Giorgio Coda

Giorgio Giuseppe Antonio Maria Coda (21 January 1924 – 23 May 1988) was an Italian psychiatrist and academic. He was vicedirector of the mental hospital of Turin (Italian: Ospedale psichiatrico di Torino, in Collegno) and director of villa Azzurra (institute for children), in Grugliasco (Turin) After the trial, that lasted from 1970 to 1974, he was sentenced to five years of imprisonment for patient abuse, as well as to interdiction from the medical profession for five years and payment of legal expenses. He has been nicknamed "The Electrician" (Italian: l'elettricista) for his misuse of the electroshock therapy.

The medical treatment consisted in the application of long-lasting electric current to the genitals and to the head. The treatment did not make the patient lose consciousness and caused strong pain. According to Giorgio Coda, this treatment should have cured the patient. The treatment was called alternatively "electro-massage" (Italian: elettromassaggio) or electroshock depending on whether it was applied to the genitals or to the head. In some cases, the two terms have been used without distinction to denote the generic treatment. The treatment was practiced systematically without anesthesia and, sometimes, without cream and rubber protection device inside the mouth, blowing up the patient's teeth during the treatments. During the trial, Giorgio Coda admitted he had practiced about 5000 "electro-massages" in his career.

The above treatment was also administered to alcoholics, drug addicts, homosexuals and masturbators, and it generated such a strong fear of the treatment, that most patients, at least temporarily, desisted from their acts and behaviors. The trial and the sentence, collected and analyzed in Alberto Papuzzi's book Portami su quello che canta have shown the coercive and punitive purpose of "electro-massages", which in practice were tools of torture and punishment, used on children too (in villa Azzurra).

Deaths during the treatment and suicides occurring in Coda's clinics raise the suspicion that they may have been provoked, at least in part, by the fear of suffering.

At the time the case was interpreted in political terms by some journalists and by the left-wing public opinion, with the bourgeois doctor abusing the weakest members of the proletariat.