eBay: 100-Year-Old Electro-Shock Machine
I am trying my hardest not to purchase anything but the most needed items while I continue to purge my home of junk, but some person with a wood-paneled office should jump on this auction of a 100-year-old electro-shock therapy machine. Not only does it come with all of the attachments and the original attachments, the seller says it still works.
Fifty freakin' bucks. (For now.) A steal.
Quack Medical/Medicine Electro Shock Machine Device [eBay]
Bonus Link: Slightly more modern unit alongside a pill box from 1890 (!) [Swapatorium]
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I want it. I want it. I want it.
Academic medical libraries tend to have collections of such devices; old docs or their heirs clean out their offices and attics and have gear like this in boxes, some of it in surprisingly good shape, some of it complete with suggestively-shaped attachments. Nobody at the library I worked at seemed terribly eager to test the stuff out, I noticed.
My father is a psychiatrist and still does ECT on a regular basis. ECT is based on the premise that people with seizures are less inclined to be depressed. Why? No one knows. So they take people who are untreatably depressed and force them, by electricity, to have a seizure. They don't "shock" them, they make them electrically convulse. There is a difference. No one has ever performed shock therapy by rubbing someones hair against a balloon. Therefore, lets stop the ignorance, and stop calling it "shock therapy" when it always has, and always will be "Convulsive therapy." ECT = Elctro-convulsive therapy.
Here's a more modern example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:E-meter_red.jpg
(a) they use electricity to induce the convulsions. Is that not shocking them?
(b) an e-meter is not the same as an ECT machine. Not even related, sorry. An e-meter is a galvanometer that measures skin resistance.