Dr. Robert G. Heath’s 1972 paper Pleasure and brain activity in man: Deep and surface electroencephalograms during orgasm details an insane experiment in which a suicidal, drug-addicted gay man was wired up with deep-brain stimulators; the good doctor then paid a prostitute to screw said suicidal, drug-addicted gay man. The experiment’s purpose? TO CURE TEH GAY!
…the patient was equipped with a three-button self-stimulating transistorized device… The three buttons… were attached to electrodes in the various deep [brain] sites, and the patient was free to stimulate any of these three sites as he chose… He was permitted to wear the device for 3 hours at a time: on one occasion he stimulated his septal region 1,200 times, on another occasion 1,500 times, and on a third occasion 900 times. He protested each time the unit was taken from him, pleading to self-stimulate just a few more times… the patient reported feelings of pleasure, alertness, and warmth (goodwill); he had feelings of sexual arousal and described a compulsion to masturbate…
One aspect of the total treatment program for this patient was to explore the possibility of altering his sexual orientation through electrical stimulation of pleasure sites of the brain. As indicated in the history, his interests, contacts, and fantasies were exclusively homosexual; heterosexual activities were repugnant to him.
A twenty-one-year-old female prostitute agreed, after being told the circumstances, to spend time with the patient in a specially prepared laboratory.
The tasping gay-curing doc founded the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at Tulane University, New Orleans, in 1949 and ran it until 1980. His research, partly financed by the CIA and US military, also involved experimentation on “prisoner volunteers.” He especially liked to work on black people, because, “they were everywhere and cheap experimental animals.”
Oscillatory Thoughts: Self-stimulating the brain for heterosexual sex with a prostitute. Seriously.
(via JWZ)