When Seizures Were Prescribed as Treatment

Doctors once injected patients with a chemical that reliably caused violent seizures.This was not a side effect.It was the treatment.Metrazol shock therapy was used throughout Europe and the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, based on the belief that seizures could interrupt mental illness. Injuries, fractures, and deaths were accepted as part of the process.Metrazol was eventually abandoned—not because the theory was wrong, but because it was replaced.