History
TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation) was patented and first used in 1974 for pain relief. TENS is non-invasive; it sends electrical current through electrodes placed directly on the skin. However, the efficacy of TENS remains controversial as the data is inconclusive.
TENS treatment did pave the way for other types of electrical stimulation for the body, primarily sacral nerve stimulation. The first sacral nerve stimulation study was performed in 1988. By penetrating the skin, sacral nerve stimulation aims to give a direct and localized electrical current to specific nerves in order to elicit a favored response. Today it is one of the most common neuromodulation techniques.
Read more about this topic: Sacral Nerve Stimulation
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“What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,—for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)