Electrotherapy Devices

Long before quack belts and violet-ray wands, physicians used electricity as a genuine clinical tool — and this wing traces that legitimate, if often overreaching, tradition. It runs from the static "influence machines" and Leyden jars of the 18th and 19th centuries, through the faradic and galvanic coils that delivered controlled currents to nerve and muscle, to the high-frequency apparatus of Tesla and d'Arsonval and the diathermy machines that deliberately heated tissue with radio-frequency energy. It ends with the early electroconvulsive-therapy devices of the 1930s and 40s. The line between medicine and quackery ran straight through this equipment: the same coil could be sold to a hospital and to a huckster. The volumes describe the physics and the hardware, credit what was real (electrostimulation and diathermy have modern descendants), and flag what was overclaimed — without ever giving operating parameters. Early ECT is presented as history only; modern ECT is a consented, anesthetized, evidence-based procedure and nothing here bears on it.