of death. How do gain control over these limits? Which organs help maintain life? How much room is there for the brain? The fact that the body could react to electrical simulations, that the heart starts beating again, was not enough to bring it back to life. The issues of the brain’s role in understanding human singularity were central to the applications of this exploratory electricity. In this way, organs acquired a very strong symbolic value that can still be found to this day. Aldini, Galvani’s nephew and colleague, spread galvanism beyond Italy’s borders, notably by electrifying the bodies of the tortured. The analogies between the galvanic cell and the organization of nerves and muscles, which seem to form organic circuits designed to conduct electricity, reinforced the idea that the body has a mechanics that can be known and mastered by the medical sciences. As early as 1791, electricity was considered the most important function of animal economics, especially for Joseph Priestley [PRI 67, 71] (1733–1804), for whom it revealed the nature of things. How can we understand the expression “culture of electricity”? If you look at it from a physical point of view, it’s hard to pinpoint. But if we consider from its very beginnings, the dimensions of spectacle and supernatural powers that surround its inscription in society, it becomes enlightening. Society was faced with a new technology, used as early as the first third of the 18th Century, as a trick and form of entertainment. Gray’s 1730 flying boy experiment is emblematic of these beginnings:
All metals, wood, reed or hemp, are conductors […] but also: soap bubbles, water, an umbrella, a slice of beef, or a young boy! [GRA 31–32, p. 35, author’s translation]
Figure 1.1. In 1730, Gray experimented with the “flying boy”, putting the human body on the list of conducting bodies
The spectacular dimension of these experiments, in addition to aiding the differentiation between insulating and conducting bodies and including the human body among the latter, went beyond the scientific field and profoundly marked the popular imagination:
He did the first experiment on a child aged 8 to 10, suspended on two silk cords, in a horizontal position. Then putting the tube close to the child’s feet; his head, his hair, his face became electric; the same thing happened to his feet, when the tube was brought close to his head. [MAN 52, p. 10, author’s translation]
The imagination was all the more marked by the fact that, following Musschenbroek’s accident, accidents due to electric shocks all too often proved fatal. Electricity, the powerful power of nature, could not be easily tamed. Self-electrification, which was spreading in academic and cultural circles, conveyed an image that was sometimes unflattering. Alongside this frightening depiction of the uses of this force, scientists were conducting experiments confined to artistic fields [BOZ 54, p. 28] and were spreading a more positive image of them:
Electric shocks had become well known, so it was disguised in a thousand different forms. Everyone was eager, big & small, learned & ignorant, hastened to experience such a singular phenomenon on themselves. Thirty, forty, one hundred people at a time took pleasure in feeling the same blow & in shouting just one cry. [MAN 52, pp. 30–31, author’s translation]
Anonymous novels are devoted to this energy, while Franklin imagined the electric spit:
On this principle, Mr. Franklin has imagined an electric wheel that turns with extraordinary force, & which, by means of a small wooden arrow raised perpendicularly, is able to roast a large bird in front of the fire, which is then threaded onto it. That’s what he called the electric spit. [MAN 52, p. 184]
Medical electricity owes its success less to the credulity of the sick than to its air of progress, and to its promises for the mastery of human finiteness which were spreading throughout all the countries of Europe. Thus, the bodies became electrified by becoming the meeting place of Volta’s metallic electricity and Galvani’s animal electricity. They provided a spectacle during electrifications, notably in 1802 during the demonstrations by Rossi and Vassali:
After I had explained to Professor Rossi on July 15, 1802, the effects I had obtained on those who had been tortured, he told me that on that same day there was an unfortunate man condemned to be beheaded; but the impossibility of combining a series of experiments in such a short time made him go to the hospital alone, where he saw, for the first time, the results I have mentioned. [ALD 04, p. 90, author’s translation]
As early as August 1797, some of Aldini’s experiments on tortured people were reproduced at the Academy of Turin, while in the perspective of applying galvanism to the knowledge and mastery of the living, he explored, following Kite, the idea that galvanism could be an agent of resurrection. This research therefore formed part of the activities of the Royal Humane Society, which since 1774 had been investigating the possibilities opened up by new techniques for resurrecting these victims. One of the medical, but also philosophical, challenges was to understand the process of dying. What was to die? Could the steps be reversed? [BAR 06]. As Zanetti summarized:
If capital execution, carried out under the control of physiology, allows the precise analysis of the different stages of the passage from life to death, is there no hope of going the other way? The decapitations and the hangings of London and Glasgow are only the prelude to a medicine of reanimation, which throughout the 19th Century was concerned with the freshest cadavers, multiplying the discussions on the definition of the thresholds of death and its reversibility. [ZAN 17, p. 39, author’s translation]
In this context of exploring the reversibility of death, after much research on electrified animals, scientists were turning to the possibilities offered by judicial executions. Most experiments were designed to use visual observations and emphasize two analogies: the first between life and motion, the second between electricity and vital motion:
One of the earliest experiments on criminals condemned to death took place in Germany in 1791. In the presence of physicians and students assembled at the site of an execution by decapitation, the investigator began by demonstrating that exposed parts of the torso’s neck muscles quiver when touched with a probe. Deeper contact caused muscle contractions strong enough to arch the back and to abduct the arms that had been folded with fingers interdigitated. A light touch of the probe on the cut end of the spinal cord in the neck likewise evoked facial muscle twitches, especially around the lips, and occasional retraction of eyelids. Deeper probing again caused massive contraction of all facial and tongue muscles. Such grotesque grimaces forced some shuddering observers to leave. The results led to the conclusion that consciousness probably persisted after decapitation. [KEV 85, p. 219]
Sœmmerring’s experiments are discussed here. Indeed, he experimented, following Galvani’s experiments [DIC 22, v. 6, p. 294], on the properties of bodies in a post-mortem context. In fact, as early as 1791, electricity was considered capable of revealing the conditions of the passage from life to death. An all-powerful medical imagining was at work:
It was not enough for science to have made itself master of the fire of the sky by means of lightning rods; to have learned to reproduce at will most of the circumstances of the terrible phenomenon, to have found in the battery a device from which the electric fluid escapes in a continuous burst which the hand of man provokes and stops, activates and slows down, directs and uses in a thousand ways; to have, by the combination of the electric fluid with the magnetic fluid, given rise to the mechanical and physiological agent whose effects we have reported so varied and so powerful; to have, in a word, applied electric force to the accomplishment of so many wonders which without it would have remained forever chimeras whose thought the most ardent imagination would hardly have dared to conceive; […]. [MAN 63, pp. 131–132, author’s translation]
After starting his experiments on animals and the dead at the same time in Italy, Aldini came to
