Cornelius Borck speaks of “open epistemology” [BOR 18a, p. 264].
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The Birth of an Electrical Culture: From Frankenstein to Hyde
The notion of the electrical culture [RHY 11, p. 9], developed by Rhys Morus in his book Shocking Bodies; Life, Death & Electricity in Victorian England, came about at the beginning of the 19th Century, coming to the fore through the discussion of two issues in which were mixed scientific aspects and the imagining of a force that seemed to possess all powers, such as:
– “re” creating life: indeed, experiments on the bodies of convicts were adjacent to the theme of electricity as the driving force of life. Aldini and Cumming, by re-animating corpses, dramatized demonstrations, thus spreading the links between galvanism and vital properties;
– control of behaviors: in the middle of the 19th Century, electrical medicine broke with the dualistic paradigm of the electrified automaton to locate, in the brain, the areas that would allow the control of behaviors through these therapies. This movement followed a more general shift from moral issues to psychiatric disorders.
From Frankenstein [SHE 18] to the main character in the novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [STE 86], two periods, foundational for medical thought, are articulated. They both contributed to making electricity an intelligible instrument of exploration and treatment, and participated in a strong popular imagining about the possibilities opened up by the application of electrical techniques in medicine. This cultural and medical imagining weaved a context in which these applications took place. The first period took place from Galvani’s experiments through to those by Doctor Ure; then after 1840, a second period marked the passage from a dualistic medicine to a holistic medicine, where consciousness was embodied in convolutions. What seemed to correspond to an objectification of the applications of medical electricity, referred to the construction of a culture in which electricity represented a fantasized scientific positivism.
The use of electricity in the “resuscitation” of those who had drowned and the apparently dead was first proposed in 1778 by Charles Kite (1768–1811) to the Royal Humane Society in London. An active member [ALZ 05] of this learned society, he wrote An Essay on the Recovery of the Apparently Dead [KIT 88] for which he received a medal. In this essay, he distinguished suspended animation from irreversible death and described the importance of collecting the necessary information on each victim of drowning to assess a possible return to life. In his presentation, he stressed that a body that no longer reacts to electrical shocks should be considered dead. Electricity, in addition to revealing the properties of matter, was imagined, early on, as an instrument to explore the boundaries between life and death. In addition to having an important impact on the definition and description of the dying process, it was conceived and massively disseminated in scientific, literary and popular circles as a means of bringing people back to life.
1.1. “Re”creating life?
There was only a short leap from experiments where animals were electrified, then revived, then electrified again through to the formulation that electricity is life. The underlying idea was that as long as a limb could be electrified, it still had signs of life. To what extent could medical electricity become an instrument of resurrection? Many of the episodes in the history of medical electricity revolve around questions of life and death, and as early as 1740, human control over the boundaries between these two states and medical power emerged. The implication of electricity in the resurrection process was deduced from experiments to bring the dead back to life. This concept prefigured the advent of future resuscitation techniques and is part of the context of an interventionist and dualist medicine, the body being like an automaton that can be animated in the manner of a machine. Experiments where electricity killed, where it allowed animals to be revived, preceded research on the bodies of convicts, which did not fail to question the links between the body and consciousness. Thus, Pierre Bertholon, in his treatise De l’électricité du corps humain dans l’état de santé et de maladie [BER 80], demonstrated animal experiments relating to the effects of electricity conceived as a vital fluid. In particular, he spoke of the experiments by physicist Daniel Bernouilli (1700–1782), “This illustrious geometrician brought drowned birds back to life, using only electric sparks as a means of restoring them to life” [BER 80, p. 54, author’s translation]. The experiments of which he spoke were also quoted in a treatise published in 1738 [BER 38]. In 1780, electricity was already considered a vital remedy, especially against asphyxia:
‘Then I shot him,’ he says ‘a few sparks from the tip of his nose, which made him stand up on his legs to complete his healing, I gave him a couple of fairly light jerks. All this work didn’t last six minutes when with the third shake the animal ran away, […]’. [BER 80, p. 55, author’s translation]1
Thus life was first “given back” to the animals, the subjects of experiments, to understand the links between physiology, asphyxiation phenomena and electricity. After 1791, medical galvanism was considered as a stimulant to revive muscular actions:
The Ecole de Médecine de Paris (Paris Medical School) tried to subject asphyxiated animals to Galvanic action; in its research it set out to determine the action of this stimulant on the muscular organs. It has mainly experimented with rabbits and small guinea pigs. The state of susceptibility of the nervous and muscular organs presented particular phenomena, depending on the difference in the causes of asphyxia. [CAS 03, p. 34, author’s translation]
The concept of death at the end of the 18th Century encompassed reversible states of unconsciousness. Here we have an important point to understand the role that electricity played in the medical imaginary. The definition of death had not yet been decided, this force was about to play the role of an objective element to differentiate between living and non-living states. Moreover, if as long as the body was excitable, there was life, then it became a primary ingredient in the idea of the creation of life by Man:
Can I name one more experiment where electricity brought a dead dog back to life? I say dead; for they have taken away part of his brain: & in this state, they put him on the cake, & they electrify him: he comes back to life, breathing, strong, gets up on his legs as if to run away. One stops electrifying it, it falls back into the inertia & the numbness of death; one starts electrifying again, & the movement starts again. [BIA 77, p. 36 quoted in ROZ 77, vol.9, p. 429, author’s translation]
The epistemological status of animal electricity in the 19th Century was a symbol of life. It was made into a spectacle during the electrification of the bodies of those executed, who found themselves animated, without coming back to life, if we think of it in terms of consciousness. Like automatons, they were shaken by disordered movements that imitated those of the living. Medicine, marked by Cartesian dualism and 18th Century materialism, was able to experience the limits and properties of life on a Man who had become a machine. A symbol of atheism, revolution and reductionism, the experiments of the first third of the 19th Century contributed to the construction of a culture of physical, medical and sociological electricity. The bearer of hope, electricity was like the fire stolen by Prometheus to be given to humanity, and symbolized a materialistic progress where humans could gain access to knowledge and control over it. The notion of the electrical body, including its relationship with the soul, was constructed during the 19th Century through the study of the links between physics and the body. As a legacy of the 17th Century, the analogies of mechanics with human and animal physiology developed. Alongside the applications of electricity, the imagining of the mechanized body, obeying the laws of physics, was developing. While the way in which electricity connected the soul and the body remained a subject of speculation and questioning, the body became the
