Applying the Rejuvenator's currents renews the youth and vitality of the old and young alike, restoring the body to a more youthful state.
The core life-extension claim that gave the device its name and placed it within the 1920s rejuvenation boom. James F. Stark’s 2014 study records that the Rejuvenator was promoted as renewing the vitality of old and young alike, with a sales pamphlet titled The Secret of Life, Health and Rejuvenation, and that the marketing rested on user and practitioner testimonials rather than any clinical measurement. Classified testimonial: the only evidence ever offered for rejuvenation was anecdotal endorsement gathered for advertising. It is refuted: no physiological mechanism supports it, no controlled outcome was ever demonstrated, and the organized medical profession (the British Medical Association from 1928, Australian authorities in 1934) rejected the device as unsupported. The claim sits beside the contemporaneous surgical and glandular rejuvenation enterprises of the same decade (Voronoff, Steinach) as the electrical-home-device version of the same promise.
Appears in
Sources
- 'Recharge My Exhausted Batteries': Overbeck's Rejuvenator, Patenting, and Public Medical Consumers, 1924-37 — Stark, James F. "'Recharge My Exhausted Batteries': Overbeck's Rejuvenator, Patenting, and Public Medical Consumers, 1924-37." Medical History 58, no. 4 (2014): 498-518. doi:10.1017/mdh.2014.50. PMID 25284892. PMC4176268.
- Overbeck's rejuvenator, supreme model: directions for use — Overbeck's rejuvenator, supreme model : directions for use / manufactured and distributed by Overbeck's Rejuvenator Ltd. Grimsby: Overbeck's Rejuvenator Ltd, 1938. 28 pages : illustrations ; 20 cm. Wellcome Collection, work eyw4gamr (b3346411x). Public Domain Mark.