ABSTRACT
Throughout the history of ECT, patients have both attested to damage it has done, and expressed gratitude for the relief and hope it can provide. In the mid-1940s, when ECT was a new treatment, a patient named Frank Kimball wrote about as defi nite an endorsement as one will fi nd from a patient of any therapy. 1 His account uses the word “miracle,” perhaps the single word most laden with the optimistic expectations of medicine that became such a potent cultural force in the mid-twentieth century. Kimball was a patient at Boston’s famous McLean Hospital in the 1930s and 1940s. 2 He had held a number of different jobs after college, teaching high school and working in insurance and investments, and he became a trustee of Boston University. Then he went into politics, which he later decided was inappropriate for his personality type. He said his illness was due to overwork and anxiety, and a rejection by his town of a plan for a World War memorial park he and a committee had proposed. He began to suffer from insomnia, “as night after night my mental wheels ground out schemes and churned over my mistakes, real and imaginary.” This culminated in a crisis leading to hospitalization at Channing Sanitarium in Wellesley in 1927. His chart from his admission described him as
retarded in speech and action; shaky; underweight; self-accusatory; afraid of arrest for misuse of funds; suspicious of nurses, believing them to be detectives; obsessed with fears of business failure and showing increasing aversion toward family and friends.
