is that it is, above all, made up of errors and failures, punctuated by the resurgence of hopes carried by electricity.
These developments are structured around six chapters. The first chapter proposes tackling the concept of electric imaginary born of the hopes raised by the new techniques generated from the 18th Century onwards. It is inseparable from the analyses of the different periods in the history of medical electricity1. Masars de Cazeles, considered the designer of care practiced by electric friction, recalled the metaphors of a divine, animist electricity whose applications have been integrated and developed within a medicine that has become experimental:
However, if I were allowed to reason according to the authority of my own people, I would dare to say that the fable of Prometheus stealing the Celestial fire from the wheel of fire of the Sun to animate our clay is, perhaps, only an allegory of the effects of Electricity, formerly glimpsed, little known in the aftermath, brought to light by modern Physicists, & made more interesting by the way in which they now fix the attention of Doctors. [MAS 80, p. 15, author’s translation]
The second chapter addresses the intellectual, scientific and experimental path from physics to electrifying physicists: the theme of studies on the laws of electricity will be addressed in order to show that it is physicists who seek to decipher the mechanisms of electricity, who are primarily interested in its effects on the body as well as its therapeutic potential2. On the one hand, the philosophical stakes for the inscription of humanity in nature will be taken further, but so will the dependence that this link creates with physics, between electrical therapies and machines. Did medical engineering arise in the 18th Century? Thus, between 1745 and 1765, electricity appeared, in the visual sense of the term, as an instrument of movement, initiator of involuntary mobility. It was in the context of the link, born accidentally following the experiments with the Leyden jar, between movement and electric power, that the first actors of a physics that was becoming medicalized applied it to paralysis, while continuing to explore its mechanisms in nature [NOL 46, ENG 56, SAN 72]. In the third chapter, we will discuss the initial electrical turmoil marked by failures that demonstrated controversial applications of this care to tackle nervous and mental illnesses and show how this force began its descent onto the brain. Indeed, after a few years of increased mistrust due, on the one hand, to often fatal electrocutions and, on the other hand, to the ineffectiveness, however distressing, of these treatments, medical electricity moved, between 1770 and 1800, towards the treatment of nervous, convulsive and mental illnesses [LED 83, GAL 91, PET 02–03]. It is also divided, in this same period, between cures of static electricity and medical galvanism. The fourth chapter is thus devoted to the breakthrough generated by Galvani’s (1737–1798) discovery of animal electricity. Between medicine and physiology, perspectives on the living were marked by electrocentrism. At the end of the 18th Century, biology appropriated electricity to make it inherent to matter. This stage marked the definitive appropriation by physiology and medicine of this physical energy, as well as the beginning of Galvani’s research on electric neuro-fluid. Galvanism, which traveled beyond the Italian borders while Europe was suffering from the political consequences of the French Revolution, opened an extremely heuristic program, both for electrophysiology and for future resuscitative medicine. Thus, bodies came to life like automatons, becoming fields of exploration for the delineation and knowledge of the dying process, the central nervous system and its ramifications throughout the body. The successor to Descartes’ (1596–1650) concept of the animal machine, galvanism intended to explore the nervous mechanisms of living beings, as well as medical in its treatment of hysterical and, more broadly, magnetic phenomena. Chapter 5 then discusses the specialization and development of the different branches of biomedical electricity. Between laboratory explorations and clinical applications, electrical medicine, by confronting diseases with vast symptomatologies, contributes to differentiating the fields of psychiatry and neurology. At the same time, the activities of the nervous system are quantified, measured, recorded, objectified and made visible in the form of signs, plots or diagrams. Electrophysiology met Volta’s desire to involve measurement and mathematics. Electroclinical and electrophysiological explorations developed between 1900 and 1950 complement each other. While electrotherapy is equipped with machines and techniques that hope to leave their mark, with regard to the problem of the reversibility of psychoses, particularly in the emergency context of the two world wars, electrophysiology measures, models and describes the impacts of electricity in the body. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses the first applications of electrical neurostimulation therapies, and tries to show that the field of mental illnesses was a favorite one as early as 1950. The aim will be to delineate two aspects of the history of brain electricity and its therapies: a long history beginning in the late 18th Century, completed by a shorter history taking its roots in the second half of the 20th Century. Between 1980 and 2010, brain stimulation techniques, deep or external, following research on brain implantation, which considered the field of mental illness as a therapeutic target, stand out in their renewed applications in the field of psychiatry.
Thus, not only can we speak of therapeutic electricity before Galvani’s discovery of animal electricity, but it is also a question of making one of the paths of medical electricity in the brain sciences, future neurosciences, and within society intelligible. This is where a long investigation begins: it was necessary to differentiate the stages, the phases of enthusiasm and decline, each period marked by the improvement of techniques and advances in knowledge on the different ways of applying currents (galvanization, faradization, etc.), as well as on the human brain and the ills it can be affected by. Marked by its polymorphism, electricity in the medical field requires a broad epistemological study, both at the level of its temporality and that of the knowledge explored. In an epistemological tradition inherited from Canguilhem (1904–1955), “Philosophy is a reflection for which all unknown material is good, and we would gladly say, for whom all good material must be unknown” [CAN 78, p.8].
Thus, everything is material for thought: the success of a theory, but also its failures and errors. The epistemologist, always in search of lines of convergence and divergence, must approach all the states of the scientific discipline under discussion, respecting both its singularity and its continuity. This continuity, in the case of medical electricity, is marked by a large number of technical, societal and scientific breakthroughs that punctuate the waves of successive crazes and discredit that hinder its development. It is built within an experimental design, conceived in terms of trial and error, marked by failures as much as by fantasized or misunderstood successes. The historical, scientific and philosophical interactions between the concepts of machines, techniques and the brain have necessitated historical back-and-forth, to the benefit of the problematization of the subject. This work takes place in the context of an open epistemology3.
How can we analyze the failures of an electrical method that has been constantly changing since the 18th Century? How can we understand the links between physics, medicine and current electrical therapies, whose psychiatric applications are multiplying? Does going back to the roots of the applications of medical electricity on the human brain allow us to understand its past and present implications?
1 1 See Appendix 1, in which chronological tables are provided to give the reader a guide to the major stages of this history.
2 2 See Appendix 2, in which extracts from the tables of contents of physicists, inventors or demonstrators, Nollet, Franklin, Jallabert and Morin, have been selected to highlight their research combining physical knowledge with considerations of the body.
