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Article ID: CBB248186840

Mass killing under the guise of ECT: the darkest chapter in the history of biological psychiatry (2017)

Gazdag, Gábor (Author)
Ungvari, Gabor Sandor (Author)
Czech, Herwig (Author)

History of Psychiatry
Volume: 28
Issue: 4
Pages: 482-488
Publication date: 2017
Language: English

DOI: 10.1177/0957154X17724037

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/0957154X17724037

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Euthanasia Medicine and ethics Medical abuse Genocide; mass murder Nazism Electroconvulsive therapy; electroshock therapy 20th century, early Austria

Following its inception, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), rapidly spread all over the world, including Nazi Germany. Paradoxically, at the same time, the euthanasia programme was started in Germany: the extermination of people with intellectual disabilities and severe psychiatric disorders. In Lower Austria, Dr Emil Gelny, who had been granted a specialist qualification in psychiatry after three months of clinical training, took control of two psychiatric hospitals, in Gugging and Mauer-Öhling. In 1944, he began systematically killing patients with an ECT machine, something that was not practised anywhere else before or after, and remains unprecedented in the history of convulsive therapy. He modified an ECT machine, adding extra electrodes, which he fastened onto a victim’s wrists and ankles to administer lethal electric shocks.

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