Читать книгу From Clouds to the Brain - Celine Cherici - Страница 11

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 biological sciences, 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.

3 3 Cornelius Borck speaks of “open epistemology” [BOR 18a, p. 264].