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Electrical stimulation to treat medical conditions is not a new therapy; it has been used to treat diseases for centuries. The first electricity sources used for electrical stimulation were produced by animal electricity. Antique Egyptians knew about the electrical proprieties of Nile catfish, but it is unclear if (and how) they experimented with them for clinical purposes. The first reported evidence of electrical stimulation arrives some centuries later in antique Greece times, when Plato and Aristotle described the ability of the torpedo fish to generate curative effects by its electric discharges (Althaus, 1873; Rockwell, 1896; Harris, 1908).
The first evidence of transcranial stimulation in history comes in Roman Empire times, when Scribonius Largus (the physician of the Roman Emperor Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar) described how placing a live torpedo fish over the scalp could relieve headache in a patient (Scribonius Largus, 1529). Perhaps the first person known to have been cured by torpedo fish electricity was Anthero, a freed slave of Tiberius Caesar, who suffered gutta (probably gout) (Cambridge, 1977). In the late 11th century, the Muslim physician in Persia, Ibn-Sidah also suggested the use of torpedo fishes to treat epilepsy (Priori, 2003), placing the live catfish on the brows of the patients (Delbourgo, 2006). The use of electric fish stimulation also spread to Africa, where Jesuit missionaries in early modern Abyssinia (Ethiopia) reported that locals used catfishes as a method of expelling 'Devils out of the human body' (Delbourgo, 2006). Fish electricity was maybe the most popular type of electrical stimulation for more than 10 centuries though it is not clear how the effects were measured.
In 1660 the German scientist Otto von Guericke invented the first electrostatic generator (Comroe & Dripps, 1976), a frictional crank-controlled machine. This device could be considered the first stimulator device and its variations were used later by scientists like the Italian anatomist Leopoldo Marco Antonio Caldani in 1756 to stimulate muscles in sheep and frogs (Caldani, 1760). The Middlesex Hospital (England) was probably the first hospital to purchase an electrostatic machine in 1767 (Cambridge, 1977).
In 1745 Ewald Georg von Kleist invented the Leyden jar, the first capacitor in history (Keithley, 1999). This device could store electric charge produced from an electrostatic generator. Experimenters, like Anton de...