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Electricity has long been thought to be an elemental life-force. Experiments by Luigi Galvani in the eighteenth century showed that touching an electrically charged scalpel to an exposed nerve in the leg from a dead frog would cause the leg to kick as if the frog were still alive. While electricity is responsible for the transmission of signals along nerves, fraudulent practioners have relied on the belief of uninformed patients that the presence of electricity and conductors will have a dramatic, disease-curing effect on living tissue.

Such a belief has been reflected in popular culture for a long time; the 1931 film Frankenstein, for example, depicted Dr. Frankenstein's patchwork monster being brought to life by electricity.

The plausibility of electrical cures was enhanced by the fact that electrical machinery was being put into practical use in medicine at the time. Electrocautery machines proved much more effective than hot irons and other primitive cauterization tools, for example. The 20th century saw development of many other genuine medical electronic instruments.

Contents 1 Electrical devices with claimed therapeutic effects 1.1 Perkins patent tractors 1.2 Electric belts and corsets 1.3 Electronic reactions of Abrams 2 Other Theories of Electrical Medicine 3 See also 4 External links

In 1795, an American doctor from Connecticut named Elisha Perkins developed the Perkins Patent Tractors — a pair of rods, one made of iron and one made of brass, that purportedly drew out disease and pain by passing them over one's body. The Connecticut Medical Society loudly condemned the tractors as "delusive quackery". Despite the device's failure to meet the conventional medical standards of the time, the tractors proved popular, and even George Washington bought a set. Perkins died of yellow fever in 1799 and his son, Benjamin Perkins, amassed a fortune with the tractors, as well as with more conventional business ventures, before he died in 1810.

The practice of "tractoration," as it was known, did not live much longer than Benjamin Perkins. Attempts to use tractors in veterinary medicine failed. Two medical practitioners named Hygarth and Falconer administered the lethal blow to the practice by building duplicates made out of wood that proved every bit as effective.

The Perkins tractors were only faintly electrical in nature, but they led to further interesting medical technologies, such as electric belts and corsets, which incorporated batteries and were marketed as being able to cure a wide range of ills. They were used through the 19th century and into the 20th. As late as 1927 a California man named Gaylord Wilshire was using an AC-powered belt named the I-ON-A-CO.

Main article: Albert Abrams

In the years from World War I to 1924, the confidence trickster and fraud Albert Abrams promoted "ERA", which stood for Electronic Reactions of Abrams. His theory was that electrons were the basic element of all life, and that he could diagnose, and later cure, diseases by analysis of blood. His work was debunked in 1923 and 1924, and after his death his machines were found to consist of nothing more than wires connected to lights and buzzers. (See also: Oberon and Radionics).

New developments in science are often adapted into questionable therapies. Magnets were, and still are, used as elements in cure-all devices.

• Radioactive quackery
• E-meter (measures galvanic skin response; used in Scientology)
• Electroacupuncture
• Violet wand

• Quack "Electrodiagnostic" Devices by Stephen Barrett, M.D. (a Quackwatch paper)
• Radionics in The Skeptic's Dictionary