Small Peculiar

I hate exercise, but I want to keep my body from falling apart for as long as possible, so I make myself do it. And it’s outrageous how much better I feel after an hour of the treadmill. I think I’ve become more productive overall since I got this thing, too, and my mood is better. So Walter Freeman’s ghost is gloating, of course, because “more exercise” was his second-favorite prescription. Now, it’s true that the treadmill was used to punish prisoners in nineteenth-century Britain, but it’s still preferable to refrigeration or metrazol or insulin shock or inhaling carbon dioxide, all of which were in vogue when Walter was practicing. And yes, electroconvulsive therapy was too, but the thing about ECT that sets it apart from refrigeration and metrazol and insulin shock and inhaling carbon dioxide is that ECT sometimes worked, and in fact sometimes still works, because it is still in use for particularly stubborn cases of unipolar or bipolar depression. So I refuse to consign it to the psychiatric dustbin along with those other “treatments,” but it’s worth pointing out that in Walter’s day it was a lot nastier than it is now. These days they give you nice muscle relaxants and sedate you first.