A real Italian Electroshock Device

An extremely rare REAL electroshock device, around 1950's, from an Italian insane asylum.

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), also known as electroshock, is a controversial psychiatric treatment in which seizures are electrically induced in anesthetized patients for therapeutic effect. Today, ECT is most often used as a treatment for severe major depression which has not responded to other treatment, and is also used in the treatment of mania, catatonia, schizophrenia and other disorders.

Convulsive therapy was introduced in 1934 by Hungarian neuropsychiatrist Ladislas J. Meduna who, believing mistakenly that schizophrenia and epilepsy were antagonistic disorders, induced seizures with first camphor and then metrazol.

In 1937, the first international meeting on convulsive therapy was held in Switzerland by the Swiss psychiatrist Muller.

Italian Professor of neuropsychiatry Ugo Cerletti, who had been using electric shocks to produce seizures in animal experiments, and his colleague Lucio Bini developed the idea of using electricity as a substitute for metrazol in convulsive therapy and, in 1937, experimented for the first time on a person. ECT soon replaced metrazol therapy all over the world because it was cheaper, less frightening and more convenient.

Cerletti and Bini were nominated for a Nobel Prize but didn't get one. By 1940, the procedure was introduced to both England and the US. Through the 40's and 50's the use of ECT became widespread. ECT is the only form of shock treatment still performed by modern medicine.

In the early 1940s, in an attempt to reduce the memory disturbance and confusion associated with treatment, two modifications were introduced: the use of unilateral electrode placement and the replacement of sinusoidal current with brief pulse. A rare but serious complication of unmodified ECT was fracture or dislocation of the long bones.