A shocking way to put the spark back

HOW’S this for an attempt to spice up your love life?

In the late 1870s, doctors in Britain came up with a disturbing way of treating erectile dysfunction by shocking the sexual desire back into men, using a bath filled with electrodes, above.

Advocates claimed that the treatment, called galvanic baths, could cure the problem with six sessions of five to eight minutes.

This wasn’t the only hairraising ‘remedy’. A decade later, adverts appeared for ‘electropathic belts’, which promised to cure impotence, as well as kidney pains, backaches and headaches.