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Bioelectromagnetism

Te currents used never exceeded 1 mA. Barlow stated that the phosphene was usually colorless, but

occasionally, they appeared bluish and sometimes slightly yellowish. No phosphene could be perceived

when the core of the coil was placed over the occipital area, the site of the visual cortex (Geddes, 2008).

Te electromagnetic stimulation began from the works of Nicola Tesla (1856–1943), a Serbian-born

American inventor and electrical engineer, and Jacques Arsène d’Arsonval (1851–1940), a French physi­

cian and physicist, professor of Medicine of the Collège de France. d’Arsonval was a pupil of Claude

Bernard (1813–1878), a French physiologist, professor at University of Paris. Now, Tesla and d’Arsonval

are considered as the father of the electromagnetic therapy. Nikola Tesla paid attention to the appli­

cation of high-frequency electric current and invented the use of it for therapeutic applications. He

observed that high-frequency electric current would rise the temperature of living tissue. Tesla pointed

out in his article entitled Message with currents of high frequency published in Te Electrical Engineers

in December 1891 as following:

Te human body is, in such a case, a fne conductor, and if a person insulated in a room, or no mat­

ter where, is brought into contact with such a source of rapidly alternating high potential, the skin

is heated by bombardment. It is a more question of the dimensions and character of the apparatus

to produce any degree of heating desired.…Without vouching for all the results, which must of

course be determined by experience and observation, I can at least warrant the fact that heating

would occur by the use of this method of subjecting the human body to bombardment of alternat­

ing currents of high potential and high frequency such as I have long worked with.

Tesla (1891)

Tesla noted in this article that a person contacted with a source of high-frequency electric current would

experience heating, without saying whether it would be benefcial or not.

Next, d’Arsonval carried out human experiments. In 1891, d’Arsonval suggested the use of high-fre­

quency electric current in medicine. He passed high-frequency electric current (3 A) through himself

and found that the electric current above 10 kHz produced a sensation of warmth without any sensation.

As a result of these experiments, he introduced the “auto-conduction” in which a human stands under

the infuence of a high-frequency electromagnetic feld.

Te d’Arsonval’s solenoid for auto-conduction is shown in Figure 15 in the book (Rowbottom and

Susskind, 1984, p. 133). Te fgure shows a patient isolating from all contact with the current-carrying

wire. During 1894 and 1895, the d’Arsonval research group made a clinical assessment of 75 patients suf­

fering from various ailments. Each of them was placed in the solenoid for 15–20 min/day (Rowbottom

and Susskind, 1984). Trough these clinical treatments, d’Arsonval proposed the diathermy.

Te basic concept of hyperthermia is based on the temperature rise. Hyperthermia generally can be

defned as a therapy to rise the temperature in tumor tissues between 41°C and 45°C. Te modern era

of hyperthermia began in 1866. Te frst paper on hyperthermia cancer therapy is reported in 1866 by

Carl D.W. Busch (1826–1881), a German surgeon (Busch, 1866). His description was the case of a 43-year­

old woman patient and a spontaneous regression of advanced multiple sarcoma on her face following a

streptococcal skin infection with fever. Tis was the frst report case stating that high temperature can

selectively kill cancerous cells without afecting the health. Tis report led to a more increased interest

in hyperthermia (Gas, 2011).

Te therapeutic application of high-frequency and short waves led to diathermy. In 1906, Karl Franz

Nagelschmidt (1875–1952), a German physician, demonstrated the possibility of deep heating the arms

and chest of the human body using high-frequency energy for therapeutic applications and introduced

the concept of diathermy. He stated that heating was also produced in deeper-lying tissues by the appli­

cation of high-frequency electric current (Westermark, 1927). Walther Hermann Nernst (1864–1941), a

German physician and chemist, showed that the heat produced in the tissues by high-frequency electric

current was purely an efect of the resistance and that this heat production follows the law of electric

heating (Westermark, 1927). Nernst received in 1920 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in recognition for his