it, opening it happily to the history of techniques, anthropology and cultural history.
Jean-Claude DUPONT
University of Picardy Jules Verne
28 May 2020
Introduction
From the clouds to the brain: this is the journey, both historical and epistemological in nature, that this book sets out to retrace. The focus of this book is the history of medical electricity, and it is this journey that is explored, accompanied by a look at electricity’s medical effects on the body, up to and including the center of the human brain. Although this history of explorations and brain simulation may seem recent, we can broaden the scope of this investigation further and take into account the philosophical, scientific and technical roots of medical electricity in the 18th Century. I am part of an important secondary literature, often written in English, tracing the major historical stages of electricity in its links with the body, the living and neuroscience. Indeed, with the exception of François Zanetti’s excellent French-language book [ZAN 17], published in 2017, the summaries on the history of this force are, for the most part, in English. The research on the effects and applications of electricity on the body, the brain and living things has been collected and correlated, in order to show the connections between these fields. The works of Iwan Rhys Morus, published between 1998 and 2011 [RHY 98, 99, 11, 09a, 10, 02, 04, 09b], have also been analyzed to show how the electrical sciences have permeated society and science from the end of the 18th Century onwards, thus opening up a dimension of cultural history. On the other hand, the treatises on the links between the applications of electricity and the birth of neuroscience, notably by Stanley Finger [FIN 94, 99, 11, 12] as well as the works on the exploration of electric life by Marco Piccolino and Marco Bresadola [PIC 03, 13] have been studied at length. The historical period covered by this book is between 1740 and 2010. In addition, epistemological analysis has been tightened around the correlations between electricity, the brain and its nerve ramifications. Thus, we find the representations of an electric culture [RHY 11, p. 9], applied to the body in its physical and moral dimensions, from the second half of the 18th Century. Far from being reduced to a cycle of failures and errors, this period shows the emergence of an electrical tool applicable, not only to human ills, but also to the exploration of the mechanisms of a living being, a category which, of course, includes the human species. As early as 1746, static electricity machines were built, the body was a member of the family of conducting bodies and medicine, marked by physics, became electric. The peak of this movement was reached during the controversies between animal and metal electricity, around 1790.
But how do we retrace that story? How do we differentiate the origins of the knowledge of electricity from its beginnings as knowledge itself? While electricity refers to the Greek term ἤλεκτρον (êlektron), which means Baltic amber, it does not mean that knowledge was being built at that time. However, Thalès de Milet, in the 7th Century BCE, recorded the fact that amber, if rubbed, had the ability to attract light objects and to produce, though not systematically, sparks. Moreover, Hippocrates, Plato and Galien described the remarkable properties of electric rays, so frequent in the Mediterranean. Galien used them on living patients in the treatment of rheumatic afflictions and headaches. In addition, amber, a physical electricity present in nature, was also noted. Sribonius used electric shocks [SRI 55] to treat a wide variety of diseases, including headaches and various kinds of paralysis. Around 1600, William Gilbert (1544–1603) recognized that the property of attracting light bodies was common to certain minerals and stones. Otto von Guericke (1602–1686) made one of the first electrical machines, around 1660, and compared the phenomenon caused to the attraction of the Earth on animate and inanimate bodies.
So, when do we talk about the beginnings of electricity? Do we have to trace them back to Greco-Roman antiquity? To 17th Century mechanics?
For what was electricity when Thales of Miletus discovered it? And what became of it for a long series of centuries, in the hands of Pliny, Strabo, Dioscorides and Plutarch? It was, during this long interval, only a seed stuck in the ground, waiting for happier hands to bring it out […]. [ALD 04, ij, author’s translation]
Its beginnings were initiated by the explorations of the forces of nature through 18th Century physics, which became systematic and also corresponded to a vast questioning of humanity’s place in Nature and its links with the laws at work there. In the same way, it was necessary that a particular epistemology enabled the questioning of the localization of the soul in the brain, the materiality and innateness of the faculties, making them free to develop, in order to found medical electricity as a tool of care for the illnesses of the psychological sphere. This discrepancy between the moment of origins and that of beginnings also made it possible to understand the immediate appropriation of electricity in the medical field. Indeed, as early as 1746, when the Leyden jar experiment by Musschenbroek and his assistant proved dangerous and painful, this first capacitor immediately catalyzed the hopes of a new medicine which was technical, interventionist, economical and beyond all metaphysical considerations.
The history of medical electricity, beyond its periodization, is based on a questioning of the concepts at work in it, such as human nature, natural laws and the study of forces. It also requires an in-depth study of the techniques that are constantly revising its applications, making them more precise and more reliable, as well as the theme of contexts, which appear to be so many different fields of experimentation and the setting up of new protocols. In addition to representing a relatively long period, the period from 1740 to 2010 required more work on the primary bibliography. For example, the Bibliographie francophone des ouvrages et articles relatifs à l’électricité et au magnétisme publiés avant 1820 [BLO 00] has no fewer than 2,000 titles. This is why the theme is centered around the links between electricity, medico-philosophical questions on the naturalization of faculties and the brain as the place where these issues are anchored. It is an epistemological journey to which we are invited by the different chapters of this book.
Research, more than progress, around electric power immediately marks a strong imagination where humanity takes precedence over nature and over itself. First mixed with experiments on magnetism and mesmerism, electricity is part of the context of investigations and experiments on the energies at work in the universe. For example, Mesmer (1734–1815), whose medical thesis was on the influence of the planets on the evolution of humanity, developed the idea that living beings are linked together by a universal magnetic force. This force, present in the macrocosm, could, according to him, have a major influence on health and balance. He thus posed as a practitioner capable of rebalancing the flow of animal magnetism in the body. During public sessions, he used magnets to restore the flow of magnetic fluid in subjects suffering from disorders as varied as hysteria and blindness. While his concept of animal magnetism did not survive the report by the commission of the Académie Française des Sciences (French Academy of Sciences), requested in 1784 by Louis XVI to evaluate his practices, the idea that there were links between the laws governing the universe and the mechanisms of the body permeated research on electricity. The roots of this conception also appealed to the neo-hippocratism that developed in the 18th Century. The advent of electricity, in the field of physiology and therapy, marked a never-ending intertwining of exploration and care. Its entry as a physiological configuration, conceived in terms of organic fluid, was a sign of a break between a medicine still tinged with metaphysics and a medicine of the Enlightenment, intended to be rationalizing. Its developments during the 18th Century were marked by the naturalization of animal spirits, the shift from the notion of fluid to that of energy, the entry into a secularized medical era opening up a materialistic perspective of the psychological and physical nature of the human being. In any case, these are the representations delivered by the research of Jean Antoine Nollet (1700–1770), Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Allamand, Sans and Ledru (1731–1807) from the second half of the 18th Century. One of the paradoxes of this history of the appropriation of electric force by medicine and, more broadly, by physiology and the experimental
