From Pigs to People: the Origin of Electroshock Therapy

     Here’s a little history lesson about how ECT started.

     In 1938 psychiatrist Ugo Cerletti was still trying to perfect his idea of inducing convulsions in patients to cure their schizophrenia. A dubious idea, at best, but one that psychiatrists had been working with since the turn of the century.

     Psychiatrists had recently been trying to trigger grand mal seizures to cure schizophrenia by injecting patients with high doses of the stimulant Cardiazol. They claimed that the intense fear the patients felt after the injection was “therapeutically beneficial,” despite the brain injury that might also be occurring.

     Insulin coma therapy had been used earlier for the same purpose, but psychiatrists had to abandon that because of the frequency of deaths and brain damage from it…although the brain damage was thought to be “therapeutically beneficial,” they said, because of the consequent “loss of tension and hostility” in a patient.

     Tension and hostility in patients disappeared, of course, because the treatment had reduced them to zombies.

     Not dismayed by the brutal “side effects” of these other experiments, Ugo Cerletti got it into his mind that electricity would be a great way to induce schizophrenia “curing” convulsions. He started electrocuting dogs.

     For one year he had the local dog catcher bring him a weekly delivery of dogs to zap with 120 volts of electricity run though electrodes placed on the head and anus. Cerletti and his partner had as many as fifty dogs at a time undergoing his experiments. Yes, they were able to provoke a seizure in half of those dogs, but the other half died from the voltage.

     Hardly surprising…to a sane person.

     Then Cerletti heard that pigs were given an electric shock to render them too docile to struggle against having their throats slit, the conventional method in those days of slaughtering them. The chief veterinarian at the local slaughterhouse invited Cerletti to observe and to perform his own experiments on the pigs. These animals were provoked into having epileptic seizures by Cerletti giving them a stronger voltage, but they did not die.

     Good news for Cerletti. He could now start experimenting on humans.

     The “good doctor” then arranged one night to have the local police bring in a poor soul they had found wandering around aimlessly on the streets of Rome. He had no known family or relatives. Perfect.

     And, of course, he could be diagnosed by Cerletti as a “schizophrenic” to justify the harsh experiment he was about to perform on him.

     Cerletti and his colleagues hid themselves in a room in the basement of the hospital, posted a guard outside to avoid any unanticipated detection, and went to work. They lay the man on a bed, shaved his head, and stuck a gauze covered plastic tube in his mouth so he didn’t crush his own teeth from the fierce biting they knew would occur from the voltage and the seizure.

     They attached two electrodes to the sides of his head and flipped a switch. Eighty volts of electricity coursed through his brain for a tenth of a second. His body contracted into a horrid spasm. Then it relaxed. No seizure.

     Cerletti’s assistant held his stethoscope to the man’s chest over his heart. He was still alive. The group breathed a sigh of relief.

     “We need to increase the current,” Cerletti announced.

     The second shock was given at 90 volts. The man’s body underwent a slightly longer spasm, he turned pale for a second, and then he relaxed and took a deep breath. Again, no seizure.

     Suddenly the homeless man sat up and addressed the group around him. “Be careful,” he said. “The first one was a nuisance. The second one was deadly.”

     “This dose still isn’t sufficient to induce a seizure,” Cerletti said. “Shall we try again?”

     A third shock was administered at maximum voltage. The patient’s body again went into a spasm, but this time it did not relax afterward. Instead, a wave of spasms started and he stopped breathing. A stethoscope was held to his chest. His heart began beating again, faster and then faster. His face turned purple. His spasms continued for forty-eight seconds and then he took one enormous breath and his body finally did relax.

     Cerletti spoke. “I can now assume that an electric current can induce a  seizure in a man without risk.”

     Easy for him to say, eh?

     Psychiatrists have been giving electroshock therapy ever since. One million a year globally, one hundred thousand a year in America.

     Now they use a muscle paralyzing agent and an anesthetic so the patient cannot feel — and no one else can see — the brutal effects of up to 460 volts of electricity running through a human brain.

     (To download and read the rest of our broadsheet about electroshock  therapy, click on the image on the homepage of this website or on the image of the broadsheet on the Resources page).