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Series Editor
Jean-Claude Dupont
From Clouds to the Brain
The Movement of Electricity in Medical Science
Céline Cherici
First published 2020 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd
27-37 St George’s Road
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UK
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030
USA
© ISTE Ltd 2020
The rights of Céline Cherici to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020938719
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-595-4
Foreword
Céline Cherici’s book explores the place of electricity in the history of medical science over a period ranging from the 18th to the 21st Centuries, from its discovery to the recent use of deep brain stimulation. Some contextual data helps us to grasp the full importance and scope of this undertaking.
The current importance of chemical and molecular representations, which have become consubstantial with biology, means it is easy that we forget that, from a historical point of view, it is physics that has constantly provided neurophysiology with explanatory models.
Galvani’s use of artificial electricity as a stimulant led him, by analogy, to conceive of muscle fibers as small Leyden jars. Thus, the mysterious nature of nervous fluid, which was therefore electric, a model which was vary different from the humoral model described by the Encyclopedists, was unraveled. The fruitfulness of the polemic between the proponents of metallic and animal electrics is well known in the history of physics, since the voltaic pile battery triggered the development of electrophysics, electromagnetism and electrochemistry, the development of which, in turn, went hand in hand with the invention of two instruments of considerable heuristic value in 19th Century Life Sciences: the galvanometer and the impolarizable electrode. These instruments led to the development of the great German electrophysiology, that is to say, the classical works of du Bois-Reymond, Helmholtz, Hermann, Bernstein, etc., which made it possible to propose various hypotheses on the nature of the action and rest currents. These currents were often considered to be the result of purely physical phenomena occurring in living tissue. In accordance with the dominant physical and technical models, nerve fiber was likened to a metal wire, a circuit, a magnet and, finally, a battery – a living battery the functioning of which physicists sought to understand by taking inspiration from the model of the electric battery. The origin of the battery’s electromotive force, how the nerve impulse was conducted and the changes produced in the fibers by this impulse were also investigated, leading to imported notions such as “polarized structures” or “local circuits”. In France, it was this tradition, that of the physical explanation of the functioning
