to improve human behavior. The notion of improvement was conceived in relation to what society understood by this term. He argued for the electrical restoration of communication between mind and body by advocating localized electrification. In the specific case of hysteria, electric current needed to be applied to the sexual organs, without which there was little chance that the mental disorders it caused could be restored. Galvanism could act as a cleanser, resulting in the disappearance of cerebral pathological phenomena and the return of the mind to normality:
However, the scientific physician enlarges the sphere of his inquiries, the good of man is his great object – the end of all his labours being to prevent moral and corporeal disease, to alleviate pain, to restore health. [LAY 40, p. viii]
For doctors such as Laycock or Millingen, hysteria, trauma or Victorian male hypochondria had in common that they were embodied in the whole body, including the moral and intellectual dimensions. From this incarnation of psychic evils in all the nervous structures, the concept of unconscious cerebration was born:
One of the reasons ‘unconscious cerebration’ is more than a Victorian curiosity is that cognitive scientists have picked up this Victorian thread in theorising the ‘adaptive unconscious’ as opposed to the Freudian unconscious. [LEW 19, p. 77]
This concept is associated in Laycock’s work with the concept of brain reflex [LEF 03, pp. 26–27], made visible, in particular, in phobic reactions translated into reflex and automatic fear. The links between these concepts, heuristics for the development of cognitive sciences and electrical treatment, have scientific but also cultural stakes. If all ailments are nervous-based, then the nervous system becomes the preferred place of treatment for electrical therapies. Beyond his assertions about the feminine nature, Laycock proposed a more profound conception of the exploration of life and the living, from the scale of consciousness to the molecular scale:
They form the connecting link between the phenomena of consciousness, and the molecular changes in organic matter upon which the phenomena of heat, electricity, galvanism and magnetism depend. They point out a new path of experimental inquiry into the phenomena of life and thought and, if traced out in all their relations, cannot fail to change the whole aspect of mental philosophy. [LAY 40, p. 100]
In 1848, Millingen published The Passions or, Mind and Matter [MIL 48], a treatise in which he discussed the galvanization of mores and behavior. While he reinforced a very classical vision of hysteria, linked to the female sexual organs, he correlated this phenomenon to the weakness of “the energies of the brain or the sensorium of woman” [MIL 48, p. 44]. In a literary and romantic style, he questioned the essence of life:
Galvanism, it is true, may produce actions similar to those of many of our functions; but who would dare to assert that life is the result of galvanism or electricity? [MIL 48, p. 121]
He interpreted brain movements, which consist of processing external stimuli, in terms of electrical speed. This point must be understood through the image of a machine brain at the controls of a machine body. Thomas William Nunn (1837–1909) published in 1853 a treatise entitled Inflammation of the breast, and milk abscess in which he extended the comparison of the cerebral organ to a galvanic machine, to the uterus, the breast and the ovaries. They would have, according to him, a morphological organization comparable to a reproductive galvanic cell completed by the female nervous system:
The ovaria, uterus and mammae form, as it were, a reproductive pile, the circuit being completed by the nervous system. [NUN 53, p. 3]
The functional analogy of nerves with electric wires was taken up in a comparison of brain function with the electric telegraph, designed by Baron Schilling in St. Petersburg in 1833:
Again by analogy, just as we have compared the constitution of a swamp to a vast galvanic apparatus, we can also liken the human body to a voltaic pile, since it is also formed by the contact of heterogeneous elements whose nerves and muscles are the conductors, and solids and fluids are both the generators and conductors of electricity. [PAL 47, p. 232, author’s translation]
Electrical therapies cannot be separated from the invention of new technologies. In the same way that the telegraph helped to maintain order by allowing criminals to be reported more quickly; electricity guaranteed moral order by restoring electrical brain power immediately. While the nerves conduct instructions from the body to the mind, communication still has to work. The development of the telegraph, thus gave a model to the nervous functioning, conceived in terms of transfers and electrical communications:
As I have already observed, these instruments of mental transmission, although they are consecutive in their operation, and may be considered sequent in their course, yet act in such a simultaneous manner, that sensations are submitted to the test of our judgment and reason with electric rapidity. [MIL 48, p. 137]
Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), daughter of the poet Byron (1788–1824), is a figure in the history of the brain as a machine. A pioneer in computer science [KIM 99] and creator of one of the first computer language programs, she showed an early interest in electricity and the brain-machine. As a patient of Laycock, she crossed paths13 with Andrew Crosse (1784–1855) with whom she evoked the fact of making electrical experiments a tool to reach a new understanding of vital mechanisms and consciousness.
The societal and medical stakes of the application of electricity were multiple: from the knowledge of Man in his materiality to the possibility of intervening on his mental physiology, the range was wide and is still developing today. While the cerebralization of behaviors and faculties seems to result from a rational movement, it also stems from an interventionist imaginary and the desire of the human species to control itself. In this context, the imaginary of convulsive behavior joins the electric imaginary. Both of them have had a lasting impact on the history of medicine. While the 19th Century was described as the century of convulsions, its conceptions of human nature were based on the electrical conception of the subject and the secularization of diseases of the mind. Thus, Laycock, Marshall Hall (1790–1857) and William Carpenter wanted to demonstrate that mind-body intricacies were very complex, that much of what the mind did to the body took place on the surface of consciousness and thought, but also that electricity played a crucial role in this research with the technical perspective of manipulating the currents that continually work between these substances. Electrification ranged from the whole body to the brain, making visible the important notion of functional localization, involving a representation of the brain organ as the organic substrate of human instincts, faculties and behaviors. This key notion of cerebralization was concretized and prolonged in a process of internalization of psychological evils. Gradually, the electrical stimulation penetrated deeper into the brain to better reveal its organization and functioning:
At the dawn of the 20th Century, the disturbing strangeness was displaced, no longer in a mysterious Other, but in oneself; in the darkness of one’s own psyche. [BAC 12, p. 184, author’s translation]
While between 1801 and 1840, electricity represented a counter-culture to atheism and materialism, capable of giving life back to the deceased, from 1840 onwards, it became the guarantor of the standardization of mores and a certain representation of happiness. Its developments thus marked the domination of Man over the evolution of his species.
Figure 1.5. French advertisement dating from 1911 for the “Herculex” electric belt
Electrical treatments were seen as universal remedies, or in any case were disseminated as such within public opinion. Everybody could compensate for the weaknesses of their animal fluid and re-establish good connections between their consciousness and
