Electrodes on B-19’s brain. Picture: Pleasure and Brain Activity in Man report

Robert Heath attempted to use “pleasure conditioning” to turn gay men straight.

He would dot their heads with electrodes and make them have sex with female prostitutes and Health would record their level of pleasure.

The Pleasure and Brain Activity in Man report looks at patient B-19, a 24-year-old with temporal lobe epilepsy.

He had a five-year history of overt homosexuality and had been abusing drugs for three years.

He had been in the military but was kicked out when he was 19 because of his homosexual tendencies.

B-19 ended up being admitted to a psychiatric hospital and he was diagnosed with a personality disorder with homosexual behaviour when he was discharged.

The report coldly described the electrodes that was stuck in to B-19’s brain.

“Stainless steel Teflon-insulated electrode, .003 inch in diameter, each with three to six leads separated by two millimetres,” the report said.

Heath was the chair of the department of psychiatry and neurology at Tulane University in New Orleans.

He stuck the electrodes to nine different parts of B-19’s brain. Heath then forced this patient to watch heterosexual pornography and B-19 was repulsed by the film and protested against watching it.

That’s when Heath started to use the electrodes to “cure” him.

A scientist thought he could use electrodes to change people’s sexual orientation. Picture: AFP/Jean-Philippe KsiazekSource:AFP

B-19 was given a three-button self-stimulating device, which was attached to the electrodes, and he could pleasure three areas of his brain.

He explored each feeling, but liked how he felt when he stimulated the septal region.

According to the report, Heath would make B-19 wear this device for three hours at a time.

The patient self-stimulated his septal region 1200 times on one occasion and 1500 times on another.

He would protest when the self-stimulation device was taken away from him.

B-19 said when he stimulated that section of his brain he was aroused and had a compulsion to masturbate.

“One of the aspects 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,” Heath wrote in his report.

“His interests, contacts and fantasies were exclusively homosexual; heterosexual activities were repugnant to him.”

After self-stimulating for 10 days, B-19 was shown the heterosexual film again and Heath said this time it aroused the patient.

“During the next seven days, the patient’s conversation was preoccupied with sex; a continually growing interest in women culminated in his expressed wish for heterosexual activity,” Heath wrote in the report.

The scientist then brought in a 21-year-old prostitute to record how B-19 would respond to sex with a female.

The report says B-19 was reluctant at first and told the prostitute he was a homosexual.

But B-19 had sex with her and Heath said he recorded a positive response.

It’s a very controversial and disturbing experiment and one that in today’s society would be completely unacceptable.

Scientist Robert Heath wanted to change B-19’s sexual preferences.Source:Supplied

According to Mosaic Science, Heath would also attempt to cure “frigid women”.

Mosaic Science looked into whether the “cure” worked and Health wrote in a report that B-19 later had a 10 month relationship with a married woman.

But he did go back to having sex with men.

Heath defended his “cure” however by saying B-19 only engaged with other men on two occasions and did it for money.

“Such acting out was not intended to be a replacement for sex with females, which he indicates he is definitely motivated to continue,” Heath said in the report.

This is a darker side of science we don’t often hear of and Heath has been dubbed a monster for his theories and experiments.

Mosaic Science reports Heath was heavily criticised in the 1970s and some even called him a monster for testing his theories on vulnerable patients. Others said he was just a bad scientist.