The great development of pseudo-science in medicine remained for the era following the scientific investigation of electricity. With the discovery of the Leyden jar and its startling spark, a new and marvelous healing agent seemed to be at hand. It is quite amusing to read the accounts of the influence of the spark of the Leyden jar on the well and on the ailing. In my "Catholic Churchmen in Science" (Dolphin Press, Phila., 1909) I summed up the situation.

Winckler of Leipzig said that the first time he tried the jar, he found great convulsions by it in his body; it put his blood into great agitation; he was afraid of an ardent fever, and was obliged to use refrigerating medicines. He felt a heaviness in his head as if a stone lay upon it. Twice it gave him a bleeding at the nose. After the second shock his wife could scarcely walk, and, though a week later, her curiosity stronger than her fears, she tried it once more, it caused her to bleed at the nose after taking it only once. Many men were terrified by it, and even serious professors describe entirely imaginary symptoms. The jar was taken around Europe for exhibition purposes, and did more to awaken popular interest than all the publications of the learned with regard to electricity, in all the preceding centuries.

The extent to which the curative power of electric sparks from the Leyden jar was supposed to go is best appreciated from a list of the affections that one distinguished electro-therapeutist claimed could be not only benefited, but absolutely cured by its employment. It included pulmonic fever, under which title practically all the more or less acute diseases of the chest were included, and some at least of the sub acute; dropsy, by which was meant every effusion into the abdominal cavity no matter what its cause; dysentery, under which was included at that time not only the specific dysenteries but many of the summer complaints and some typhoid fevers; diarrhea, including all the intestinal diseases not already grouped under dysentery; putrid and bilious fever, under which category were assembled the worst cases of typhoid; typhus {43} fever, and all the other continued fevers, and any febrile condition reasonably severe for which no other term could be used; epidemic diseases, pest, anthrax, small-pox, cancer, gravel, diseases of the bladder and of the brain and spinal cord. The Leyden jar had no real effect on any of these affections, but doubtless the mental effect of this new remedy was quite sufficient to be of distinct therapeutic value in the milder forms of many of them.

With Galvani's discovery of the twitching of the muscles of the frog there came a new impetus to the exploitation of electricity in medicine. Many felt that now it was beyond doubt that electrical energy bore some definite relation to vital energy—that one might be made to replace the other if indeed they were not more or less the same thing. This led to many applications of electricity in medicine. Students of physiology were convinced that they were getting close to the solution of the mystery of life, and their persuasion was readily carried over to the people of the time, so that electricity literally worked wonders on them.

When the various electrical machines were invented and their use popularized, pseudo-science proceeded to exploit them, and succeeded, because the mechanical shock of the electric current proved a suggestive therapeutic stimulant. Gordon in the eighteenth century made the first practical frictional electrical machine, and soon some men were observing wonderful effects with it, though the charge was so small that it could actually accomplish little. Just after the invention of the voltaic pile in 1800 it came to be used in medicine with wonderful results. We are prone to think that electrotherapy is modern, but when electrical machines were quite crude, current strength small and potential low, old-time electro-therapeutists were recording their wonderful results and were getting just as marvelous effects as are reported now by enthusiasts. Considerable electro-medical literature existed a century ago when next to nothing was known of electricity. When, later, high potency currents came in and the Wimshurst and other powerful machines were invented, there was revealed at each novel invention a new horizon in electro-therapy and wondrous cures were reported. These continue to occur in the practice of a few favored individuals, though the general profession secures only some ordinary mechanico-muscular effects, which demand much time for real good to be accomplished and have nothing at all of the marvelous about them.

The power of the pseudo-scientific aspect of electricity to influence patients, far from being lost in our time, has rather been increased. Our newspapers make their readers eminently suggestible because they constantly furnish suggestions, and nothing so strengthens a function of any kind as exercise of it. All sorts of electrical contrivances and apparatuses are advertised to cure various pains and aches. Many of them actually seem to relieve long-standing discomfort, though it is not through any electrical power that they do so, but entirely through their influence on the patient's mind. A museum of the electrical contrivances of various kinds for which absurdly high prices are paid at the present time and which people recommend to others because of having been benefited by them would be interesting. There are belts of many kinds, and rings, and medallions, and plates to be worn on the back and on the chest, and curiously shaped poles or "polar plates" resembling various organs, and pendants and armlets and anklets and insoles of many, many kinds, usually {44} going in pairs, one made in zinc and the other in copper, and worth exactly as much as the weight of copper and zinc in them, yet curing chronic ailments by suggestion, or at least bringing relief from many pains and aches complained of.