A survey of the history of electrical stimulation for pain to 1900

Abstract

This paper traces the history of the use of electricity to treat pain, beginning with the first century A.D. practice of using the torpedo fish to treat gout, continuing through the eighteenth-century use of electrostimulation as an analgesic, up to 1900 when electroanalgesia fell into disrepute. The author recognizes the early empiric nature of electrotherapy as it was catalogued by the Reverend John Wesley, and the beginnings of speculation on the mechanism of pain relief by Berlioz, Sarlandière, and others.