Electroshock: A prehistory

Philip-Loring

Philip Loring of the Science Museum will guide you through the fascinating journey of the electrical networks of the brain as part of the Neurocomic exhibition taking place at the Cube London. When most people today think of electroshock, they think of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), made infamous in the 1970s by books such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and still a controversial tool used today by psychiatrists around the world. If we step back a century or two, however, we find a radically different notion of electric therapy. Electricity was then something newly harnessed and still full of mystery. Experts and laypeople agreed that it had a profound relationship to nerves, for it could stimulate as well as soothe them. This talk, illustrated with material from the current Mind Maps exhibition at the Science Museum, brings this forgotten world back into view and discusses the reasons for its partial, but not total, eclipse.

This event takes place on Thursday, 05 June at 19:00. RSVP at [email protected] to book your place.

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