One hundred years ago this week Perth's Sunday Times was falling – heavily, naively – for the new-fangled quackery of medical electricity.
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A credulous reporter had been to see S.R. Booty "Perth's best known authority on all matters electrical". The reporter was shown a contraption of "wires, batteries, dynamos connections of all kinds". He left it to Mr Booty to tell the story.
"It is not an infernal machine I've got here," Booty spruiked, "it's not a weapon of destruction at all, but an instrument of repair."
"The human body's nervous system is composed of thousands of minute cells. The stomach generates the necessary vital force, passes it on to the brain, and the brain distributes it to these cells to enable them to perform the proper functions of the body. While they continue healthy everything is right [but when someone is unwell] they sicken or wilt like a tree deprived of its sap. The remedy is to re-charge those nerve cells with the vital power ... This is the function of our machine. We can send a current to the affected part. We can send a 25,000 volt current through the body ..."
The reporter was attached to the contraption and was thrilled, as, with "sparks and sizzles from its dynamo" it gave his cells their 25,000-volt jolt.
Mr Booty told the naive reporter of many electrical miracle cures.
"A man who had not been off crutches for two years threw them aside after a month's treatment from us."
