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Your
Engineering Heritage
Guillaume
Duchenne: The Father of Electrotherapy and Neuropathology
by
David L. Morton, Ph.D.
Biomedical
engineering, one of the hottest areas in technology today, is
increasingly overlapping the field of electrical engineering. Yet
the search for ways to use electricity for medical treatment is
well rooted in history. Peter Christian Abildgaard suggested
the possibilities in a bizarre way in 1775, when he discovered
that he could render a chicken unconscious with an electric shock,
and then revive it the same way. In 1780, Luigi Galvani noticed
that his static-electricity generator caused the muscles in a frog’s
leg to contract. And between the late 1700s and early 1840s, when
it first became known that each beat of the heart was accompanied
by an electrical pulse, there was an explosion of interest in
using electricity either to study or cure the body.
One of the key
researchers during this period was French physician Guillaume
Duchenne (1806-1875). Beginning in the 1840s, Duchenne used either
batteries or Michael Faraday’s recently invented induction coil
to apply currents to make muscles twitch, mapping the paths the
current took through the body. As he learned more about the body,
he found ways to apply the electrodes to isolate certain muscles.
Conducting extensive experiments on the hands, feet and arms, he carefully mapped the muscles that cause smiles, frowns,
looks of anxiety and other facial expressions. He also made
limited progress using “faradic” (ac) currents to treat
paralysis, finding that by applying high currents, certain
patients could regain use of their muscles.
Duchenne also
employed the relatively new technology of photography to document
his results, using a variety of subjects including actors,
children and Parisian indigents. He published a book of his
findings in 1862 that remained a standard text for many years.
Remembered as
the father of electrotherapy and neuropathology, Duchenne’s name
is memorialized in the disease Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, one of
the debilitating diseases that he hoped electrical stimulation might
alleviate. But Duchenne’s work was little appreciated at the
time. When he died in 1875, the direct use of electricity for
questionable medical purposes (rather than simply studying its
effects on the body) was reaching its height. For the next 75
years, machines using “faradic” or “galvanic” (dc)
electricity would remain in widespread use. Although few of these
devices produced reliable results, it would be many decades before
physicians were finally convinced that electrotherapy had only a
very limited value in clinical medicine. Eventually, however, the
findings of the early pioneers such as Duchenne helped establish
the basis for clinical neurology and paved the way for more
sophisticated treatment methods.
To find out
more, go to these online resources:
David
Morton is a research historian at the IEEE History Center at
Rutgers University. Visit the IEEE History Center's Web page at: www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/.
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