Herman Boerhaave was a 18th Century Dutch physician of European renown. He is known as the ‘father of physiology’ and his contributions to medicine were legion. His name lives on in the ‘Boerhaave Syndrome’ which is the rupture of the oesophagus after forceful vomiting which he described in 1724 when the Dutch admiral Baron Jan van Wassenaer died of the condition after a particularly gluttonous feast.
Herman Boerhaave
His ideas weren’t all great though. When he turned his formidable mind to the treatment of depression, he devised the ‘gyrating chair’. This was a chair that was designed to literally shake people out of their funk. I haven’t managed to find any double-blind, randomised controlled trials looking at the efficacy of this contraption but, the fact that mental health clinics aren’t full of people being jiggled better, makes me suspect it wasn't very effective.
The Gyrating Chair
This is of course only one example in a long history of bizarre, misguided and frankly dangerous treatments for mental health problems. In the grand scheme of things, the gyrating chair is amongst the most harmless.
The history of far more dangerous and sinister treatments comes surprisingly close to the modern day. Take for example the ‘insulin coma’. This involved administering huge doses of insulin to patients to induce a coma and this might be done hundreds of times over a series of months in the hope that the patient would emerge from one of these comas feeling better, and not dead which was another real possibility. This was being practised throughout the 1930s.
Even more notorious is the work of the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz who pioneered the frontal lobotomy and was even awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in 1949. But the real villain of the lobotomy piece was the American, Walter Freeman who spent the 1950s perfecting his ‘ice-pick’ lobotomy on thousands of patients.
The ice-pick lobotomy is as horrific as it sounds - perhaps more so. The procedure involved hammering an ice pick through the thin bone in the top of each eye socket, without anaesthetic and outside of an operating theatre, and then moving the ice-pick back and forth to sever the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the frontal lobes. Predictably, this led to an enormous number of patients suffering devastating disabilities for the rest of their lives. One patient even died when Freeman paused to have his photo taken mid-procedure and the ice pick slipped further into the patient’s brain.
So perhaps Boehaave’s chair isn’t so bad.
You can read more about the history of depression in The Burnt Out Society.