Say you show up at your doctor's office with some sniffles and a really sore throat.
You'd probably expect them to prescribe you some medicine, or tell you to rest.
But what if the doctor handed you some metal rods, hooked them up to a generator,
and sent an electric current through your body to make a spasm?
Not your typical doctor's appointment, right?
Well, using electricity to try and cure a lot of medical problems, or electropathy,
was actually pretty common in the mid-1800s in Victorian England.
The only problem? These treatments did not work. See, electropathic devices were based on pseudoscience,
or misleading ideas that people believed at the time, even though they weren't very well researched.
18th-century physicians were learning about human and animal anatomy,
but they basically had no grasp of how electricity affected living bodies.
The Italian scientist Luigi Galvani was experimenting with dissected frogs,
and he found that if he touched two different kinds of metals to their legs, it would make their muscles twitch.
Galvani thought the muscles moved because of "animal electricity" stored within the frog.
But the physicist Alessandro Volta realized it was the metals creating the electric circuit,
and he eventually used that idea to invent the first electric battery.
Soon, scientists were experimenting with electric generators,
to figure out what they could do with this exciting new technology,
including how electricity might affect the human body.
In the mid-1800s, some well-intentioned physicians tried a kind of electropathic therapy called galvanism, after Galvani.
Basically, they ran currents of electricity through the bodies of some patients
to try to relieve pain or cure diseases.
One strategy was the hydroelectric bath, where patients would lay in warm water with an electric current passing through it,
which was just about as safe as it sounds.
Some patients reported feeling a tingling sensation, but others were accidentally burned,
or even fatally electrocuted because of badly-insolated tubs or high voltage currents.
Then there was the magneto electric machine.
Where patients would hold one metal electrode in each hand while the operator turned a crank
so that the machine shocked them.
Sometimes a doctor would even hold an electrode while the patient held the other
hoping to transfer "good health" as the electric current passed between their bodies.
Electricity was just seen as this mysterious, miraculous new thing.
So even with all the hazards and without any biological benefit,
the Victorian public still got super stoked on the idea of using electricity as medicine.
Soon all sorts of bogus inventions started popping up in advertisements and medical journals.
In 1885 ads for the Electropathic Belt claimed that it could generate a gentle electric current
in the wearer's body.
And treat a bunch of conditions like paralysis and gout or indigestion.
But it was just made of stacks of zinc and copper plates that actually didn't generate electricity.
So people were paying to wear hunks of metal on their body.
This was just one of countless other devices from corsets to hairbrushes
that claimed to harness electrical healing powers while doing absolutely nothing.
There just wasn't any concrete evidence that electric currents could relieve pain.
And people probably just wanted to believe these devices helped.
So the fad of electropathy was over.
Nowadays, scientists are still studying how electricity and our bodies interact.
Which is called electrophysiology.
And therapy's like TENS are the closest thing we have to Victorian electropathic treatments.
In this particular therapy, patients stick electrodes on their skin to let a weak current travel through their tissue
Stimulating nerve cells and mild muscle contractions.
All that nerve stimulation supposedly disrupts pain signals to your brain.
But scientific studies that have tested TENS as a therapy are mostly negative or inconclusive.
Physicians have also developed life-saving medical technologies because of how electrical signals control our muscles.
Who can forget the good ol' defibrillator?
Your heart has specialized muscle cells that send electrical signals to make different chambers contract and pump blood regularly.
That's your heartbeat.
Defibrillators are made of an electric supply unit and electrodes that are either pressed to a person's chest or inserted into a person's heart.
And these devices can generate a high voltage electric current to
shock the heart muscle cells into resetting to a normal rhythm again.
In a really broad sense, Victorian scientists were kind of right.
You can use electricity to save human lives.
But just shocking patients or having them wear random metal devices isn't the way to produce miraculous medical results.
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