October 28, 2019 • 46 mins
For more than 200 years, doctors have experimented with using electricity to treat everything from liver disease to severe depression to varying degrees of success. We look at the history behind these practices and what's going on.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to text Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and I love all things tech and
I was recently listening to an episode of a different podcast,
(00:24):
the podcast Sawbones, in which wife and husband team Sydney
and Justin McElroy discussed some of the ways we humans
have tried to treat medical issues using a limited understanding
of those issues and the various treatments we were applying.
So they've done tons of episodes on stuff like blood
(00:45):
letting or trepid nation, and recently they did one on
the use of electricity as a means of treating medical issues,
and they do a great job, but I thought I
would dive into it a little bit more and talk
about how we built an understanding around electricity and then
how we made use of electricity to try and treat ourselves,
sometimes not so well. And I'm looking really at the
(01:09):
early uses. I'll talk a little bit about modern uses
of electricity, but I'm mostly focusing on how we first
started applying electricity to medical uses. And I want to
keep in mind that we do still have electrotherapy today,
though it's still a matter of some mystery and confusion,
also largely because some people appropriate the term electrotherapy to
(01:33):
pedal medically questionable products and services. So you've got more
reputable sources that are attempting to determine whether or not
electrotherapy is a working means of treatment, and you have
other people who don't really concern themselves with that part.
They're just looking to sell stuff. And electricity is almost
(01:56):
like magic to a lot of us. And also in
this episode, I'll be focusing primarily on direct application of electricity.
It's pretty obvious that many medical procedures either depend directly
or indirectly on electricity and electrical instruments and equipment, and
I'm not getting down all those pathways, though we should
(02:17):
understand their. Use of electricity in the medical field began
to emerge around the same time as our understanding of
other phenomena such as X rays and ultra violet rays,
and so a lot of histories about electricity and medicine
also talk about these, And sure we could talk about
lots of different types of equipment, scanners, things like that,
instruments but I really want to talk about directly applying
(02:40):
electricity to the human body. Back to Sawbones, which I
should add is is not affiliated with the I Heart
Radio network at all. Just in the interest of full disclosure,
I am a fan of Sawbones. I also have no
connection with the macl roys tho. Hey guys, Sydney, Justin Griffin,
Travis if you if you want to chat, hit me up.
(03:03):
But the Sawbones episode was inspired by Benjamin Franklin, who
conducted famous experiments with electricity. If you are familiar with
Benjamin Franklin as a historical figure, you've probably heard about
his experiment with the kite and the key during the thunderstorm.
So some of this episode will play into that a
little bit. But our knowledge of electricity actually dates much
(03:26):
further back than that founding father of the United States.
You could even really say that humans were at least
aware of electricity in some measure, just from the presence
of lightning. Now, we didn't understand what it was, we
didn't have a name for it like electricity, and we
didn't know how it was formed, but we knew it existed.
We could see that, but it would take a long
(03:47):
time to figure out what those bolts actually were. In fact,
during Benjamin Franklin's time, the thought was it was some
form of fluid. In fact, that's why we get the
word current, because of a flow of some sort of
electrical ether fluid stuff. Now, the earliest account that describes
(04:08):
one aspect of electricity, one that is going to be
very important for this discussion, comes from sales of Milita's
And I know I've butchered that name. My Greek is
worse than my Latin, which is terrible. But he was
a Greek philosopher. Aristotle actually thought of him as the
first true philosopher, who was born in six hundred twenty
(04:31):
four b c e. And he asked a lot of questions,
which is what philosophers do. And these are questions that
had before his time largely been met with the answer
because the gods want it to be that way, you know,
like like lightning was Zeus's way of saying, hey, knock
that crap off. But this philosopher was more inclined to
(04:52):
believe that there were less mythological explanations for certain phenomena
there might be more natural and one could argue in
the future scientific explanations for those things, and one thing
he observed had to do with what we now know
as static electricity. He wrote something that likely people had
already been observing for quite some time, which was if
(05:14):
you rubbed amber was something like animal fur. If you
did it vigorously enough, the fur would then start to
attract other stuff like moats of dust to it. Particles
would drift toward the fur. It was drawing stuff to it.
Stuff like blades of dried grass would move toward it,
(05:35):
and there was some sort of power of attraction going
on that people just couldn't easily explain. But I can
do it now. To be fair, very smart people figured
all this stuff out way way before I was ever born,
and I just benefit from having been able to read
about it. But it comes down to some basic features
(05:58):
in atoms. So yeah, this is gonna get super super basic,
and then we'll build up from there. You know, typical
text stuff approach. Atoms have neutrons, protons and electrons. Protons
have a positive charge, electrons have a negative charge, and
neutrons just want to get through the day without too
much hassle. Opposite charges attract each other, so a negative
(06:21):
charge attracts a positive charge Likewise, like charges repel each other.
So if you get to positively charged particles together, well,
you're gonna be spending a lot of energy because those
positive charges are gonna push back against each other. Uh.
There are forces within the nucleus of an atom that
bind protons together, which is why they don't just fly
(06:42):
apart from the fact that their charges are repelling each other.
With the amber and animal, for what's really going on
is a transfer of electrons from one material to the
surface of another material. The animal for collects electrons from
the amber and thus builds up a negative charge. This
(07:03):
charge is nowhere to go. It's static. There's no current
to flow through, there's no circuit there for it to
create a current. So if the negatively charged material makes
contact with something else, it can then release that electric charge.
It can discharge, and that's when you get that little
snappy spark. It's also what happens if you rub your
feet against the carpet and then touch someone else or
(07:25):
something metal and you get that little shock. It's because
you've got this build up of electrons that you then
discharge when you come in contact with something that doesn't
have that build up. So the animal fur with a
negative charge will attract stuff that has a greater positive
charge than the fur does. So those dust moats have
(07:47):
a slight positive charge to them, they're being attracted to
that negative charge. On a related note, if you've ever
seen a person's hair stand on end after taking off
a hat, or if they're playing with an electrostatic generator,
that because the hairs get negatively charged, and because like
charges repel each other, the hairs are actually repelling one another.
(08:09):
They stand on end because they're attempting to get as
far away from each other as they possibly can. Uh,
or so I'm told, I don't know. I've been bald
for twenty years. I have no idea what hair even
does anymore. It never comes to visit doesn't even call
me anyway. While philosophers like the one I was just
(08:30):
mentioning observed phenomena like these, they had no way to
explain what was actually going on, and it remained a
mystery for centuries, and no one yet had had been
able to link this curious observation with more dramatic examples
like lightning. There was no way of saying these two
things are related. If we want to talk about therapy, well,
(08:53):
there are actually some stories about ancient people using electrotherapy,
uh Pacrates or Hippocrates. If you prefer treated patients by
placing them in barrels filled with water and electric eels,
it's pretty primitive electrotherapy. He did that to treat stuff
(09:13):
like gout and rheumatism. I'm not sure to what effect,
because I ran out of time before I could really
dig up more accounts of that particular therapy. Now we
probably get the word electricity thanks mainly to a fellow
named William Gilbert. He was born in fifteen forty four
in England, and he became an astronomer and a physician.
(09:34):
He actually served Elizabeth the First at one point as
a court physician. He also wrote a work titled d Magnete,
which he published around six hundred. This work was filled
with his observations on matters surrounding magnetism and electrical phenomena.
He differentiated between magnets and the attractive effect observed when
(09:57):
using amber, sometimes helpfully called the amber effect. Gilbert said
these two things were similar but distinct phenomena that magnets
and this attractive force he was observing through electrostatic build
up were related somehow or similar in many ways, but
they were not exactly the same thing. Later scientists would
(10:17):
determine that they are both manifestations of a single force,
that of electro magnetism, but they are distinct. So that
would be getting ahead of ourselves. Let's get back to Gilbert.
He referred to the materials that were known for this
static electricity effect as electricus. That is a new Latin word,
(10:39):
meaning it wasn't an existing Latin phrase. He actually took
a Greek word and then he sort of latinized it
and he meant it to mean like amber. So electricus
is like amber. The Greek word was electron, which meant
amber itself. So he took a Greek word, made it
(10:59):
sort of Latin and then got electricus. He described the
attractive force as an electric force. Another smarty pants named
Francis Bacon used the word electric to describe materials that
could create this attractive force, and in sixteen forty six,
Sir Thomas Brown went a step further and he coined
(11:21):
the word electricity. Now, in this case, it was a
word meant to describe a material's behavior or the property
of being electric, sort of like if you were elastic
you would describe the quality of elastic as elasticity. Well,
that was the case with electricity. It didn't mean a
(11:42):
current or a flow or anything. It was a way
of describing the tendency for material to be electric. Moving
forward a century, two different people independently invented a device
capable of storing static electricity. One of those was evolved
joe Orge von Kleist, and together was Peter von muschen
(12:03):
Brook And again i'm butchering names. Both of these guys
developed their version in the early seventeen forties, and the
basic device was pretty simple in its original form. It
was a glass vial that had some water in it,
and the vial had a cork that capped the vial.
But piercing through the cork was a piece of metallic
(12:26):
wire that was long enough to have one end of
it dipping into the water in the vial. The other
end would extend out from the end of the cork
and it would be brought into contact with what was
called a friction device, essentially electrostatic generator. This was the
device meant to build up a static charge, and this
(12:47):
would transfer a build up of electrons to the wire,
which they could then actually hold on to that that charge,
and it would hold onto it until you touched it
to something that would allow it to complete a circuit,
and then it would discharge that electricity in a spark.
So it was sort of like a very primitive capacitor. UH.
This would end up being called a Leyden jar because
(13:10):
the area that it was that where it was being
invented was near Leyden in the Netherlands. UH and later
versions of it would end up using metallic components, not
just a glass vial filled with water, but the earliest
versions were basically just that. Now this brings us to
Benjamin Franklin. Franklin met with a doctor named Dr Spence,
(13:34):
apparently who had traveled from Scotland. According to Franklin, there's
actually some scholastic debate over who Dr Spence might have been.
Maybe he was Spencer, not Spence. Franklin got to see
a Leyden jar in action and he was fascinated by it,
and not long afterward, Peter Collinson of the Royal Society
(13:55):
of London sent Benjamin Franklin the equipment that he needed
to make his own Leaden jar, and Franklin began doing
experiments and sussing out the nature of this electricity thing. Now,
some of those experiments involved using electricity to treat people
with paralysis or people who were dealing with symptoms that
they developed in the aftermath of a stroke. He observed
(14:18):
that some patients reported improvement and relief after receiving electro
static shocks, but he wrote in seventeen fifty seven to
the Royal Society that he quote never knew any advantages
from electricity in patients that were permanent end quote. So
in other words, the effects he observed appeared to be
temporary in nature. They did not seem to be a cure,
(14:41):
although they might treat acute symptoms, and he couldn't really
explain what was going on. Also, I should add that
Benjamin Franklin wasn't necessarily just doing this on his own, thinking, well, gosh,
I wonder what happens if I shock people who aren't
feeling well? Will they feel better? This was sort of
an accut humulative approach. There were a lot of people
(15:01):
who were speculating that electricity might be used for things
that they had frankly run out of ideas as far
as how they could treat them. There were a lot
of diseases and disorders that we just didn't know how
to treat. None of the conventional approaches seemed to work,
so it was almost a move of desperation. Now, Franklin
(15:23):
also went on to prove that lightning and the sparks
that he was seeing from these electro static discharges were
in fact the same thing. Different orders of magnitude and strength,
but they were the same thing. He also invented the
lightning rod to help protect houses against lightning strikes. Now,
speaking of the Royal Society, its members were also experimenting
(15:44):
with using electricity as a medical treatment for all sorts
of ailments, though primarily for things like paralysis, seizures, and
neurological disorders and diseases in general. The physicians of the
eighteenth century who were inclined to try electricity as a
means of treating these issues did so because more conventional
treatments were failing. This isn't quite like saying, well nothing
(16:07):
else worked, let's shock them. But it's not far from
that point of view, And we're still talking about discharging
and electrostatic charge, so zapping someone not subjecting someone to
a prolonged, uninterrupted current of electricity, so this was usually
done with the zapp going to whatever area of the
(16:28):
body was thought to be affected. So, depending upon the
disease or the disorder, the doctors would say, well, let's
target let's say the liver, and they would deliver an
electric shocked toward the the person's abdomen in an effort
to shock the liver out of whatever the problem was.
Erasmus Darwin, who was the grandfather of the famous Charles Darwin,
(16:53):
was one of the physicians who experimented with medical uses
of electricity. The medical community was not universal in its
acceptance of electricity as a means of treatment, but Darwin
and a few other physicians sought to employ electricity to
treat certain ailments and conditions, again mostly in places where
other treatments just weren't working. These included neurological disorders and diseases, paralysis, seizures,
(17:19):
things like that. And his fellow philosophers felt that natural philosophy,
which was their term for the natural sciences, primarily physics,
had the potential to make life better for people in general,
and using electricity to help some of the most vulnerable
people in the population seemed like a great way to
do that now, Darwin believed in a concept called the
(17:39):
spirit of animation. This would be a type of energy
within living beings that gave life to those beings. This
energy would travel along nerves to muscles, and in some
ways it was similar to electricity itself, and it was
kind of heading down the right path towards how our
(18:00):
neurological systems use electrochemical signals to control our muscles. But
it was a much more primitive and somewhat spiritual outlook
on that process. Now that being said, Darwin and his
contemporaries had a limited understanding of electricity. Darwin described it
as an ethereal fluid. Likewise, the understanding of actual ailments
(18:23):
was limited and the language describing them sometimes imprecise. So
Darwin used electricity to treat everything from jaundice to tape worms.
He also used it to treat symptoms like pain and swelling,
and he noted that the shocks could restore some movement
to what appeared to be lifeless limbs, something that a
couple of other physicians would expand upon later. And early
(18:45):
electrician named Tiberius Cavallo from Italy immigrated to England and
became a member of the Royal Society. He worked to
improve electrical devices, and he also lamented that many of
the people in England making use of electricity medicine were
under qualified to do it properly. He said natural philosophers
frequently lacked sufficient education and training in medicine whereat while
(19:09):
the physicians the doctors fell short in the natural philosophy department.
And indeed, as word spread, many people began incorporating stuff
like Leyden jars in their various treatments. Some like Darwin,
were attempting to approach things from a more or less
scientific perspective. Others were more on the snake oil con
man side of things, and because of some advances in
(19:32):
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your first job post. Terms and conditions apply. Now let's
get back to electricity as a type of medical therapy.
Up until this point, I've been talking about using electrostatic
charges to target specific body parts or general regions of
the body. That means every treatment would be administered as
(21:20):
a single or a series of single shocks, so you'd
get shocked, and maybe they'd have to use a couple
of different electro stag generators to continue to build up
a charge to shock you. Again, these were not necessarily
super powerful shocks, though sometimes they could be, and with
electro static charges, you're talking about discharging it pretty much
(21:41):
all at once, at least until Alessandro Volta invented the
electro forests. But never mind that it gets a little
too deep in the weeds for us. Then we get
to Luigi Galvani, an Italian physician in the late seventeen hundreds.
On November six, eighty, galva he began to experiment with
fresh frog legs, freshly cut from the frog. Galvanni hypothesized
(22:07):
that the muscle, tissue and the nerves in a frog's
legs could generate electricity, and that this was the energy
used for motive force. This was different from the prevailing
wisdom at the time, and he was largely derided for
this hypothesis. In one of his experiments, he connected a
nerve from a frog leg to a Franklin square capacitor,
(22:30):
which caused the leg to twitch. He later used an
arc of metallic wire to connect a nerve to a
muscle in the frog leg, and that also caused the
leg to contract again. Galvani published his results a decade
later in sev Alessandro Volta recreated Galvani's experiments and discovered
(22:52):
that he got even better results if he used a
metallic arc made of two different metals, so bi metallic wire.
Volta believed that the two different types of metal were
necessary to create what he thought of as an electrical imbalance,
so a differential, if you will, and that Galvani's hypothesis
that the animal's tissue generated its own electricity was off base.
(23:16):
Galvanni responded with a new experiment in which he connected
the nerves of two different frog legs together and that
caused both frog legs to twitch. Galvani and Volta engaged
in a spirited debate through correspondence and publications. That debate
ended in se not because one side had thoroughly defeated
the other, but because Galvanni went the way of his
(23:39):
frogs and croaked get it. Volta took his idea and
he created a device that we call the voltaic pile.
It was a stack of alternating layers of copper and
cardboard soaked in salt water and zinc, and you had
a wire connecting the bottom plate of the pile to
the top plate, and that made a circuit through which
(24:01):
electricity could flow. So you could actually put a load
on that wire and it would power it. Not that
there was anything to really power at that point. Sure enough,
the pile generated a steady current of electricity, so it
was an early type of battery. Now I'm not going
to go into the full chemistry of what's going on
here because it would require a pretty big tangent in
(24:22):
this episode, but we'll save that for a future episode. Well,
we'll go into more detail. And as for the debate
between Galvani and Volta, turns out both guys were right.
Volta was correct that the two medals connected through a
salty medium generated electricity. It proved to be true, and
Galvanni's hypothesis that nerves and muscles generate electricity also proved
(24:43):
to be true. So everybody wins. The invention of the
battery would lead to new applications of electricity in medicine,
and slowly physicians were starting to change their understanding of
how the body works. In the seventeen forties and seventeen fifties,
the prevailing ideas felt into a category called iatro mechanical theories.
(25:04):
And I'm sure I messed that up too, but the
underlying assumption for that theory was that most illnesses were
caused because something somewhere in the body was all gunked up. Essentially,
either the blood wasn't flowing properly, or nerves were somehow constricted,
or your gushy fluids in your body had become sludgy
(25:24):
like jello, and we'll see there's your problem. Well, many
people at the time believe that electricity could get stuff
moving again, that it could quicken the pulse, and perhaps
it could even break up that sludgy stuff in your
body to make you better. That electricity could dislodge blocked
humors in your body, and that those humors would otherwise
(25:46):
prevent your body from being able to get rid of them.
You know, you would just sweat them out or excrete
them in some way you would get rid of noxious humors.
And this seems awfully similar to something that gets pedaled
a lot today, which is namely the concept of toxins.
You'll hear a lot about various treatments from massage you know,
(26:07):
a massage therapist, to to sweat lodges, to all sorts
of different things where you get this vague concept of
removing toxins from your body, like knocking loose toxins. That's
an old, old, old idea that has no basis in
real science. Uh, your liver actually does process toxins already,
(26:28):
So assuming you have a working liver, then your liver
is already doing that for you. That's its job. If
you don't have a working liver, you've got bigger problems
to worry about. But this bit of medical misunderstanding has
been incredibly persistent and remains a key component in a
lot of different places, saying like this is what our
treatments do for you. By the way, I'm not knocking massages.
(26:51):
I love them, but yeah, the whole toxin thing is
kind of um. Let's just say hello blue over nothing.
On a related note, magnetism was also an area of
intense interest among physicians and the general public, and because
it's related to electricity through the electro magnetism force, I
(27:13):
thought i'd chat about just for a second, like electricity.
There are legitimate uses of magnets in the medical industry.
There are many of them, magnetic resonance imaging, for example. However,
magnets also gave rise to the opportunity for Charlatan's to
ascribe magical or vague properties to them that would somehow
be a benefit to humans. Sure, they couldn't really explain
(27:35):
how the magnets did this, but the claims were there.
The fact that magnets could attract and repel each other
through some invisible force made it seem kind of mystical
to people, and I think this is why to this
day you can find companies that market magnetic bracelets that
supposedly do everything from improving your circulation to somehow giving
you a boost in athletic performance. There's no real scientific
(27:58):
evidence to bear any of that out. By the way,
the premise depends upon the target customer taking a leap
of faith. It's actually pretty hard to understand how magnets work.
I mean, just ask the insane clown Posse. And sometimes
we humans are willing to take another leap if we
see something that we can tell does something, but we
don't understand how it does. That something. So if I
(28:22):
see a device do something that is really incredible, and
then you tell me it can do something even more incredible,
I might be inclined to believe you. I've already witnessed
it do something that I can't explain, so I might
be willing to just go along for the ride for
the whole thing. And a lot of people found that
out with magnets. So ignorance is the friend of the
con man, is what I'm saying there, and it would
(28:44):
be true both for magnets and electricity. However, I'm going
to be a little bit more charitable. Not everyone in
the eighteenth and nineteen centuries was out to pull a
fast one on people. I guess it's important to acknowledge
physicians around this time were largely in an experimental phase.
They were very slowly learning which treatments were most effective
(29:07):
for various ailments. We weren't quite in the era of
modern medicine yet, nor did we have a basic understanding
of most pathogens. So it shouldn't be a huge surprise
that some physicians were willing to try all new approaches,
including the use of something they didn't fully understand, in
the hopes that perhaps some positive effect would follow. Many
(29:28):
of their patients had tried all other available treatments, and
so any port in a storm. I guess with the
invention of the voltaic pile, we were on our way
to the creation of batteries, and these would provide a
supply of direct current, typically at pretty low voltages. And
the early experiments in using electricity to treat a host
of ailments meant that you could have a lot of
(29:49):
opportunity to jump on the chance to create products that
leverage the legitimacy given to the practice by the pioneers
and medicine. So in other words, you had legitim it
respectable people looking into ways of using electricity to actually
try and treat people. Then you had all the people
who said, hey, I think this is a way I
can make a buck, and I can trade upon the
(30:12):
legitimacy made by these other people who are also just experimenting.
So this was also the era of patent medicines, also
known as nostrums. These were products marketed as cures for
various illnesses that were sold as over the counter treatments
and there was no need for a prescription and there
was no accountability either. In many cases. Perhaps in most cases,
(30:34):
the best you could hope for is that you would
end up with something that was ineffective but didn't cause
any further harm. In the worst cases, you would end
up with quote unquote cures that could be toxic all
on their own. If you've seen the original version of
the Disney film Pete's Dragon, there's an antagonist named Doctor Terminus.
(30:55):
He's a con man who deals in patent medicines. Well,
electricity would join the banks of those supposed cures in
the eighteen hundreds. So let's take the work of Dr
James Bryan for example. I do not know much about
this person. My initial research didn't turn up any real
facts other than there are a lot of doctors who
(31:16):
happened to have the name James Bryan, both in the
past and in present day. But this doctor James Bryan
produced a pamphlet advertising his products and services, which included
electric belts and electric baths. So what the what? We'll
explain more in a second, but first let's take a
quick break. Before the break, I alluded to the electric
(31:46):
belts and baths of doctor James Bryan, So what the
heck were those? Well, an electric belt is kind of
what it sounds like. It was a belt worn against
the skin, and the belt had electrodes in it through
which it could administer a current into the body of
the person wearing the belt and be attached to a
battery or voltaic pile. The pamphlet helpfully has illustrations showing
(32:09):
how different belts could be worn around the waist, around
the stomach, as well as a harness version that would
include electrodes near the back or the chest. And according
to the Good Doctor, these belts were meant to treat
problems like nervous prostration, hysteria, kidney disorders, liver disease, spinal
injuries and stuff what is not going well in your brain.
(32:33):
The devices were priced at around fifteen dollars to twenty
dollars a princely some in the early nineteen century, the
electric baths were a little bit different. They involved a
patient getting into a special bathtub made out of a
metallic material, whatever it might be. The tub was filled
with water and that would include some form of electro
(32:53):
light component in it to facilitate conductivity. According to one
description by a doctor Maurice urn Uh, an electric bath,
the type of mixture sometimes you know a type of
acid would depend upon whatever ailment you were actually trying
to treat. So here's a passage from his description quote.
The water is slightly acidulated to increase its conductibility, and
(33:17):
the acid varies according to cases. Nitric or hydrochloric acid
is used for the extraction of mercury, silver or gold,
other acids for that of lead. This done the negative
pole of the pile, meaning a voltaic pile, is brought
into contact with the sides of the bathing tub and
(33:38):
the positive pole placed in the hands of the patient.
The work of purification is now in full activity. The
electrical current precipitates itself through the body of the sufferer,
penetrating into the depth of his bones, pursues in all
the tissues. Every particle of metal seizes it, restores its
(33:59):
primitive form, and chasing it out of the organism, deposits
it on the sides of the tub, where it becomes
apparent to the naked eye. Well, that just sounds grand,
don't it. It also sounds like hogwash to me. The
process described would see deposits on the tub due to
chemical changes within the water and the acid mixture. As
(34:22):
electrical current was passing through it, It would not be
an indicator that stuff was getting pushed out of the
person's body and then accumulating on the sides of the tub. Rather,
it would be a build up of stuff from the
actual chemicals that were in the water already. This actually
reminds me of ear candling, a practice that is equally dubious,
(34:42):
and that practice a person with an ear ailment places
a small candle in their ear canal and they light it. Now,
according to those who practice this, the principle, the mechanical
principle that makes this work, is that the burning flame
wicks away stuff like earwax out of your ear. The
idea that it kind of pulls that wax up through
(35:05):
the candle. And when you're done, assuming you haven't set
yourself on fire or anything, when you take the candle
out and you blow it out, you see that there
does seem to be some gunk around there. But these
are candles that are made of gunk. If you just
lit one of the candles and you just let it
burn on its own, without being inside somebody's ear, you
would get a very similar result. So, in other words,
(35:25):
we're still seeing these old methods and these old tricks
being used today, both by people who know better but
who are pulling a con and some people who are
well intentioned but misled. In general, the approach of the
nineteenth century, particularly as the years went on, was to
move away from delivering a dramatic shock the way the
(35:46):
electrostatic approaches had in the eighteenth century, and more toward
using low voltage currents to deliver therapist to patients. And
most of the time the goal was to try and
find the lowest possible intensity in order to treat the
malath ease, because more is not always better, and finding
a method to provide treatment with the minimum discomfort and
the minimum side effects was really the goal. But our
(36:09):
understanding remained limited. So let's move up to the twentieth century,
the nineteen hundreds. At this point we had a better
knowledge of how electricity works. We had discovered electrons for
one thing. We knew the basic structure of the atom.
By this point in the psychiatric medicine world, what was
once called electroshock therapy today we call it electro convulsive
(36:31):
therapy used electricity to deliver a current through the brain
of a patient with the intent of triggering a small
brief seizure on purpose. Now this is still done today
with varying degrees of success, and it's also under much
more carefully controlled circumstances today. Oh and sometimes it also
(36:52):
is called shock treatment, which also happens to be the
name of an amazing musical and a sort of sequel
to the Rocky Horror picture show. But I digress. This
electro convulsive therapy is used to treat conditions like major
depression or bipolar disorder, and it's particularly for patients again
who have not responded well to other types of treatment.
And indeed, doctors learned back in the eighteenth century that
(37:15):
seizures could sometimes help with certain disorders and diseases. It
really has a medical beneficial effect. Now. Back in those days,
they were typically induced through the use of certain chemicals,
including one that became known as metrosol. That was until
about eight when Lucy Obeni and Ugo Cerletti experimented with
(37:37):
electricity to induce seizures instead of using chemicals. Many patients
reported that after they had to take metrosol, that that
chemical I was talking about a second ago, they would
experience intense feelings of terror just before they had a seizure,
and they were so intense and so unpleasant that patients
(38:00):
would try to avoid taking the chemical for understandable reasons,
they did not want to experience this traumatizing reaction, but
that meant treatment was becoming even more challenging. So Beanie
and Serletti actually were hoping that their approach using electricity
to induce seizures rather than chemicals, would actually work better
(38:20):
and not cause this intense reaction in patients, and it
did seem to have that effect for about half the
patients that tried it, so about a fifty success rate. Also,
there were reports that patients would experience a mild form
of amnesia about the treatment itself, so they would have
some amnesia that were that the effects were right around
(38:43):
when they experienced the treatment. It wasn't general amnesia, it
wasn't severe, and it wasn't permanent either. People would over
time be able to remember effects, but because they would
be somewhat forgetful of the experience of the electro convulsive therapy,
they wouldn't develop a lot of strong negative feelings toward it.
(39:04):
They just didn't remember what it was like. Now, that
does not mean it was actually pleasant to go through it,
but it does mean that patients weren't necessarily avoiding treatment.
Now that being said, this treatment was also used in
the nineteen fifties as a way to control unruly patients
in mental hospitals, a practice that was dramatized in the
novel and in future play and film of One Flew
(39:28):
Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The experience was painful and it
could be dangerous, you know, seizures are are serious. Over time,
doctors would adjust their approach to e CT to minimize
the risks and the discomfort of the patient, but it
was definitely something disturbing to witness in the early days.
On top of that, some practitioners used e c T
(39:50):
to treat things that were not disorders at all. For example,
to quote unquote treat homosexuality. They were subscribing to the
belief that homosexuality was behavioral disorder. Between that barbaric practice
and the disturbing reports coming out of hospitals in the
nineteen fifties, electro convulsive therapy understandably got a pretty bad reputation.
(40:13):
Now that does not mean it's an illegitimate practice, and
it doesn't work for for some disorders. It does work,
but because it was used poorly in several cases, and
not just poorly but inhumanely in some cases, the overall
approach got a pretty negative stigma attached to it. Now
(40:33):
these days, the way it works is more measured and
scientific and controlled. A patient is put under anesthesia so
that they don't experience pain. They're given muscle RELAXANTCE as well,
and that way it helps reduce the risk of seizure,
the physical risks of seizure, and it certainly has proven
(40:55):
to be effective to treat some patients who are dealing
with massive severe depression for example. So the stigma still remains,
but for some people it has literally become a life
saving therapy. Now, there are some other uses of electricity
in medicine, some of them are disputed. Uh there are
devices that claim to use mild electrical stimulation to encourage
(41:16):
healing in wounds. So let's say that you've broken a
bone or you've got a bad cut. There are some
devices that say that using electrical impulses you can encourage
the healing process and speed it up. There are others
that are using electricity to help manage pain. But there's
also a lot of disagreement over whether there's actually a
(41:37):
real effect happening with these devices or if the effects
are more psychological in nature. In other words, if you
believe it works, it seems to work for you, there
are there are a lot of questions about it. It
might work, it might not. A report on transcutaneous electrical
nerve stimulation or TENS, as a practice in which electricity
(42:01):
is used to reduce pain. It's thought to inhibit part
of the nervous system that processes the pain sensation. It's
a good example of this issue in medicine. The report
is titled Using TENS for Pain Control the State of
the Evidence. It was published in the journal Pain Manage,
(42:21):
and it states the evidence for TENS efficacy is conflicting
and requires not only description but also critique. Population specific
systemic reviews and meta analyzes are emerging indicating both HF
and LF tens are being shown to provide analgesia, specifically
(42:43):
when applied at a strong, non painful intensity. So, in
other words, the jury is still out on this, and
there's also still some mystery around the actual mechanisms of
electricity and its role in healing. That doesn't mean electrotherapy
as a sham, or that there's no way for it
to work. I want to be clear about that, But
(43:03):
what it does mean is we do not have a
full understanding of what is actually going on. That's just
like weird man. Like with technology, we typically know if
something works, and we typically know how it works and
why it works. Typically there are exceptions, but in medicine,
(43:25):
sometimes we know that something seems to be working, but
we have no idea why it's working, or why it
might work in one case but not in another similar case,
or whether the effects we see are due directly to
the treatment or more through the perception that the patient
and the doctors have of that treatment. It's weird man.
(43:49):
I'm glad I'm stuck with technology because that's way easier
to understand than you know us. Now. I plan on
doing some more episodes related to this topic. I plan
on revisiting topics that we have covered in past episodes
of tech stuff, like the electric chair. It's a terrifying
use of electricity that I think we need to revisit,
(44:11):
or devices that are meant to stimulate muscles using electrical pulses.
I get ads for that occasionally because now that I
am more health conscious. I tend to get ads for
all sorts of stuff related to that. Some of them
might be somewhat suspect, So keep on the lookout for
those episodes. They should be coming out before too long.
But as always, remember to ask questions and to use
(44:35):
critical thinking and do your homework, because that's the way
you are best suited to getting what you need. Whether
it's a specific kind of device that you want or
you're looking at treatments, it's always good for you to
do some research and see if you can find as
non biased a source of information as possible in order
(44:58):
to draw your conclusions. Because there are a lot of
people out there who either consciously are trying to take
advantage of you or unconsciously promoting pseudo science thinking that
they're doing the right thing, and that doesn't necessarily bode
well for anyone out there. And whether it's ill intention
or not, I want you guys to get the absolute
(45:21):
best out of life you possibly can. So critical thinking,
I know, I say it a lot. What I also
say a lot is if you have suggestions for future
episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out and tell me
what they are. You can email me at tech Stuff
at how stuff works dot com. Pop on over to
our podcast website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You
(45:44):
will find links there for every episode that we have
ever published. You will also find where we are on
social media, so you can hunt me down on Facebook
or Twitter and get in touch with me that way.
You can also find a link to our online store,
where every purchase you make goes to help the show,
and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to
(46:05):
you again really soon. Hext Stuff is a production of
I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to text Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tex Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and I love all things tech and
I was recently listening to an episode of a different podcast,
(00:24):
the podcast Sawbones, in which wife and husband team Sydney
and Justin McElroy discussed some of the ways we humans
have tried to treat medical issues using a limited understanding
of those issues and the various treatments we were applying.
So they've done tons of episodes on stuff like blood
(00:45):
letting or trepid nation, and recently they did one on
the use of electricity as a means of treating medical issues,
and they do a great job, but I thought I
would dive into it a little bit more and talk
about how we built an understanding around electricity and then
how we made use of electricity to try and treat ourselves,
sometimes not so well. And I'm looking really at the
(01:09):
early uses. I'll talk a little bit about modern uses
of electricity, but I'm mostly focusing on how we first
started applying electricity to medical uses. And I want to
keep in mind that we do still have electrotherapy today,
though it's still a matter of some mystery and confusion,
also largely because some people appropriate the term electrotherapy to
(01:33):
pedal medically questionable products and services. So you've got more
reputable sources that are attempting to determine whether or not
electrotherapy is a working means of treatment, and you have
other people who don't really concern themselves with that part.
They're just looking to sell stuff. And electricity is almost
(01:56):
like magic to a lot of us. And also in
this episode, I'll be focusing primarily on direct application of electricity.
It's pretty obvious that many medical procedures either depend directly
or indirectly on electricity and electrical instruments and equipment, and
I'm not getting down all those pathways, though we should
(02:17):
understand their. Use of electricity in the medical field began
to emerge around the same time as our understanding of
other phenomena such as X rays and ultra violet rays,
and so a lot of histories about electricity and medicine
also talk about these, And sure we could talk about
lots of different types of equipment, scanners, things like that,
instruments but I really want to talk about directly applying
(02:40):
electricity to the human body. Back to Sawbones, which I
should add is is not affiliated with the I Heart
Radio network at all. Just in the interest of full disclosure,
I am a fan of Sawbones. I also have no
connection with the macl roys tho. Hey guys, Sydney, Justin Griffin,
Travis if you if you want to chat, hit me up.
(03:03):
But the Sawbones episode was inspired by Benjamin Franklin, who
conducted famous experiments with electricity. If you are familiar with
Benjamin Franklin as a historical figure, you've probably heard about
his experiment with the kite and the key during the thunderstorm.
So some of this episode will play into that a
little bit. But our knowledge of electricity actually dates much
(03:26):
further back than that founding father of the United States.
You could even really say that humans were at least
aware of electricity in some measure, just from the presence
of lightning. Now, we didn't understand what it was, we
didn't have a name for it like electricity, and we
didn't know how it was formed, but we knew it existed.
We could see that, but it would take a long
(03:47):
time to figure out what those bolts actually were. In fact,
during Benjamin Franklin's time, the thought was it was some
form of fluid. In fact, that's why we get the
word current, because of a flow of some sort of
electrical ether fluid stuff. Now, the earliest account that describes
(04:08):
one aspect of electricity, one that is going to be
very important for this discussion, comes from sales of Milita's
And I know I've butchered that name. My Greek is
worse than my Latin, which is terrible. But he was
a Greek philosopher. Aristotle actually thought of him as the
first true philosopher, who was born in six hundred twenty
(04:31):
four b c e. And he asked a lot of questions,
which is what philosophers do. And these are questions that
had before his time largely been met with the answer
because the gods want it to be that way, you know,
like like lightning was Zeus's way of saying, hey, knock
that crap off. But this philosopher was more inclined to
(04:52):
believe that there were less mythological explanations for certain phenomena
there might be more natural and one could argue in
the future scientific explanations for those things, and one thing
he observed had to do with what we now know
as static electricity. He wrote something that likely people had
already been observing for quite some time, which was if
(05:14):
you rubbed amber was something like animal fur. If you
did it vigorously enough, the fur would then start to
attract other stuff like moats of dust to it. Particles
would drift toward the fur. It was drawing stuff to it.
Stuff like blades of dried grass would move toward it,
(05:35):
and there was some sort of power of attraction going
on that people just couldn't easily explain. But I can
do it now. To be fair, very smart people figured
all this stuff out way way before I was ever born,
and I just benefit from having been able to read
about it. But it comes down to some basic features
(05:58):
in atoms. So yeah, this is gonna get super super basic,
and then we'll build up from there. You know, typical
text stuff approach. Atoms have neutrons, protons and electrons. Protons
have a positive charge, electrons have a negative charge, and
neutrons just want to get through the day without too
much hassle. Opposite charges attract each other, so a negative
(06:21):
charge attracts a positive charge Likewise, like charges repel each other.
So if you get to positively charged particles together, well,
you're gonna be spending a lot of energy because those
positive charges are gonna push back against each other. Uh.
There are forces within the nucleus of an atom that
bind protons together, which is why they don't just fly
(06:42):
apart from the fact that their charges are repelling each other.
With the amber and animal, for what's really going on
is a transfer of electrons from one material to the
surface of another material. The animal for collects electrons from
the amber and thus builds up a negative charge. This
(07:03):
charge is nowhere to go. It's static. There's no current
to flow through, there's no circuit there for it to
create a current. So if the negatively charged material makes
contact with something else, it can then release that electric charge.
It can discharge, and that's when you get that little
snappy spark. It's also what happens if you rub your
feet against the carpet and then touch someone else or
(07:25):
something metal and you get that little shock. It's because
you've got this build up of electrons that you then
discharge when you come in contact with something that doesn't
have that build up. So the animal fur with a
negative charge will attract stuff that has a greater positive
charge than the fur does. So those dust moats have
(07:47):
a slight positive charge to them, they're being attracted to
that negative charge. On a related note, if you've ever
seen a person's hair stand on end after taking off
a hat, or if they're playing with an electrostatic generator,
that because the hairs get negatively charged, and because like
charges repel each other, the hairs are actually repelling one another.
(08:09):
They stand on end because they're attempting to get as
far away from each other as they possibly can. Uh,
or so I'm told, I don't know. I've been bald
for twenty years. I have no idea what hair even
does anymore. It never comes to visit doesn't even call
me anyway. While philosophers like the one I was just
(08:30):
mentioning observed phenomena like these, they had no way to
explain what was actually going on, and it remained a
mystery for centuries, and no one yet had had been
able to link this curious observation with more dramatic examples
like lightning. There was no way of saying these two
things are related. If we want to talk about therapy, well,
(08:53):
there are actually some stories about ancient people using electrotherapy,
uh Pacrates or Hippocrates. If you prefer treated patients by
placing them in barrels filled with water and electric eels,
it's pretty primitive electrotherapy. He did that to treat stuff
(09:13):
like gout and rheumatism. I'm not sure to what effect,
because I ran out of time before I could really
dig up more accounts of that particular therapy. Now we
probably get the word electricity thanks mainly to a fellow
named William Gilbert. He was born in fifteen forty four
in England, and he became an astronomer and a physician.
(09:34):
He actually served Elizabeth the First at one point as
a court physician. He also wrote a work titled d Magnete,
which he published around six hundred. This work was filled
with his observations on matters surrounding magnetism and electrical phenomena.
He differentiated between magnets and the attractive effect observed when
(09:57):
using amber, sometimes helpfully called the amber effect. Gilbert said
these two things were similar but distinct phenomena that magnets
and this attractive force he was observing through electrostatic build
up were related somehow or similar in many ways, but
they were not exactly the same thing. Later scientists would
(10:17):
determine that they are both manifestations of a single force,
that of electro magnetism, but they are distinct. So that
would be getting ahead of ourselves. Let's get back to Gilbert.
He referred to the materials that were known for this
static electricity effect as electricus. That is a new Latin word,
(10:39):
meaning it wasn't an existing Latin phrase. He actually took
a Greek word and then he sort of latinized it
and he meant it to mean like amber. So electricus
is like amber. The Greek word was electron, which meant
amber itself. So he took a Greek word, made it
(10:59):
sort of Latin and then got electricus. He described the
attractive force as an electric force. Another smarty pants named
Francis Bacon used the word electric to describe materials that
could create this attractive force, and in sixteen forty six,
Sir Thomas Brown went a step further and he coined
(11:21):
the word electricity. Now, in this case, it was a
word meant to describe a material's behavior or the property
of being electric, sort of like if you were elastic
you would describe the quality of elastic as elasticity. Well,
that was the case with electricity. It didn't mean a
(11:42):
current or a flow or anything. It was a way
of describing the tendency for material to be electric. Moving
forward a century, two different people independently invented a device
capable of storing static electricity. One of those was evolved
joe Orge von Kleist, and together was Peter von muschen
(12:03):
Brook And again i'm butchering names. Both of these guys
developed their version in the early seventeen forties, and the
basic device was pretty simple in its original form. It
was a glass vial that had some water in it,
and the vial had a cork that capped the vial.
But piercing through the cork was a piece of metallic
(12:26):
wire that was long enough to have one end of
it dipping into the water in the vial. The other
end would extend out from the end of the cork
and it would be brought into contact with what was
called a friction device, essentially electrostatic generator. This was the
device meant to build up a static charge, and this
(12:47):
would transfer a build up of electrons to the wire,
which they could then actually hold on to that that charge,
and it would hold onto it until you touched it
to something that would allow it to complete a circuit,
and then it would discharge that electricity in a spark.
So it was sort of like a very primitive capacitor. UH.
This would end up being called a Leyden jar because
(13:10):
the area that it was that where it was being
invented was near Leyden in the Netherlands. UH and later
versions of it would end up using metallic components, not
just a glass vial filled with water, but the earliest
versions were basically just that. Now this brings us to
Benjamin Franklin. Franklin met with a doctor named Dr Spence,
(13:34):
apparently who had traveled from Scotland. According to Franklin, there's
actually some scholastic debate over who Dr Spence might have been.
Maybe he was Spencer, not Spence. Franklin got to see
a Leyden jar in action and he was fascinated by it,
and not long afterward, Peter Collinson of the Royal Society
(13:55):
of London sent Benjamin Franklin the equipment that he needed
to make his own Leaden jar, and Franklin began doing
experiments and sussing out the nature of this electricity thing. Now,
some of those experiments involved using electricity to treat people
with paralysis or people who were dealing with symptoms that
they developed in the aftermath of a stroke. He observed
(14:18):
that some patients reported improvement and relief after receiving electro
static shocks, but he wrote in seventeen fifty seven to
the Royal Society that he quote never knew any advantages
from electricity in patients that were permanent end quote. So
in other words, the effects he observed appeared to be
temporary in nature. They did not seem to be a cure,
(14:41):
although they might treat acute symptoms, and he couldn't really
explain what was going on. Also, I should add that
Benjamin Franklin wasn't necessarily just doing this on his own, thinking, well, gosh,
I wonder what happens if I shock people who aren't
feeling well? Will they feel better? This was sort of
an accut humulative approach. There were a lot of people
(15:01):
who were speculating that electricity might be used for things
that they had frankly run out of ideas as far
as how they could treat them. There were a lot
of diseases and disorders that we just didn't know how
to treat. None of the conventional approaches seemed to work,
so it was almost a move of desperation. Now, Franklin
(15:23):
also went on to prove that lightning and the sparks
that he was seeing from these electro static discharges were
in fact the same thing. Different orders of magnitude and strength,
but they were the same thing. He also invented the
lightning rod to help protect houses against lightning strikes. Now,
speaking of the Royal Society, its members were also experimenting
(15:44):
with using electricity as a medical treatment for all sorts
of ailments, though primarily for things like paralysis, seizures, and
neurological disorders and diseases in general. The physicians of the
eighteenth century who were inclined to try electricity as a
means of treating these issues did so because more conventional
treatments were failing. This isn't quite like saying, well nothing
(16:07):
else worked, let's shock them. But it's not far from
that point of view, And we're still talking about discharging
and electrostatic charge, so zapping someone not subjecting someone to
a prolonged, uninterrupted current of electricity, so this was usually
done with the zapp going to whatever area of the
(16:28):
body was thought to be affected. So, depending upon the
disease or the disorder, the doctors would say, well, let's
target let's say the liver, and they would deliver an
electric shocked toward the the person's abdomen in an effort
to shock the liver out of whatever the problem was.
Erasmus Darwin, who was the grandfather of the famous Charles Darwin,
(16:53):
was one of the physicians who experimented with medical uses
of electricity. The medical community was not universal in its
acceptance of electricity as a means of treatment, but Darwin
and a few other physicians sought to employ electricity to
treat certain ailments and conditions, again mostly in places where
other treatments just weren't working. These included neurological disorders and diseases, paralysis, seizures,
(17:19):
things like that. And his fellow philosophers felt that natural philosophy,
which was their term for the natural sciences, primarily physics,
had the potential to make life better for people in general,
and using electricity to help some of the most vulnerable
people in the population seemed like a great way to
do that now, Darwin believed in a concept called the
(17:39):
spirit of animation. This would be a type of energy
within living beings that gave life to those beings. This
energy would travel along nerves to muscles, and in some
ways it was similar to electricity itself, and it was
kind of heading down the right path towards how our
(18:00):
neurological systems use electrochemical signals to control our muscles. But
it was a much more primitive and somewhat spiritual outlook
on that process. Now that being said, Darwin and his
contemporaries had a limited understanding of electricity. Darwin described it
as an ethereal fluid. Likewise, the understanding of actual ailments
(18:23):
was limited and the language describing them sometimes imprecise. So
Darwin used electricity to treat everything from jaundice to tape worms.
He also used it to treat symptoms like pain and swelling,
and he noted that the shocks could restore some movement
to what appeared to be lifeless limbs, something that a
couple of other physicians would expand upon later. And early
(18:45):
electrician named Tiberius Cavallo from Italy immigrated to England and
became a member of the Royal Society. He worked to
improve electrical devices, and he also lamented that many of
the people in England making use of electricity medicine were
under qualified to do it properly. He said natural philosophers
frequently lacked sufficient education and training in medicine whereat while
(19:09):
the physicians the doctors fell short in the natural philosophy department.
And indeed, as word spread, many people began incorporating stuff
like Leyden jars in their various treatments. Some like Darwin,
were attempting to approach things from a more or less
scientific perspective. Others were more on the snake oil con
man side of things, and because of some advances in
(19:32):
science technology, things were about to get more complicated. But
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get back to electricity as a type of medical therapy.
Up until this point, I've been talking about using electrostatic
charges to target specific body parts or general regions of
the body. That means every treatment would be administered as
(21:20):
a single or a series of single shocks, so you'd
get shocked, and maybe they'd have to use a couple
of different electro stag generators to continue to build up
a charge to shock you. Again, these were not necessarily
super powerful shocks, though sometimes they could be, and with
electro static charges, you're talking about discharging it pretty much
(21:41):
all at once, at least until Alessandro Volta invented the
electro forests. But never mind that it gets a little
too deep in the weeds for us. Then we get
to Luigi Galvani, an Italian physician in the late seventeen hundreds.
On November six, eighty, galva he began to experiment with
fresh frog legs, freshly cut from the frog. Galvanni hypothesized
(22:07):
that the muscle, tissue and the nerves in a frog's
legs could generate electricity, and that this was the energy
used for motive force. This was different from the prevailing
wisdom at the time, and he was largely derided for
this hypothesis. In one of his experiments, he connected a
nerve from a frog leg to a Franklin square capacitor,
(22:30):
which caused the leg to twitch. He later used an
arc of metallic wire to connect a nerve to a
muscle in the frog leg, and that also caused the
leg to contract again. Galvani published his results a decade
later in sev Alessandro Volta recreated Galvani's experiments and discovered
(22:52):
that he got even better results if he used a
metallic arc made of two different metals, so bi metallic wire.
Volta believed that the two different types of metal were
necessary to create what he thought of as an electrical imbalance,
so a differential, if you will, and that Galvani's hypothesis
that the animal's tissue generated its own electricity was off base.
(23:16):
Galvanni responded with a new experiment in which he connected
the nerves of two different frog legs together and that
caused both frog legs to twitch. Galvani and Volta engaged
in a spirited debate through correspondence and publications. That debate
ended in se not because one side had thoroughly defeated
the other, but because Galvanni went the way of his
(23:39):
frogs and croaked get it. Volta took his idea and
he created a device that we call the voltaic pile.
It was a stack of alternating layers of copper and
cardboard soaked in salt water and zinc, and you had
a wire connecting the bottom plate of the pile to
the top plate, and that made a circuit through which
(24:01):
electricity could flow. So you could actually put a load
on that wire and it would power it. Not that
there was anything to really power at that point. Sure enough,
the pile generated a steady current of electricity, so it
was an early type of battery. Now I'm not going
to go into the full chemistry of what's going on
here because it would require a pretty big tangent in
(24:22):
this episode, but we'll save that for a future episode. Well,
we'll go into more detail. And as for the debate
between Galvani and Volta, turns out both guys were right.
Volta was correct that the two medals connected through a
salty medium generated electricity. It proved to be true, and
Galvanni's hypothesis that nerves and muscles generate electricity also proved
(24:43):
to be true. So everybody wins. The invention of the
battery would lead to new applications of electricity in medicine,
and slowly physicians were starting to change their understanding of
how the body works. In the seventeen forties and seventeen fifties,
the prevailing ideas felt into a category called iatro mechanical theories.
(25:04):
And I'm sure I messed that up too, but the
underlying assumption for that theory was that most illnesses were
caused because something somewhere in the body was all gunked up. Essentially,
either the blood wasn't flowing properly, or nerves were somehow constricted,
or your gushy fluids in your body had become sludgy
(25:24):
like jello, and we'll see there's your problem. Well, many
people at the time believe that electricity could get stuff
moving again, that it could quicken the pulse, and perhaps
it could even break up that sludgy stuff in your
body to make you better. That electricity could dislodge blocked
humors in your body, and that those humors would otherwise
(25:46):
prevent your body from being able to get rid of them.
You know, you would just sweat them out or excrete
them in some way you would get rid of noxious humors.
And this seems awfully similar to something that gets pedaled
a lot today, which is namely the concept of toxins.
You'll hear a lot about various treatments from massage you know,
(26:07):
a massage therapist, to to sweat lodges, to all sorts
of different things where you get this vague concept of
removing toxins from your body, like knocking loose toxins. That's
an old, old, old idea that has no basis in
real science. Uh, your liver actually does process toxins already,
(26:28):
So assuming you have a working liver, then your liver
is already doing that for you. That's its job. If
you don't have a working liver, you've got bigger problems
to worry about. But this bit of medical misunderstanding has
been incredibly persistent and remains a key component in a
lot of different places, saying like this is what our
treatments do for you. By the way, I'm not knocking massages.
(26:51):
I love them, but yeah, the whole toxin thing is
kind of um. Let's just say hello blue over nothing.
On a related note, magnetism was also an area of
intense interest among physicians and the general public, and because
it's related to electricity through the electro magnetism force, I
(27:13):
thought i'd chat about just for a second, like electricity.
There are legitimate uses of magnets in the medical industry.
There are many of them, magnetic resonance imaging, for example. However,
magnets also gave rise to the opportunity for Charlatan's to
ascribe magical or vague properties to them that would somehow
be a benefit to humans. Sure, they couldn't really explain
(27:35):
how the magnets did this, but the claims were there.
The fact that magnets could attract and repel each other
through some invisible force made it seem kind of mystical
to people, and I think this is why to this
day you can find companies that market magnetic bracelets that
supposedly do everything from improving your circulation to somehow giving
you a boost in athletic performance. There's no real scientific
(27:58):
evidence to bear any of that out. By the way,
the premise depends upon the target customer taking a leap
of faith. It's actually pretty hard to understand how magnets work.
I mean, just ask the insane clown Posse. And sometimes
we humans are willing to take another leap if we
see something that we can tell does something, but we
don't understand how it does. That something. So if I
(28:22):
see a device do something that is really incredible, and
then you tell me it can do something even more incredible,
I might be inclined to believe you. I've already witnessed
it do something that I can't explain, so I might
be willing to just go along for the ride for
the whole thing. And a lot of people found that
out with magnets. So ignorance is the friend of the
con man, is what I'm saying there, and it would
(28:44):
be true both for magnets and electricity. However, I'm going
to be a little bit more charitable. Not everyone in
the eighteenth and nineteen centuries was out to pull a
fast one on people. I guess it's important to acknowledge
physicians around this time were largely in an experimental phase.
They were very slowly learning which treatments were most effective
(29:07):
for various ailments. We weren't quite in the era of
modern medicine yet, nor did we have a basic understanding
of most pathogens. So it shouldn't be a huge surprise
that some physicians were willing to try all new approaches,
including the use of something they didn't fully understand, in
the hopes that perhaps some positive effect would follow. Many
(29:28):
of their patients had tried all other available treatments, and
so any port in a storm. I guess with the
invention of the voltaic pile, we were on our way
to the creation of batteries, and these would provide a
supply of direct current, typically at pretty low voltages. And
the early experiments in using electricity to treat a host
of ailments meant that you could have a lot of
(29:49):
opportunity to jump on the chance to create products that
leverage the legitimacy given to the practice by the pioneers
and medicine. So in other words, you had legitim it
respectable people looking into ways of using electricity to actually
try and treat people. Then you had all the people
who said, hey, I think this is a way I
can make a buck, and I can trade upon the
(30:12):
legitimacy made by these other people who are also just experimenting.
So this was also the era of patent medicines, also
known as nostrums. These were products marketed as cures for
various illnesses that were sold as over the counter treatments
and there was no need for a prescription and there
was no accountability either. In many cases. Perhaps in most cases,
(30:34):
the best you could hope for is that you would
end up with something that was ineffective but didn't cause
any further harm. In the worst cases, you would end
up with quote unquote cures that could be toxic all
on their own. If you've seen the original version of
the Disney film Pete's Dragon, there's an antagonist named Doctor Terminus.
(30:55):
He's a con man who deals in patent medicines. Well,
electricity would join the banks of those supposed cures in
the eighteen hundreds. So let's take the work of Dr
James Bryan for example. I do not know much about
this person. My initial research didn't turn up any real
facts other than there are a lot of doctors who
(31:16):
happened to have the name James Bryan, both in the
past and in present day. But this doctor James Bryan
produced a pamphlet advertising his products and services, which included
electric belts and electric baths. So what the what? We'll
explain more in a second, but first let's take a
quick break. Before the break, I alluded to the electric
(31:46):
belts and baths of doctor James Bryan, So what the
heck were those? Well, an electric belt is kind of
what it sounds like. It was a belt worn against
the skin, and the belt had electrodes in it through
which it could administer a current into the body of
the person wearing the belt and be attached to a
battery or voltaic pile. The pamphlet helpfully has illustrations showing
(32:09):
how different belts could be worn around the waist, around
the stomach, as well as a harness version that would
include electrodes near the back or the chest. And according
to the Good Doctor, these belts were meant to treat
problems like nervous prostration, hysteria, kidney disorders, liver disease, spinal
injuries and stuff what is not going well in your brain.
(32:33):
The devices were priced at around fifteen dollars to twenty
dollars a princely some in the early nineteen century, the
electric baths were a little bit different. They involved a
patient getting into a special bathtub made out of a
metallic material, whatever it might be. The tub was filled
with water and that would include some form of electro
(32:53):
light component in it to facilitate conductivity. According to one
description by a doctor Maurice urn Uh, an electric bath,
the type of mixture sometimes you know a type of
acid would depend upon whatever ailment you were actually trying
to treat. So here's a passage from his description quote.
The water is slightly acidulated to increase its conductibility, and
(33:17):
the acid varies according to cases. Nitric or hydrochloric acid
is used for the extraction of mercury, silver or gold,
other acids for that of lead. This done the negative
pole of the pile, meaning a voltaic pile, is brought
into contact with the sides of the bathing tub and
(33:38):
the positive pole placed in the hands of the patient.
The work of purification is now in full activity. The
electrical current precipitates itself through the body of the sufferer,
penetrating into the depth of his bones, pursues in all
the tissues. Every particle of metal seizes it, restores its
(33:59):
primitive form, and chasing it out of the organism, deposits
it on the sides of the tub, where it becomes
apparent to the naked eye. Well, that just sounds grand,
don't it. It also sounds like hogwash to me. The
process described would see deposits on the tub due to
chemical changes within the water and the acid mixture. As
(34:22):
electrical current was passing through it, It would not be
an indicator that stuff was getting pushed out of the
person's body and then accumulating on the sides of the tub. Rather,
it would be a build up of stuff from the
actual chemicals that were in the water already. This actually
reminds me of ear candling, a practice that is equally dubious,
(34:42):
and that practice a person with an ear ailment places
a small candle in their ear canal and they light it. Now,
according to those who practice this, the principle, the mechanical
principle that makes this work, is that the burning flame
wicks away stuff like earwax out of your ear. The
idea that it kind of pulls that wax up through
(35:05):
the candle. And when you're done, assuming you haven't set
yourself on fire or anything, when you take the candle
out and you blow it out, you see that there
does seem to be some gunk around there. But these
are candles that are made of gunk. If you just
lit one of the candles and you just let it
burn on its own, without being inside somebody's ear, you
would get a very similar result. So, in other words,
(35:25):
we're still seeing these old methods and these old tricks
being used today, both by people who know better but
who are pulling a con and some people who are
well intentioned but misled. In general, the approach of the
nineteenth century, particularly as the years went on, was to
move away from delivering a dramatic shock the way the
(35:46):
electrostatic approaches had in the eighteenth century, and more toward
using low voltage currents to deliver therapist to patients. And
most of the time the goal was to try and
find the lowest possible intensity in order to treat the
malath ease, because more is not always better, and finding
a method to provide treatment with the minimum discomfort and
the minimum side effects was really the goal. But our
(36:09):
understanding remained limited. So let's move up to the twentieth century,
the nineteen hundreds. At this point we had a better
knowledge of how electricity works. We had discovered electrons for
one thing. We knew the basic structure of the atom.
By this point in the psychiatric medicine world, what was
once called electroshock therapy today we call it electro convulsive
(36:31):
therapy used electricity to deliver a current through the brain
of a patient with the intent of triggering a small
brief seizure on purpose. Now this is still done today
with varying degrees of success, and it's also under much
more carefully controlled circumstances today. Oh and sometimes it also
(36:52):
is called shock treatment, which also happens to be the
name of an amazing musical and a sort of sequel
to the Rocky Horror picture show. But I digress. This
electro convulsive therapy is used to treat conditions like major
depression or bipolar disorder, and it's particularly for patients again
who have not responded well to other types of treatment.
And indeed, doctors learned back in the eighteenth century that
(37:15):
seizures could sometimes help with certain disorders and diseases. It
really has a medical beneficial effect. Now. Back in those days,
they were typically induced through the use of certain chemicals,
including one that became known as metrosol. That was until
about eight when Lucy Obeni and Ugo Cerletti experimented with
(37:37):
electricity to induce seizures instead of using chemicals. Many patients
reported that after they had to take metrosol, that that
chemical I was talking about a second ago, they would
experience intense feelings of terror just before they had a seizure,
and they were so intense and so unpleasant that patients
(38:00):
would try to avoid taking the chemical for understandable reasons,
they did not want to experience this traumatizing reaction, but
that meant treatment was becoming even more challenging. So Beanie
and Serletti actually were hoping that their approach using electricity
to induce seizures rather than chemicals, would actually work better
(38:20):
and not cause this intense reaction in patients, and it
did seem to have that effect for about half the
patients that tried it, so about a fifty success rate. Also,
there were reports that patients would experience a mild form
of amnesia about the treatment itself, so they would have
some amnesia that were that the effects were right around
(38:43):
when they experienced the treatment. It wasn't general amnesia, it
wasn't severe, and it wasn't permanent either. People would over
time be able to remember effects, but because they would
be somewhat forgetful of the experience of the electro convulsive therapy,
they wouldn't develop a lot of strong negative feelings toward it.
(39:04):
They just didn't remember what it was like. Now, that
does not mean it was actually pleasant to go through it,
but it does mean that patients weren't necessarily avoiding treatment.
Now that being said, this treatment was also used in
the nineteen fifties as a way to control unruly patients
in mental hospitals, a practice that was dramatized in the
novel and in future play and film of One Flew
(39:28):
Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The experience was painful and it
could be dangerous, you know, seizures are are serious. Over time,
doctors would adjust their approach to e CT to minimize
the risks and the discomfort of the patient, but it
was definitely something disturbing to witness in the early days.
On top of that, some practitioners used e c T
(39:50):
to treat things that were not disorders at all. For example,
to quote unquote treat homosexuality. They were subscribing to the
belief that homosexuality was behavioral disorder. Between that barbaric practice
and the disturbing reports coming out of hospitals in the
nineteen fifties, electro convulsive therapy understandably got a pretty bad reputation.
(40:13):
Now that does not mean it's an illegitimate practice, and
it doesn't work for for some disorders. It does work,
but because it was used poorly in several cases, and
not just poorly but inhumanely in some cases, the overall
approach got a pretty negative stigma attached to it. Now
(40:33):
these days, the way it works is more measured and
scientific and controlled. A patient is put under anesthesia so
that they don't experience pain. They're given muscle RELAXANTCE as well,
and that way it helps reduce the risk of seizure,
the physical risks of seizure, and it certainly has proven
(40:55):
to be effective to treat some patients who are dealing
with massive severe depression for example. So the stigma still remains,
but for some people it has literally become a life
saving therapy. Now, there are some other uses of electricity
in medicine, some of them are disputed. Uh there are
devices that claim to use mild electrical stimulation to encourage
(41:16):
healing in wounds. So let's say that you've broken a
bone or you've got a bad cut. There are some
devices that say that using electrical impulses you can encourage
the healing process and speed it up. There are others
that are using electricity to help manage pain. But there's
also a lot of disagreement over whether there's actually a
(41:37):
real effect happening with these devices or if the effects
are more psychological in nature. In other words, if you
believe it works, it seems to work for you, there
are there are a lot of questions about it. It
might work, it might not. A report on transcutaneous electrical
nerve stimulation or TENS, as a practice in which electricity
(42:01):
is used to reduce pain. It's thought to inhibit part
of the nervous system that processes the pain sensation. It's
a good example of this issue in medicine. The report
is titled Using TENS for Pain Control the State of
the Evidence. It was published in the journal Pain Manage,
(42:21):
and it states the evidence for TENS efficacy is conflicting
and requires not only description but also critique. Population specific
systemic reviews and meta analyzes are emerging indicating both HF
and LF tens are being shown to provide analgesia, specifically
(42:43):
when applied at a strong, non painful intensity. So, in
other words, the jury is still out on this, and
there's also still some mystery around the actual mechanisms of
electricity and its role in healing. That doesn't mean electrotherapy
as a sham, or that there's no way for it
to work. I want to be clear about that, But
(43:03):
what it does mean is we do not have a
full understanding of what is actually going on. That's just
like weird man. Like with technology, we typically know if
something works, and we typically know how it works and
why it works. Typically there are exceptions, but in medicine,
(43:25):
sometimes we know that something seems to be working, but
we have no idea why it's working, or why it
might work in one case but not in another similar case,
or whether the effects we see are due directly to
the treatment or more through the perception that the patient
and the doctors have of that treatment. It's weird man.
(43:49):
I'm glad I'm stuck with technology because that's way easier
to understand than you know us. Now. I plan on
doing some more episodes related to this topic. I plan
on revisiting topics that we have covered in past episodes
of tech stuff, like the electric chair. It's a terrifying
use of electricity that I think we need to revisit,
(44:11):
or devices that are meant to stimulate muscles using electrical pulses.
I get ads for that occasionally because now that I
am more health conscious. I tend to get ads for
all sorts of stuff related to that. Some of them
might be somewhat suspect, So keep on the lookout for
those episodes. They should be coming out before too long.
But as always, remember to ask questions and to use
(44:35):
critical thinking and do your homework, because that's the way
you are best suited to getting what you need. Whether
it's a specific kind of device that you want or
you're looking at treatments, it's always good for you to
do some research and see if you can find as
non biased a source of information as possible in order
(44:58):
to draw your conclusions. Because there are a lot of
people out there who either consciously are trying to take
advantage of you or unconsciously promoting pseudo science thinking that
they're doing the right thing, and that doesn't necessarily bode
well for anyone out there. And whether it's ill intention
or not, I want you guys to get the absolute
(45:21):
best out of life you possibly can. So critical thinking,
I know, I say it a lot. What I also
say a lot is if you have suggestions for future
episodes of tech Stuff, please reach out and tell me
what they are. You can email me at tech Stuff
at how stuff works dot com. Pop on over to
our podcast website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. You
(45:44):
will find links there for every episode that we have
ever published. You will also find where we are on
social media, so you can hunt me down on Facebook
or Twitter and get in touch with me that way.
You can also find a link to our online store,
where every purchase you make goes to help the show,
and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to
(46:05):
you again really soon. Hext Stuff is a production of
I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from
my heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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TechStuff News
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