But then, imagine that such a perverse oddity was in use by psychiatrists, like the 18th-century German physician Johann Christian Reil, who...wrote that the device was intended to shake mental patients who had lost the ability to focus out of a 'fixed state' and into 'conscious awareness.'
A bafflingly cruel and nonsensical experiment, and we might rejoice to know it probably never took place. But the bizarre idea of the cat piano, or Katzenklavier, did not spring from the weird delusions of one sadistic psychiatrist.
It was supposedly invented by German polymath and Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), who has been called 'the last Renaissance man' and who made pioneering dis...)
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