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.

The domestication of an everyday health technology: A case study of electric toothbrushes

Social Theory & Health, 2013

Using the electric toothbrush as an example, this article examines the growing acceptability of domestic health technologies that blur the traditional boundaries between health, aesthetics and consumption. By using empirical material from individual and household interviews about people's oral health practices, this research explores the relationships between an everyday artefact, its users and their environments. It investigates the ways in which oral health technologies do, or do not, become domesticated in the home environment. We conclude that the domestication of oral health technologies is not inevitable, with the electric toothbrush often becoming an 'unstable object' in the domestic setting.

From chemical disinfection to electrodisinfection: The obligatory itinerary

Desalination and Water Treatment, 2010

This review concerns chemical disinfection and electrodisinfection (ED). Chemical disinfection is a common unit process used in water supply and wastewater treatment. Traditionally, chlorination is the most dominant method of disinfection. However, there are serious safety concerns and great ecological risks involved in the use of chlorine. Other methods, such as ozonation, UV radiation and ClO2 application, are still more expensive or less convenient than chlorination. It has been reported that ED can destroy a wide variety of microorganisms from viruses through bacteria and algae to larger species, such as Euglena. The ED process has the potential to be developed as a robust, cost-effective and environmental friendly alternative of disinfection, particularly for saline sewage effluent and for seawater in cooling and other industrial usages. During ED, water is forced through a disinfector that is equipped with electrodes on which current is charged. This practice is different from conventional electro-chlorination (E-C), which relies on the production of a concentrated chlorine solution by electrolysing a side-stream of salt water. A number of theories have been proposed to explain ED's major bactericidal actions, including E-C, destruction caused by the electric field, and generation of energy rich but short-lived intermediate ED products. Increasing attention has been recently given to free radicals, such as OH- and O2-, that could be produced during electrolysis, for their possible role in ED's strong killing actions, although more evidence remain to be collected. On the other hand, ED has many advantages compared with chemical disinfection. ED reliability has been proven in several practical applications, mainly for the disinfection of drinking water, swimming pool water and industrial cooling water. ED has also been used or tested for the reduction of bacterial contamination in dental water supplies, and for the disinfection of contact lenses and ion exchange resins, etc. However, only a few ED products are currently available in the market. This is due to the relative unfamiliarity of the technology, and fierce market competition with other technologies. Eventually, the cost and performance advantages of ED should lead to its wider use. Finally, electrocoagulation (EC) as an efficient process in mineral and organic matters removal has been also proven efficient in microorganisms removal; hence, this electrochemical process may be presented as promising water/wastewater treatment technology.

The bicentennial of the Voltaic battery (1800–2000): the artificial electric organ

Trends in Neurosciences, 2000

Review of "Domesticating Electricity" by Graeme Gooday

This study evocatively brings to light a more nuanced interdisciplinary consideration of a key 20th C technological advance: how gender asserted a prominent role in “domesticating” electricity for everyday household use, thereby influencing a modern revisioning of the domestic dividing line between how the sexes allocated labor in the home, as well as how consumers changed spending habits in the evolving early 20th C economy.

Dirty electricity and electrical hypersensitivity: Five case studies

Deteriorating power quality is becoming increasingly common in developed countries. Poor power quality, also known as dirty electricity, refers to a combination of harmonics and transients generated primarily by electronic devices and by non-linear loads. We have assumed, until recently, that this form of energy is not biologically active. However, when Graham/Stetzer™ filters were installed in homes and schools, symptoms associated with electrical hypersensitivity (such as chronic fatigue, depression, headaches, body aches and pains, ringing in the ears, dizziness, impaired sleep, memory loss, and confusion) were reduced. Five case studies are presented that include one healthy individual; one person with electrical hypersensitivity; another with diabetes; and a person with multiple sclerosis. Results for 18 teachers and their classes at a school in Toronto are also presented. These individuals experienced major to moderate improvements in their health and wellbeing after Graham/Stetzer filters improved power quality in their home or work environment. The results suggest that poor power quality may be contributing to electrical hypersensitivity and that as much as 50% of the population may be hypersensitive; children may be more sensitive than adults and dirty electricity in schools may be interfering with education and possibly contributing to disruptive behavior associated with attention deficit disorder (ADD); dirty electricity may elevate plasma glucose levels among diabetics, and exacerbate symptoms for those with multiple sclerosis and tinnitus. Graham/Stetzer filters and meters enable individuals to monitor and improve power quality in buildings and they provide scientists with a tool for studying the effects of dirty electricity. For the first time we can progress from simply documenting electrical hypersensitivity to alleviating some of the symptoms. These results are dramatic and warrant further investigation. If they are representative of what is happening worldwide, then dirty electricity is adversely affecting the lives of millions of people.

Electrified Sex and Gender: A Short History

Carnival. Journal of the International Students of History Association, 2020

This article will examine the different developments of descriptions concerning sex and gender in German medical educational books from 1800 until 1860 based on theories of electricity. Separation of both female and male sex and gender is seen as developing out of a complementary model referred to until the end of the 18th century. Furthermore, the conception of each sex as well as gender changed over time. While the male sex and gender changed from a complementary sex concept to the divine half of humanity, the female sex and gender, as the other half, was reduced to a sexual organ, the uterus. During this increasing differentiation, the male sex and gender were equally reduced to the testis. Therefore, both sexes and genders experienced the same kind of development, but at a different time. While the conceptual reduction of the female sex and gender took place, female reproduction was identified as the prime aim of female existence. The starting points of this focus on reproduction were attraction and repulsion, so written in medical educational books. This terminology of physical movement had its origin in the scientific development and research of both magnetism in the 13 th century and electricity in the 1600s, where attraction and repulsion were discovered as underlying movements.

1 Dirty Electricity and Electrical Hypersensitivity: Five Case Studies

2014

Deteriorating power quality is becoming increasingly common in developed countries. Poor power quality, also known as dirty electricity, refers to a combination of harmonics and transients generated primarily by electronic devices and by non-linear loads. We have assumed, until recently, that this form of energy is not biologically active. However, when Graham/Stetzer ™ filters were installed in homes and schools, symptoms associated with electrical hypersensitivity (such as chronic fatigue, depression, headaches, body aches and pains, ringing in the ears, dizziness, impaired sleep, memory loss, and confusion) were reduced. Five case studies are presented that include one healthy individual; one person with electrical hypersensitivity; another with diabetes; and a person with multiple sclerosis. Results for 18 teachers and their classes at a school in Toronto are also presented. These individuals experienced major to moderate improvements in their health and wellbeing after Graham/S...

Our Electric Controls FROM THE SERIES: Our Lives with Electric Things Photo by Mass Observation Archive

Cultural Anthropology

Electrified urinary drainage bag: an in vitro study

World Journal of Urology, 2002

An experimental study was designed to examine the effect of electrical current on bacteria-contaminating urinary drainage bags. An experimental model analogous to a urinary drainage system has been formed. Bottles containing 1,000 ml urine inoculated with Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Klebsiella pneumoniae or Escherichia coli in different experimental settings were drained with constant speed into urinary drainage bags in which platinum electrodes had been implanted. An experimental procedure involved applying an electrical current with a 12 V DC generator into bags containing urine for 24 h. Cultures were obtained separately from the bags and microorganism-inoculated bottles for 24 h and following a cessation of electrical current for another 24 h. In electrified bags, P. aeruginosa was killed in all experiments. E. coli and K. pneumoniae were eradicated at the end of 24 h. However, K. pneumoniae began to grow in increasing numbers following the cessation of the electrical current. An electrical current might decrease or eradicate the bacteria in urinary-drainage bags. This might be one of the ways to decrease the risk of in vivo cross-contamination and nosocomial infections.

i>Electrifying Anthropology : Exploring Electrical Practices and Infrastructures</i>, edited by Simone Abram, et al., Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Not a thing, stolen It begins with a theft. 'Early in the process of Soviet electrification, ' writes Arkady Markin, a Soviet himself and chronicler of this era, 'two men were arraigned for stealing energy. Though they freely admitted to tapping somebody else's electric mains, they were acquitted on the following pretext: "The nature of electricity is unknown, " said the judge. "When talking of electric current people take the word 'current' conventionally. A theft, however, implies that some definite object must be stolen, such as storage batteries, or wires. " In response, the defense attorney crowed, having just won his case: "The courts cannot establish the fact of theft! Indeed, " he continued, "can a smell, or air, or sound be stolen?"' (Markin 1961, 7). The same story, again differently In 2016, a power systems engineer in California repeated to me an explanation he had given his wife for the difficulty in assuring 100 per cent renewable power on any large-scale electricity system (a difficulty not acknowledged by those electricity retailers, who promise to sell such purity to customers for a small additional surcharge). 'Stand in the middle of a field, ' said this engineer to his wife. ' At the other end of the field are a number of men, each equipped with an identical bass drum. This one we'll call coal; this one-nuclear; this one-natural