ABSTRACT
The recent (re)appearance of electrotherapy for voice and swallowing disorders in the twenty-first century recalls how very important such therapies were for the treatment of analogous problems for over a hundred and fifty years. 1 They flourished in Western medicine, as we shall see, from the end of the nineteenth century to the post-World War I period. Between the end of World War I and the mid-1960s mention of electrical stimulation for treatment of voice disorders all but disappeared as the focus moved from a somatic understanding of voice problems to one which mixed somatic and psychological etiologies. Interest in electrotherapy resurfaced in the mid-1960s in the Soviet Union, where electrotherapy was an artifact of the persistence of older, German medical traditions. With the wide acceptance of the work of Yakov Kots and his Soviet co-workers beginning in the 1970s, electric stimulation therapy for muscle strengthening has become a commonplace in sports medicine and beyond. 2 It is of little wonder that it was also applied in the USSR to a wide range of pathologies including those of the voice. By the 1960s, Soviet researchers had used sinusoidal low frequency currents on patients with diagnoses as broad as vocal fold paralysis and parses. 3
