first came to Cerletti from watching pigs being anesthetised with electroshock before being butchered. The story goes, that on his way home he stopped at a butcher shop. The shop didn't have the cut of meat that he wanted and he was told to walk back to the slaughter house behind the shop to have the cut made for him. At that slaughter house, the technique used for butchering cattle involved an electric shock to their heads. This would cause the cattle to go into seizures and fall down, making it easy to slit their throats. In that time period, people believed that seizures were essential in preventing schizophrenia, since many believed that those diagnosed with epilepsy were immune to the disorder. Cerletti reasoned that electric shock might be useful in humans as a treatment for schizophrenia. Furthermore, since 1935, metrazol, a convulsant drug, and insulin, a hormone, were in wide use in many countries to treat schizophrenics, with great success. This approach was based on Nobel winner Julius Wagner-Jauregg's research on the use of malaria-induced convulsions to treat some nervous and mental disorders, such as the general paresis of the insane, caused by neural syphilis, as well as on Ladislas J. Meduna's theory that schizophrenia and epilepsy were antagonistic. The pharmacological convulsive treatment of Ladislas J. Meduna would eventually be largely replaced by the less cumbersome electrical method of Cerletti. Cerletti came to the use of electroshock for therapeutic purposes in humans by way of many experiments with animals on the neuropathological consequences of repeated epileptic seizures. In Genoa, he used electric current to provoke repeatable, seizures in dogs and other animals. In these early experiments, many of the animals that were used ended up dying. In Rome, his assistant Lucio Bini realized a rudimental apparatus with a control panel that could safely be applied to humans. Cerletti first used ECT in a human patient, a diagnosed schizophrenic with delusions, hallucinations and confusion, in April 1938, in collaboration with Lucio Bini. A series of electroshocks were able to return the patient to a normal state of mind. This experiment indicated that electric shock treatment may hold potential to improve the condition of patients diagnosed with specific diseases. Electric shock treatment quickly replaced insulin and Metrazol as the favourite form of shock treatment. Thereafter, in the succeeding years, Cerletti and his coworkers experimented with thousands of electroshocks in hundreds of