STEVE ERENBERG: A lot of these objects have character.
You can sense it.
They have an aura about them.
I mean, there's nothing sinister in this collection.
But people look, and they say, oh, what is that?
Is that S&M?
Or is that a torture device?
No, they're medical devices or they're lifesaving devices.
You have to think of someone wearing a smoke mask
to go into a smoky building.
They really had to be a hero to wear that stuff.
And then you have some other things,
and it could be a brace or a prosthetic device.
And there is a sad story behind them.
My name is Steve Erenberg.
And I'm a collector.
But now I'm a dealer.
My son and I, we collect and buy anything from a prosthetic hand
to an airplane engine, scientific electronic
equipment, medical head devices.
It's early technology.
And the collection has been going for over 30 years.
And I can't even count how many things we have.
One of my favorite things to collect
are early anatomical models.
They're really art.
Early on, they started with cadavers, and then came wax.
And wax was unstable also.
And Dr. Azoo did them in paper mache.
Every piece is hand painted and labeled
and maybe there's 400 pieces in this life size horse.
It's the kind of model I wouldn't
want to take apart unless I had gone through four
years of veterinary school.
This is one of my favorite pieces and it's French.
There are different keys that connect
to pulleys and to strings and it shows
how the different muscles of the eye works.
When I was in school, I failed science.
I was an artist.
I was not geared to be a doctor or a scientist.
So I found the aesthetics of some of this equipment
to be more interesting than its use.
You see design trends, you go back to Victorian times
and they used wood.
They used mahogany.
It would be polished.
It would have brass corners on it
and edges and details and knobs.
And then you find aluminum and you
find pressed steel and the shapes
become more organic or more free flowing.
This was a teaching aid for learning
how to reconstruct the face.
Students would build a wax face over the metal skull.
So it looks as if Salvador Dali did that.
That's a quack medical device for electrical treatment,
two wands that a patient would hold.
They'd feel the electricity running through their hands.
If you look at early quack devices,
they're designed to be better looking than their purpose.
This is a nebulizer.
And you can see it's Victorian if you look at the legs.
And this was used by doctors.
Maybe they had a little eucalyptus.
And this one, a little salt water in this one.
And there would be a pipe with a breathing apparatus
and they would mix a couple of things for patients
and that'll be $5 please.
The more important it looked, the better people
thought it worked and the more money the doctor would get.
And some of these things aren't quack.
Devices.
They were state of the art for their time.
They just over time, they proved not to really work that well.
This is light therapy.
Now they use light therapy to treat depression.
But back in this-- I believe this is 1920s,
I believe this one was used to treat any number of ailments.
It could have been kidney disease,
it could be stomach problems.
It looks like an electric chair, but it's actually
from the Kellogg sanitarium.
You'd sit in that chair and it would vibrate your whole body.
I mean everything there had to do with your bowels.
I'd rather try the electric chair.
I can't help but think when I see
some of these new devices that are being used,
new materials that 100 years from now,
we'll be looking back at them and laughing
and calling them quack devices.
But that's what science is.
We always think state of the art.
We're ahead of time.
It will never get any more modern than that.
But it is always changing.