Pharmacy - The current cure 1872
by Mike Savad
Title
Pharmacy - The current cure 1872
Artist
Mike Savad
Medium
Photograph - Colorized Photo
Description
Hand colored photo from 1872
Original title: Two men and a boy inside a pharmacy
Photographer: Unknown
Location: Unknown
Do you have a toothache? Gout? A headache? Perhaps a touch of leprosy? Well then you are in luck, with this high tech machine, a turn of the crank will zap you with a jolt of electricity you will no longer notice the pain, only the smell of burning hair.
This is one of those curious medical quackery's they had in the Victorian Era. They would create really fancy looking, steampunk like, machines, and the fancier it looked, the more they could charge.
This device is called an Electrostatic Generator, one would turn a crank, and quite a bit of power could be made, that would travel up the wire and into some part of you. I would have to guess that the burning sensation on your skin, and maybe your heart stopping would make you focus less on the original pain.
It's hard to know how long these devices were made, however a person by the name of James Wimshurst, created a device (based off of this sort of design). A crank was turned and 2 glass plates with thin metal foil glued to it in strips were spun opposite each other. The spinning wheels would create positive and negative charges and this would be collected into capacitors (that glass jar with the ball on it), it would be near the plates as it spun.
The voltage it could create was impressive, it could create 50,000-60,000 volts with it. I don't think it was used to treat issues like this. But it was used as a way to power a fluoroscope out in the field. So it was actually useful after all.
I would wonder if that smirking child was punched from the jolt in that guys hand.
As for shock therapy, they had all sorts of machines in all kinds of configurations. We laugh about how silly this all is, but we still use this technology in different forms today.
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August 1st, 2023
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