The origins of electroconvulsive therapy in denmark

'Electroshock Therapy' in the Third Reich

The history of 'electroshock therapy' (now known as electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)) in Europe in the Third Reich is still a neglected chapter in medical history. Since Thomas Szasz's 'From the Slaughterhouse to the Madhouse', prejudices have hindered a thorough historical analysis of the introduction and early application of electroshock therapy during the period of National Socialism and the Second World War. Contrary to the assumption of a 'dialectics of healing and killing', the introduction of electroshock therapy in the German Reich and occupied territories was neither especially swift nor radical. Electroshock therapy, much like the preceding 'shock therapies', insulin coma therapy and cardiazol convulsive therapy, contradicted the genetic dogma of schizophrenia, in which only one 'treatment' was permissible: primary prevention by sterilisation. However, industrial companies such as Siemens-Reiniger-Werke AG (SRW) embraced the new development in medical technology. Moreover, they knew how to use existing patents on the electrical anaesthesia used for slaughtering to maintain a leading position in the new electroshock therapy market. Only after the end of the official 'euthanasia' murder operation in August 1941, entitled T4, did the psychiatric elite begin to promote electroshock therapy as a modern 'unspecific' treatment in order to reframe psychiatry as an 'honorable' medical discipline. War-related shortages hindered even the then politically supported production of electroshock devices. Research into electroshock therapy remained minimal and was mainly concerned with internationally shared safety concerns regarding its clinical application. However, within the Third Reich, electroshock therapy was not only introduced in psychiatric hospitals, asylums, and in the Auschwitz concentration camp in order to get patients back to work, it was also modified for 'euthanasia' murder.

A Material History of Electroshock Therapy : Electroshock Technology in Europe until 1945

The article considers the history of electroshock therapy as a history of medical technology, professional cooperation and business competition. A variation of a history from below is intended; though not from the patients' perspective (Porter, Theory Soc 14:175-198, 1985), but with a focus on electrodes, circuitry and patents. Such a 'material history' of electroshock therapy reveals that the technical make-up of electroshock devices and what they were used for was relative to the changing interests of physicians, industrial companies and mental health politics; it makes an intriguing case for the Social Construction of Technology theory (Bijker et al., The social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1987).

'A Berlin psychiatrist with an American passport': Lothar Kalinowsky, electroconvulsive therapy and international exchange in the mid-twentieth century

The emigration of Lothar Kalinowsky (1899-1992) might, at first glance, seem to be a history of coincidence and twists of fate, but it is shown to be a truly entangled and intertwined history and story. The international introduction of electroconvulsive therapy was not only closely involved with the political, scientific and economic conditions during World War II, but the story of Kalinowsky's relevance to it emerges from competing stories, told differently in Europe and the USA - and by Kalinowsky himself. Tracing these stories up to the end of the 1960s reveals Kalinowsky as an influential inheritor and patron of Berlin Biological Psychiatry, rather than telling the history of an émigré innovator of international neuropsychiatric research.