Until 1938, Stefan Jellinek was an extraordinary professor at the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Vienna. In the four decades from 1899 to 1938 he also developed the Electropathological Museum at the University as a private collection. On 12 March 1938, the museum had around two thousand objects, including moulages, anatomical specimens, watercolours, damaged electrical objects and natural history objects. Because of Jellinek's Jewish origins, the university dismissed him at the end of 1938. In spite of several applications to the dean of the Medical Faculty and the support of his long-standing assistant and curator Franz Maresch, who had been Gauleiter of the Nationalsozialistische Betriebszellenorganisation (National Socialist Factory Cell Organization) in Vienna during the time from 1936 when the Nazi Party was illegal, he was unable to obtain an exemption that would allow him to continue working. In August 1939, Jellinek, who had obtained a position at Queen's College, Oxford, was able to depart with his wife and two sons before the outbreak of war, but was unable to take his collection with him. The Electropathological Museum had already been seized by Gestapo and transferred to the University of Vienna. From 1939 to 1945, Franz Maresch, how head of the industrial safety department in the office of Soziale Selbstverwaltung und Gestaltung (Social Self-Administration and Design) in the Deutsche Arbeitsfront (German Labour Front), continued to work as the curator of the museum.

In early 1946, Stefan Jellinek contacted the University of Vienna to discuss the future of the Electropathological Museum, which was restituted to him by a decision of the rector's office in July 1946. The collection remained in Vienna, while Jellinek continued to teach at Oxford. After his death in 1968, his son Ernst Heinrich Jellinek, who lived in Edinburgh, was named sole heir and in 1980 donated half of the Electropathological Museum collection to the Allgemeine Unfallversicherungsanstalt and the other half to the Österreichischer Verband für Elektrotechnik. In 2002, the latter gave its share to the Allgemeine Unfallversicherungsanstalt, which donated the contents of the Electropathological Museum in May 2005 to the Technisches Museum Wien. The wet specimens were later transferred to the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien.