Organized Lightning

Electricity is really just organized lightning.

— George Carlin

Three times a week I receive "stim" during physical therapy.

Stim (electrical stimulation) is used on patients whose injuries cause pain or curb mobility.

To apply stim, the therapist tapes electrodes to the patient's skin, connects them to the stim machine, and dials up the current, until the patient cries uncle. He or she will feel a strong tingling sensation wherever the electrodes have been placed.

"Medical electricity" like stim has been in use since 1744, when it was unveiled in Europe as a branch of "experimental philosophy."

Propelled by amusing experiments and the invention of the Leyden jar in 1746, British, French, German and Italian "electricians" began touting electricity's miraculous healing properties, playing to crowds that assembled at soirées and in theaters, churches and temples to witness "this new fire that man produced from himself, and which did not descend from heaven." 

One professor of medicine and philosophy in Germany, Johann Gottlob Krüger, claimed electrical shocks could be used, in particular, to treat palsy. Soon thereafter, electricians claimed shocks could be used to treat other maladies, including paralysis, tetanus, tumors, gout, rheumatism, toothaches, headaches, menstrual cramps, sleepwalking, fevers, tics, ulcers, and St Anthony’s fire.

Instrument-makers soon flooded the market with portable medical devices that delivered shocks, and in 1756 the first textbook in English on medical electricity was published.

Two centuries later, psychiatrists discovered another application for medical electricity: electroconvulsive therapy, generally known as "shock treatment."

Invented in Italy in the 1930s, shock treatment uses electrical jolts to induce seizures. Throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s, shock treatment was used worldwide to treat depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and homosexuality. Its use declined during the 1980s, although an estimated 100,000 Americans are still treated annually through shock therapy today.

While shock treatment has declined, there's an emergent form of medical electricity: "electroceuticals."

Electroceuticals are small medical devices that are attached to the skin or surgically implanted. They emit electrical impulses that fire up or quiet down neurons, and are used to treat such maladies as heart disease, diabetes, incontinence, high blood pressure, obesity, chronic pain, and arthritis.

While still considered experimental, electroceuticals hold the promise of working miracles.

Miracle-wise, however, no application of medical electricity can compare to that found in Frankenstein—the movie versions, anyway.

The novel's author, Mary Shelley, had in mind an alchemist, not an electrician, when she penned Frankenstein in 1817.

Although familiar with medical electricity through demonstrations by the philosopher Luigi Galvani, in which he passed an electrical current through the nerves of a corpse, Shelly based the novel on folktales about an eccentric German alchemist, Johann Konrad Dippel, who claimed he'd discovered the "elixir of life."

Dippel, who lived in Frankenstein Castle, liked to stitch together bodies from the parts of dead animals and try to bring them to life with chemical compounds.