Pulvermacher's chain
A variant intended to be worn wrapped on parts of the body for long periods was known as Pulvermacher's galvanic chain or electric belt.
The Pulvermacher Company attracted a great deal of antagonism from the medical community due to their use of the names of well-known physicians in their advertising without permission.
The usual practice in the use of medical electrical batteries was to feed the output of the interrupter to an induction coil in order to increase the voltage applied to the patient by transformer action.
[5] A novel feature of Pulvermacher's interrupter was that it was operated by the action of a vibrating spring kept in motion by the movements of the patient without the need for any external input.
He first published details of his chain in August 1850 in German and in the winter of that same year came to Britain to demonstrate the machine to notable physicians.
Early in 1851 Pulvermacher gave Golding Bird, a well known London physician with an interest in electrotherapy, a sample of the machine with which to experiment.
Bird thought that the battery would make a useful source of portable electricity and could be used for treating patients with some forms of paralysis in their homes.
Bird was a tireless opponent of quack practitioners, and was particular quick to criticise medically unqualified electrical treatment, as he felt this was a reason professional acceptance of his own work in electrotherapy was being held back.
Meinig had been using extracts from the testimonial provided by Bird without permission in order to bolster the Company's, medically largely unsupported, quack advertising claims.
Bird made plain that he had only ever recommended the chain as a convenient source of electricity and did not support any of the claimed curative powers, most especially those that were supposed to produce instant results (a typical course of electrotherapy at the time could last several months).
He criticised some of the chains being sold as delivering "too feeble" a current to be of any medical use and pointed out that the proposed procedure of wrapping the device around an affected limb would make it useless since a conductive path through the skin across each cell would prevent a useful voltage being developed at the terminals (Pulvermacher even suggests in his patent that contact with the body generates enough electricity to be effective even without electrolyte[15]).
[19] The College of Dentists investigated its possible use as an anaesthetic during tooth extraction but found no benefit with the device frequently adding to the pain.
The Medical Times was prompted by this to examine the efficacy of the Pulvermacher chain ending a long period of the paper ignoring it as a worthless quack instrument.
Since the device was being sold essentially as a quack cure it was only necessary to generate enough electricity that the wearer could feel it, no matter how slightly, and know that it was working.
[21] Electric belts were made for every conceivable part of the human anatomy: limbs, abdomen, chest, neck – sometimes all worn at the same time.
Pulvermacher even had a model designed to attach to the male genitals in a special sac which was claimed to cure impotence and erectile dysfunction.
Amongst Pulvermacher's many competitors in the US were the German Electric Belt Company (actually New York based), Dr Crystal's, Dr. Horn's, Addison's, Edson's, Edison's, Owen's and Heidelberg's.
[23] The Pulvermacher chain, especially in the form of one being worn on the body, was very familiar in the late 19th and early 20th century and would not have needed to be explained to an audience.
For instance, there are references to it in the novel Madame Bovary when the character Homais wearing a number of Pulvermacher chains is described as "more bandaged than a Scythian".
