MALADIES CURED WITH ELECTRICITY. Australian Electrical therapy baths and battery-charged wearables. (2025)

Electronics and medicine: When electroquackery thrived: The mystery and glamor of electricity were exploited by charlatans who bilked the public with promises to cure any ill

IEEE Spectrum, 2000

When electroquackery thrived The mystery and glamor of electricity were exploited by charlatans who bilked the public with promises to cure any ill Electroquackery has a history all its own that is as long and colorful as that of legitimate electromedicine. But then, the difference between serious research and outright fraud has often been a little unclear. At a time when electricity was only beginning to be understood, fakers proposed devices that seemed no stranger to the general public than the proposed devices of legitimate researchers, and the theories of even the most extravagant charlatan could gain a ready following because they hardly seemed less believable than the phenomena they were supposed to explain. The first connection between electricity and living creatures that was experienced by man was probably the discharge of an electric fish. Primitive Africans used them to "cure" agues, according to reports as early as the 16th century, and the practice is probably of very ancient origin. And the fascination with the power of the electric fish survived. An advertisement appearing in London in 1777 invites the public to be shocked by a "torporific eel" for two shillings and sixpence, and as late as 1850 European doctors in Guiana used electric eels to treat rheumatism. In fact, during the middle of the last century, many people seeking cures still preferred fish to machines as a source of electricity. Their reasoning may sound familiar to us today: "organic" electricity was more effective than the artificial kind. Early devices The earliest known electric device that is specifically medical appeared around 1750 and was designed for the purpose of providing a tonic to the cardiovascular system. The electric charge produced by an electrostatic generator was transferred by wires to the surface of a silk drape that surrounded the patient, who sat on an insulated stool. This "total body electrification" or "electric bath" was said to produce an increased pulse rate in the patient when positive, and to lower the pulse rate when the electricity was negative. At first, advocates of the electric bath might seem to be all wet, but since it was discovered that a person bled faster when electrified than at other times, they had some evidence for their theories in a day when bleeding was a popular treatment for all sorts of ailments. In fact, many of today's uses of electricity in medicine have long histories. Cautery-heat used to destroy superfluous tissues or to coagulate blood-is one of the oldest known medical procedures. When galvanocautery was introduced during the 1840s, it proved a great improvement over the use of hot irons and boiling liquids. It also

Medical Machines as Symbols of Science?: Promoting Electrotherapy in Victorian Canada

Technology and culture, 2017

This article tackles a common assumption in the historiography of medical technology, that new medical instruments in the nineteenth century were universally seen as symbols of the scientific nature of medical practice. The article examines the strategies used by Jenny Trout, the first woman in Canada licensed to practice medicine, and J. Adams, a homeopathic physician, to advertise electrotherapy to the residents of Toronto in the 1870s and 1880s. While electrotherapy involved complex electrical technology, the doctors in this study did not draw attention to their instruments as proof of the legitimacy of their practice. In fact the technology is almost entirely absent from their promotional texts. While both doctors wanted their practice to be associated with scientific medicine, neither saw their instruments as immediately or obviously symbolic of science.

Shocking Subjects: Human Experiments and the Material Culture of Medical Electricity in Eighteenth-Century England

“Shocking Subjects. Human experiments and the material culture of medical electricity in eighteenth-century England”, in Erika Dick and Larry Stewart (eds), The Uses of Humans in Experiment: Perspectives from the 17th to the 20th Century (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2016), 2018

In contemporary Western societies medical patients are accustomed to being tested or treated by means of electrical instruments. Their presence is so familiar that it would be unsettling to enter a hospital or a medical laboratory unfurnished with the high tech apparatus through which research, diagnoses and therapies are routinely carried out. The technologization of medicine has produced systems of trust that rely on black boxed instruments, which profoundly influence contemporary perceptions of the human body and of the self.2 However, the applications of scientific instruments for medical purposes have a history of debates and controversies.3 In the eighteenth century, when the medical profession was regulated by the guild system, the intersections between experimental philosophy and medical practices created uncharted territories that blurred disciplinary divides and gave rise to conflicting epistemologies of medical efficacy. The early applications of electricity as a medical remedy offer a striking case of the tensions that such intersections engendered.4

A Shocking Business: The Technology and Practice of Electrotherapeutics in Canada, 1840s to 1940s

Material Culture Review/Revue de la …, 1999

De 1840 à 1940, tant des médecins que des entrepreneurs ont pratiqué Vélectrothérapie. Cette étude examine la gamme d'appareils utilisés, discute des justifications de ce genre de traitement et suggère des raisons de son déclin. Étant donné le rôle important joué par les femmes dans cette forme de thérapie, comme praticiennes et comme patientes, l'incidence de l'appartenance à un sexe est aussi examinée. Le texte s'accompagne d'illustrations des appareils d'électrothérapie appartenant à la collection du Musée canadien de la santé et de la médecine. Cette brève étude intéressera les muséologues et les historiens et leur permettra de situer l'électrothérapie et ses appareils dans l'histoire générale de la médecine et de la technologie au Canada.

Therapeutic Attractions: Early Applications of Electricity to the Art of Healing

In the past few decades a number of studies dealing with eighteenth-century natural philosophy in England have pointed out its inextricable links with spectacle and public display. The commodification of cultural products, which was one of the main features of the Enlightenment, extended to science and scientific instruments, textbooks, and demonstrations, as well as to medicine. Pivotal works by Roy Porter have indelibly portrayed the vibrant marketplace in which medical practitioners operated. Even when they had a formal degree, “regular” healers had to compete both with “irregulars” and with a widespread culture of self-treatment (Porter, 1985, 1990, 1995; Porter & Porter, 1989; Schaffer, 1983; Stewart, 1992). In such competitive arena recently invented therapies attracted the attention of both patients and practitioners. From the 1740s onward, “medical electricity” was among the most attractive ones. The term indicated the applications of electric shocks and sparks to the treatment of various diseases, in particular palsies and “nerve disorders.” Electrical healing was first presented to the eighteenth-century public as a branch of experimental philosophy (Bertucci, 2001a). This essay analyzes the early diffusion of medical electricity, setting it in the context of the experimental culture from which it emerged. I deal with a relatively short span of time – the few decades during which almost instantaneously medical electricity came to be practiced in different European states – and I highlight the role played by itinerant demonstrators and instrument-makers in spreading what would soon become a fashionable, though controversial, healing practice.

Electricity rendered useful for mental illness: tribute to Richard Lovett -- extra

The British Journal of Psychiatry, 2013

The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (review)

Technology and Culture, 2004

Reviewed by Karen Halttunen "Quacks and quackery," "medical instruments and apparatus," "electrotherapeutics": the designated subject categories for this book fail to do it justice. The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American is a fascinating study of "the relationship between technology, energy, and the body in modern American culture" (p. xi). Since the mid-nineteenth century, Carolyn Thomas de la Pena demonstrates, Americans have used an inventive range of machines and technological devices in an effort to restore vitality, cure disease, and build stronger, more vigorous bodies. To dismiss as mere "quackery" such outmoded technologies as early weight-lifting machines, electric belts, and radium water jars is to reject out of hand their historical significance, in service to the same Whiggish narrative of medical science that informed the American Medical Association's opposition to these therapeutic practices. The guiding insight of this study is that "when we allow a technology intimate entry into our bodies, we become, on some level, complicit in the culture that technology represents" (p. xii). The body technologies she explores served to domesticate frightening new forms of energy in a rapidly industrializing society, mediating between the growing fear of machines and an expanding sense of their ultimate promise, and propelling the human body itself into the modern era. The Body Electric focuses on three areas of body technologies that emerged over three overlapping time periods, between 1850 and 1950, and promised three different modes of revitalization. First, the musclebuilding machines of the mid-to late-nineteenth century promised to "unblock" energy already present in the body. The first mass-marketed American machine to link technology with physical health was the Health Lift, designed by Bostonian David Butler in 1870, which targeted tired businessmen suffering from neurasthenia. The overwhelming sense of physical depletion that characterized that epidemic ailment was widely attributed to Kelvin's second law of thermodynamics, "the universal tendency in nature to the dissipation of mechanical energy" (p. 27). Proper muscle-building, according to Butler and his followers, would offset entropy by tapping the body's energy reserves and diffusing them, not only to the working muscle, but also throughout the body. This theory influenced other fitness entrepreneurs, such as Dudley Allen Sargent, first director of physical education at Harvard, who built a graduated weight-training system that emphasized symmetrical

Electrostimulation in medicine - history and contemporary usage

PRZEGLĄD ELEKTROTECHNICZNY, 2018

Some historical and contemporary aspects of the usage of electricity in medicine were presented in the paper. The using amber and electric fish in antiquity and medieval ages was described. The contemporary use of electricity in medicine is connected with the discovery Volta's battery and was shown from the first attempt in 19 th century till today's medical practice. The last part of the paper was devoted to the lately discovered electric stimulation of fingerprints. Two clinical cases were shown as the examples of this stimulation. Streszczenie. W artykule przedstawione zostały historyczne i współczesne aspekty stosowania elektryczności w medycynie, Przedstawiono historię wykorzystania bursztynu i ryb elektrycznych od starożytności do wieków średnich. Współczesne wykorzystanie elektryczności w medycynie wywodzi się od odkrycia baterii przez Voltę-pokazane zostały przykłady elektrostymulacj: od XIX wieku do dzisiejszej praktyki medycznej. Ostatnia część artykułu poświęcona jest metodzie stymulacji poprzez opuszki palców. Przestawione zostały dwa przypadki medyczne z zastosowaniem tej metody.

Volta's electric lighter and its improvements: The birth, life and death of a peculiar scientific apparatus which became the first electric household appliance

From the itinerant lecturers of the 18th century to popularizing physics in the 21st century – exploring the relationship between learning and entertainment

Electrobiorremediación, una técnica innovadora para la limpieza de suelos contaminados

Epistemus, 2015

En este escrito se hace una revisión bibliográfica con el propósito de mostrar una técnica innovadora para la eliminación de contaminantes orgánicos en suelos, la cual consiste en la aplicación de un campo eléctrico y el uso de organismos biológicos como plantas y bacterias. Esta práctica es conocida como electrobiorremediación y surge a partir de la necesidad de mejorar los métodos ya existentes de remediación de suelos. El objetivo de este documento es mostrar el funcionamiento, las limitantes, así como las ventajas y desventajas de la aplicación de la electrobiorremediación.