If you’re like me, you’re a slightly overweight, devastatingly charming Jew who’s been diagnosed with ADHD before entering kindergarten. To cope with your “behavioral problems” and “short attention span,” you’ve run the pharmaceutical gamut from Ritalin and Wellbutrin to Adderall and Vyvanse.
If only 19th century German psychiatrist Johann Christian Reil was still around to treat today’s hyperactive youth. In an 1803 manual on the treatment of mental disorders, Dr. Reil prescribed that the “oft-distracted” be forced to watch a concert preformed on the Katzenclavier (translation: “cat piano”) as therapy.
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“An octave’s worth of cats arranged in a row with their tails stretched behind them. And a keyboard fitted out with sharpened nails would be set over them. The struck cats would provide the sound. A fugue played on this instrument–when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expression on their faces and the play of these animals–must bring Lot’s wife herself from her fixed state into conscious awareness…”
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