''The Desideratum; or, Electricity Made Plain and Useful - By a Lover of Mankind, and of Common Sense'' is a 1760 book by

John Wesley John Wesley (; 2 March 1791) was an English people, English cleric, Christian theology, theologian, and Evangelism, evangelist who was a leader of a Christian revival, revival movement within the Church of England known as Methodism. The soci ...

advocating the use of

electric shock therapy Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is a psychiatric treatment where a generalized seizure (without muscular convulsions) is electrically induced to manage refractory mental disorders.Rudorfer, MV, Henry, ME, Sackeim, HA (2003)"Electroconvulsive th ...

. Wesley collected the accounts of other researchers with "electrifying machines," and to them added observations from his own experiments in public clinics.

Legacy

The 72-page book has led Wesley to be mentioned alongside his contemporaries Richard Lovett and

Jean Paul Marat Jean-Paul Marat (; born Mara; 24 May 1743 – 13 July 1793) was a French political theorist, physician, and scientist. A journalist and politician during the French Revolution, he was a vigorous defender of the ''sans-culottes'', a radical ...

as a pioneer advocate of the medical uses of electroconvulsive therapy, despite the fact that Wesley's tests and results are not considered scientific by modern standards.Linda S. Schwab, essay ''This Curious and Important Subject - John Wesley and The Desideratum'', in ''Inward & Outward Health: John Wesley's Holistic Concept of Medical Science '' ed. Deborah Madden 2008, republished 2012 Page 169 ".. has elicited a wide range of evaluations from scholars of the last ... Discussion of its place (if any) in the history of medicine has been complicated and often compromised by a persistent and critical misunderstanding: that the only contemporary application of electricity in medicine is electroconvulsive therapy ."

References

External links

Digital copy
of an 1871 reprint at Archive.org 1760 non-fiction books Medical books Works by John Wesley Electroconvulsive therapy {{med-book-stub