20 Strange Ways People Once Used Electricity As Medicine

The history of using electricity as a medical treatment started long before humans even understood what electricity was. Around 46 CE, Roman physician Scribonius Largus described a rather unusual treatment for headaches and gout: place a live torpedo fish directly on the aching body part! The fish’s specialized organs produced electric shocks that could temporarily numb the forehead or limb. The treatment, described in the medical text Compositiones, wouldn’t cure the condition, but it might alleviate its symptoms.

In 1748, Swiss scientist Jean Jallabert described brief jumping in paralyzed arms when he gave them an electric shock. Following the advent of Leyden jars, early devices that stored electrical charge, and other electrostatic generators in the 1740s, patients sitting on stools with glass legs underwent a treatment known as “Franklinization,” named after American scientist Benjamin Franklin. The muscles of those who were paralyzed twitched but did not actually improve. Franklin, who administered similar shocks to paralytics in Philadelphia, reported the same limited result and was careful not to overstate it.

In 1781, James Graham of Scotland opened London’s “Temple of Hymen.” It contained a 12-foot-high “Celestial Bed,” which stood on 40 glass pillars and was connected to friction generators for electrocution purposes. Graham advertised the Celestial Bed as a cure for infertility and lost vitality, and couples were charged £50 a night for this service. Graham never graduated from medical school and ended up bankrupt.

In 1791, Italian experimenter Luigi Galvani theorized, based on his experiments on frog legs, that there is an “animal electricity” in living tissue. This was opposed by fellow scientist Alessandro Volta, who maintained that current was a product of the contact between two dissimilar metals. In January 1803, in London, Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, used electricity on the corpse of the executed murderer George Forster, causing the jaw to quiver, the eyes to open, and the legs to kick. These were only passive muscle contractions, but the spectacle inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

Unlike many supposed electrical cures of the 19th century, Pulvermacher’s “Hydro-Electric Chains” actually produced a real electrical effect. When soaked in sweat or vinegar, the chains generated an electrical current—though there were no proven medical benefits from wearing them. Even as doctors protested that their names were being used to promote the products without permission, Pulvermacher’s London-based medical business, established in 1850, still sold enough electrical belts and “Galvanic Suspensory Sacks” for male vigor to make millions.

The Magneto-Electric Machine was a 19th-century household device that delivered mild electric shocks through a pair of brass handles. People sometimes associate machines like it with psychiatric treatment, but it had no connection to modern electroconvulsive therapy. In 1854, inventors Ari Davis and Walter Kidder patented the device. Turning its hand crank caused coils of wire to rotate in front of a horseshoe magnet, generating the mild shocks. These machines were widely sold as low-powered household gadgets meant to ease headaches, neuralgia, and toothaches.

Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne, a French neurologist and pioneer of electrotherapy, wrote De l’électrisation localisée in 1855. In it, he stimulated individual facial muscles using wet electrodes connected to induction coils that delivered alternating Faradic current, studied the effects on facial expression to determine which muscles produced certain expressions, and treated nerve palsies using electrical stimulation, the basis of modern localized electrotherapy.

In 1858, J.B. Francis invented electrical extraction forceps, which ran current from a battery through the forceps during tooth removal. Proponents of this device claimed that the electrical current blocked nerves during extraction. However, later trials showed that the device worked only as a distraction; despite delivering a real electric current, it produced only a placebo effect.

Between 1870 and 1920, over 150 American companies marketed mahogany electrotherapy kits for the home, which included chemical cells, sponge electrodes, and induction coils for treating general ailments. Upscale spas also offered hydro-electric treatments, during which patients suffering from gout or rheumatism would sit in electrified porcelain bathtubs that were wired into low-voltage transformer-isolated electrical panels.

A businessman named George A. Scott launched a mail-order company during the 1880s. He sold a variety of items, including ‘Dr. Scott’s Electric Hairbrushes’ and, starting in 1881, his ‘Electric Corsets’. These were touted as cures for baldness, weak backs, and headaches. But the corsets, priced between $1 and $3, simply contained magnetized steel rods, with no electric shocks, no circuits, and no batteries. Scott apparently had no medical degree either; he made up the ‘Dr.’

As electricity became associated with health and healing in the late 19th century, companies began putting the word “electric” on all sorts of products. Mail-order ads touted “Galvanic Insoles,” perforated sheets of zinc and copper that supposedly used perspiration from the feet to produce an electrical current strong enough to cure gout. Any current they produced would’ve been far too weak to reach the joints. “Electric Teething Necklaces,” worn by infants and made of zinc and silver beads, sold for 25 to 50 cents in druggists’ shops. There were even “Electric Bitters” and “Galvanic Liniments,” though these warmed the skin through capsaicin, alcohol, or turpentine, without any electrical action at all.

Late 19th-century electrotherapists treated headaches by applying induction currents to the patients’ scalps. Often, a brass headpiece equipped with adjustable electrodes was used. In museums, it is sometimes exhibited on a so-called phrenology head of Orson and Lorenzo Fowler. This has created the false impression that the crown was actually invented by them. In reality, this 13-electrode crown was made in Italy: it was stamped by E. Balzarini of Milan.

In 1892, a customer whose hernia worsened while wearing the Medical Battery Company’s “Electropathic Belts” sued for fraud. During the trial, experts confirmed that the belts’ copper and zinc discs, insulated by the cloth they were attached to, produced no current. The company, founded in London in 1885 by furniture salesman Cornelius Harness, was insolvent.

Back in the 1890s, Hercules Sanche sold a cylinder known as the “Electropoise” for $25 (nearly $800 in modern currency). The idea was that by submerging the Electropoise in ice water, it would create “thermal electricity” to force oxygen through your skin and help cure disease. However, when the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) cut one open, they discovered the device contained nothing but carbon powder and sand. There was no electricity.

In 1891, the French biophysicist Jacques-Arsène d’Arsonval discovered that high-frequency electrical currents (AC with a frequency of about 10,000 cycles per second) could pass through human tissue without inducing painful muscular contractions. Doctors called this electrotherapeutic procedure “D’Arsonvalization.” D’Arsonval’s discovery provided the basis for modern electro-diathermy and led to the development of other commercial and clinical high-frequency devices.

The “Violet Ray” was a glass wand that delivered high-frequency electrical current and produced a distinctive violet glow when used against the body. Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla demonstrated his high-frequency technology at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and by the late 1890s, physician Frederick Finch Strong and other manufacturers had adapted Tesla coil technology into these glass wands. Tesla himself did not manufacture or sell them. By the 1920s, Violet Ray wands were advertised as treatments for everything from acne and baldness to prostate problems. The claims eventually caught up with them: by the 1940s and 1950s, the FDA was confiscating the devices and banning their sale for therapeutic purposes.

Around 1900, German physician Adolf Schnee patented a four-cell hydro-electric bath, an electrotherapy device designed to send electrical current through individual arms and legs. Instead of immersing the entire body in an electrified treatment tank, doctors could now target individual limbs. The patient sat in a dry armchair with each arm and leg inserted into its own porcelain tub, all connected by wires to a control unit.

First presented in 1909, Jean Bergonié’s electrical ‘passive exercise’ chair featured metal electrodes that sent sinusoidal pulses throughout the body to induce involuntary muscle contractions. Marketed as a fat-loss method at luxury spas, this same chair was used during WWI to rehabilitate shell-shocked soldiers.

From the 1890s through the 1930s, some clinics used “Ozone Inhalers,” machines that generated ozone gas using high-voltage electrical arcs. They were sold as high-tech treatments for respiratory illnesses like asthma and tuberculosis (TB), with patients actually inhaling the ozone the machines produced. However, toxicological studies showed that ozone didn’t help these conditions and instead severely irritated the airways. Regulators eventually banned the sale of the inhalers.

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which uses a controlled electrical current to trigger a brief seizure in the brain, was first tested by Italian neuropsychiatrists Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini in Rome in April 1938. The procedure used an alternating-current control unit custom-built specifically for ECT, entirely unlike the hand-cranked shock boxes and other electrical gadgets of the previous century. Early, unmodified ECT could cause broken bones, yet the therapy proved effective for severe depression.

This content was created with the help of AI.