mummy’s return was under the effects of the technique and not under supernatural conditions. The comparison of the two texts shows very divergent cultural and literary instrumentalizations of galvanization. While in the first, Poe relates the fictional conditions of reanimation; in the second, under the guise of mocking traditional fears, he takes the experience of the tortured to the absurd by taking as his object a mummy several millennia old. Poe’s reference to electricity corresponds to a long reflection on the unity of the laws of physics in the universe, culminating in Eureka [POE 48], an essay dedicated to Alexander von Humboldt. Body and soul of the universe, electricity allows us to understand nature in its totality, material and spiritual, to which we must relate the phenomena of vitality and consciousness:
The cosmos was a vast electrical machine that could be understood and manipulated in much the same way as they understood and manipulated the electrical machines and artefacts with which they plied their trade. Human bodies were part of the electrical universe too. [RHY 02, p. 102]
From the research on clouds, whose meteorological disturbances generate thunderstorms, a culture of the powers of electricity was born. From the sky to the body of the torpedo fish, electricity seems to flow everywhere. In this materialistic mechanics, it found its political and cultural foundation in the revolutionary period and developed to the core of organic fibers. From inorganic to matter, it permeated all 19th Century research. Several medical branches developed from the knowledge of electricity and the way it intervenes in vital phenomena: diagnosis, resuscitation, electrophysiology and electrotherapy are all fields born from the physics of this energy. The history of electricity is not only played out in medical circles, it permeates societies shaken by political events. In addition to allowing the development of medical and physiological experimentation, it poses the exploration of the boundaries of life and death as a philosophical, medical and societal issue. The concepts of the electrical body, electrical culture or galvanic culture are the results of this intertwining of electricity and society. Within a materialistic philosophy, it promotes the awareness that not everything stops with voluntary movement and that there is a certain permanence of life in death, especially through chemical and physical processes. From the culture of electricity to the culture of galvanism, the notion of scientific scales of the living developed to understand the sequence of non-life, life and the living as a whole. Moreover, the idea of a galvanist culture refers to a certain type of representation of the individual in the 19th Century: an individual, living in ever-larger cities whose mores must meet the standards of the society in which they evolve. The result of this societal expansion of galvanism is that electricity, in addition to stimulating a body that has become electric, also heals its consciousness. The historical value of medical electricity is not reduced to the technical prowess it achieves, but responds to the epistemology of each context, by being inscribed and renewed in it. From success to failure, at each stage it answers medical-philosophical questions about human beings and matter, about an organism whose functions generate consciousness:
One reason why electrical engineers saw electrotherapeutics as an area where their own expertise was relevant was because they recognized the electrical body as being made up of the same kind of components, organized in the same kind of system as that on which they plied their trade. [RHY 02, p. 106]
The creation of the electric chair is rooted in the large number of deaths by electrocution as well as in research into the medical boundaries between life and death and is the result of the acute awareness of the power taken by this energy. In North America, it thus became a killing instrument in the early 1890s. This invention was not insignificant in relation to the fact that electricity was developing as the guarantor of a certain societal order. While at the beginning of the 19th Century it was a question of bringing people back to life, electricity could then be used to punish criminals for their crime. But the cultural impact of electricity did not stop at the physiological understanding of states of life and death. From 1770, medical electricity was applied to nervous and psychic illnesses, particularly in the work of Ledru [LED 83]. This research into the fundamentals of electrotherapy for nervous and psychic diseases will be developed further. From 1840 onwards, galvanic electricity became a symbol of control and standardization of the subject. From the myth of Frankenstein, we move into the context of Dr. Jekyll unwillingly transforming himself into Hyde. From this beast that sleeps in each one of us, electricity symbolizes the cage:
And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly toward the mystic and the transcendental, re-acted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. [STE 86, p. 75]
This shift in the applications of these techniques cannot be detached from the organicist and materialist movement that integrates the mental faculties within the brain structures.
1.2. Changing and regulating behavior
Galvani had already spoken about neuro-electric fluid [GAL 53, p. 64] and attributed the genesis of animal electricity to the brain. Correlate to this the fact that the nervous structure was thought of in terms of wires for the nerves and voltaic pile for the brain organ. At the same time, the work of Ledru and abbé Sans on the links between artificial electricity and nervous diseases put forward the latter to be treated by the applications of electric fluid. Thus, at the time when electrotherapy was developing, the 19th Century was marked by an imaginary control by electricity of mores and behaviors considered harmful. If humans were beings in which matter generated consciousness, they seemed to be inhabited by a beast that sometimes pushed them to adopt harmful societal behaviors. On the literary side, we find this idea in Stevenson’s novel (1850–1894) or in The Beast in Man where Zola (1840–1902) [ZOL 85] stages the archetype of the mad murderer. This idea also developed in the imagining of galvanic doctors who, realizing the complexity of the links between the brain and consciousness, conceived these therapies as the guarantors of a certain moral security. Electricity then became a tool for the standardization of the individual, inherited from the research of Delgado or Heath in the mid-20th Century:
The key to understanding – and disciplining – the body in this respect was standardization. Just as other items of electrical apparatus and equipment needed to be standardized to function effectively within the new networks of power, so did the electrical body. [RHY 02, p. 102]
There was a division between the idea of reducing the vital functions of a body to that of controlling the subject and his behaviors. A conceptual division between a medicine marked by the Cartesian dualism of the animal machine, then by the materialism of the 18th Century, and a holistic medicine where faculties and consciousness were integrated into the human machine. Yet these two approaches complemented each other. From the beginning of the 19th Century, neuroanatomical research was looking for Galvani’s neuro-electric fluid within the human brain, in order to record it and correlate it with the expression of mental faculties. In 1808, Malacarne was between a post-mortem approach of the brain organ to the idea of acting on its electricity. The analogy of the electrical machine to organic structures extended to the nervous system:
Are not brains, nervous ganglions, and nerves, which are evidently the seat of vital action, in the identities we call animal, real electrical machines; similar in principle, as they are similar in substance and in structure, to the electrical discharging apparatus of the gymnotus and torpedo, which consist of large brain-like ganglions connected with the spinal cord? [MAC 31, p. 94 in RHY 98, p. 131]
Thus, Malacarne published a text entitled “Conoscendo dalla organizzazione del cervelletto in ispezie, e forse anche da più attento esame del cervello e dalla midolla spinale che queste viscere formano qualche cosa di somigliante alla colonna galvanica del Volta” [MAL 08, pp. 122–130]. Probably the first localizer of the faculties within the cerebral organ, his research was marked among the scholars of the 19th Century [CHE 16]. Bayle quotes him in his Encyclopédie des sciences médicales
