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There was only a short leap from experiments where animals were electrified, then revived, then electrified again through to the formulation that electricity is life. The underlying idea was that as long as a limb could be electrified, it still had signs of life. To what extent could medical electricity become an instrument of resurrection? Many of the episodes in the history of medical electricity revolve around questions of life and death, and as early as 1740, human control over the boundaries between these two states and medical power emerged. The implication of electricity in the resurrection process was deduced from experiments to bring the dead back to life. This concept prefigured the advent of future resuscitation techniques and is part of the context of an interventionist and dualist medicine, the body being like an automaton that can be animated in the manner of a machine. Experiments where electricity killed, where it allowed animals to be revived, preceded research on the bodies of convicts, which did not fail to question the links between the body and consciousness. Thus, Pierre Bertholon, in his treatise De l’électricité du corps humain dans l’état de santé et de maladie [BER 80], demonstrated animal experiments relating to the effects of electricity conceived as a vital fluid. In particular, he spoke of the experiments by physicist Daniel Bernouilli (1700–1782), “This illustrious geometrician brought drowned birds back to life, using only electric sparks as a means of restoring them to life” [BER 80, p. 54, author’s translation]. The experiments of which he spoke were also quoted in a treatise published in 1738 [BER 38]. In 1780, electricity was already considered a vital remedy, especially against asphyxia:

‘Then I shot him,’ he says ‘a few sparks from the tip of his nose, which made him stand up on his legs to complete his healing, I gave him a couple of fairly light jerks. All this work didn’t last six minutes when with the third shake the animal ran away, […]’. [BER 80, p. 55, author’s translation]¹

Thus life was first “given back” to the animals, the subjects of experiments, to understand the links between physiology, asphyxiation phenomena and electricity. After 1791, medical galvanism was considered as a stimulant to revive muscular actions:

The Ecole de Médecine de Paris (Paris Medical School) tried to subject asphyxiated animals to Galvanic action; in its research it set out to determine the action of this stimulant on the muscular organs. It has mainly experimented with rabbits and small guinea pigs. The state of susceptibility of the nervous and muscular organs presented particular phenomena, depending on the difference in the causes of asphyxia. [CAS 03, p. 34, author’s translation]

The concept of death at the end of the 18th Century encompassed reversible states of unconsciousness. Here we have an important point to understand the role that electricity played in the medical imaginary. The definition of death had not yet been decided, this force was about to play the role of an objective element to differentiate between living and non-living states. Moreover, if as long as the body was excitable, there was life, then it became a primary ingredient in the idea of the creation of life by Man:

Can I name one more experiment where electricity brought a dead dog back to life? I say dead; for they have taken away part of his brain: & in this state, they put him on the cake, & they electrify him: he comes back to life, breathing, strong, gets up on his legs as if to run away. One stops electrifying it, it falls back into the inertia & the numbness of death; one starts electrifying again, & the movement starts again. [BIA 77, p. 36 quoted in ROZ 77, vol.9, p. 429, author’s translation]

The epistemological status of animal electricity in the 19th Century was a symbol of life. It was made into a spectacle during the electrification of the bodies of those executed, who found themselves animated, without coming back to life, if we think of it in terms of consciousness. Like automatons, they were shaken by disordered movements that imitated those of the living. Medicine, marked by Cartesian dualism and 18th Century materialism, was able to experience the limits and properties of life on a Man who had become a machine. A symbol of atheism, revolution and reductionism, the experiments of the first third of the 19th Century contributed to the construction of a culture of physical, medical and sociological electricity. The bearer of hope, electricity was like the fire stolen by Prometheus to be given to humanity, and symbolized a materialistic progress where humans could gain access to knowledge and control over it. The notion of the electrical body, including its relationship with the soul, was constructed during the 19th Century through the study of the links between physics and the body. As a legacy of the 17th Century, the analogies of mechanics with human and animal physiology developed. Alongside the applications of electricity, the imagining of the mechanized body, obeying the laws of physics, was developing. While the way in which electricity connected the soul and the body remained a subject of speculation and questioning, the body became the site of investigations into the limits of life and the beginnings of death. How do gain control over these limits? Which organs help maintain life? How much room is there for the brain? The fact that the body could react to electrical simulations, that the heart starts beating again, was not enough to bring it back to life. The issues of the brain’s role in understanding human singularity were central to the applications of this exploratory electricity. In this way, organs acquired a very strong symbolic value that can still be found to this day. Aldini, Galvani’s nephew and colleague, spread galvanism beyond Italy’s borders, notably by electrifying the bodies of the tortured. The analogies between the galvanic cell and the organization of nerves and muscles, which seem to form organic circuits designed to conduct electricity, reinforced the idea that the body has a mechanics that can be known and mastered by the medical sciences. As early as 1791, electricity was considered the most important function of animal economics, especially for Joseph Priestley [PRI 67, 71] (1733–1804), for whom it revealed the nature of things. How can we understand the expression “culture of electricity”? If you look at it from a physical point of view, it’s hard to pinpoint. But if we consider from its very beginnings, the dimensions of spectacle and supernatural powers that surround its inscription in society, it becomes enlightening. Society was faced with a new technology, used as early as the first third of the 18th Century, as a trick and form of entertainment. Gray’s 1730 flying boy experiment is emblematic of these beginnings:

All metals, wood, reed or hemp, are conductors […] but also: soap bubbles, water, an umbrella, a slice of beef, or a young boy! [GRA 31–32, p. 35, author’s translation]

Figure 1.1. In 1730, Gray experimented with the “flying boy”, putting the human body on the list of conducting bodies

The spectacular dimension of these experiments, in addition to aiding the differentiation between insulating and conducting bodies and including the human body among the latter, went beyond the scientific field and profoundly marked the popular imagination:

He did the first experiment on a child aged 8 to 10, suspended on two silk cords, in a horizontal position. Then putting the tube close to the child’s feet; his head, his hair, his face became electric; the same thing happened to his feet, when the tube was brought close to his head. [MAN 52, p. 10, author’s translation]

The imagination was all the more marked by the fact that, following Musschenbroek’s accident, accidents due to electric shocks all too often proved fatal. Electricity, the powerful power of nature, could not be easily tamed. Self-electrification, which was spreading in academic and cultural circles, conveyed an image that was sometimes unflattering. Alongside this frightening depiction of the uses of this force, scientists were conducting experiments confined to artistic fields [BOZ 54, p. 28] and were spreading a more positive image of them:

Electric shocks had become well known, so it was disguised in a thousand different forms. Everyone was eager, big & small, learned & ignorant, hastened to experience such a singular phenomenon on themselves. Thirty, forty, one hundred people at a time took pleasure in feeling the same blow & in shouting just one cry. [MAN 52, pp. 30–31, author’s translation]

Anonymous novels are devoted to this energy, while Franklin imagined the electric spit:

On this principle, Mr. Franklin has imagined an electric wheel that turns with extraordinary force, & which, by means of a small wooden arrow raised perpendicularly, is able to roast a large bird in front of the fire, which is then threaded onto it. That’s what he called the electric spit. [MAN 52, p. 184]

Medical electricity owes its success less to the credulity of the sick than to its air of progress, and to its promises for the mastery of human finiteness which were spreading throughout all the countries of Europe. Thus, the bodies became electrified by becoming the meeting place of Volta’s metallic electricity and Galvani’s animal electricity. They provided a spectacle during electrifications, notably in 1802 during the demonstrations by Rossi and Vassali:

After I had explained to Professor Rossi on July 15, 1802, the effects I had obtained on those who had been tortured, he told me that on that same day there was an unfortunate man condemned to be beheaded; but the impossibility of combining a series of experiments in such a short time made him go to the hospital alone, where he saw, for the first time, the results I have mentioned. [ALD 04, p. 90, author’s translation]

As early as August 1797, some of Aldini’s experiments on tortured people were reproduced at the Academy of Turin, while in the perspective of applying galvanism to the knowledge and mastery of the living, he explored, following Kite, the idea that galvanism could be an agent of resurrection. This research therefore formed part of the activities of the Royal Humane Society, which since 1774 had been investigating the possibilities opened up by new techniques for resurrecting these victims. One of the medical, but also philosophical, challenges was to understand the process of dying. What was to die? Could the steps be reversed? [BAR 06]. As Zanetti summarized:

If capital execution, carried out under the control of physiology, allows the precise analysis of the different stages of the passage from life to death, is there no hope of going the other way? The decapitations and the hangings of London and Glasgow are only the prelude to a medicine of reanimation, which throughout the 19th Century was concerned with the freshest cadavers, multiplying the discussions on the definition of the thresholds of death and its reversibility. [ZAN 17, p. 39, author’s translation]

In this context of exploring the reversibility of death, after much research on electrified animals, scientists were turning to the possibilities offered by judicial executions. Most experiments were designed to use visual observations and emphasize two analogies: the first between life and motion, the second between electricity and vital motion:

One of the earliest experiments on criminals condemned to death took place in Germany in 1791. In the presence of physicians and students assembled at the site of an execution by decapitation, the investigator began by demonstrating that exposed parts of the torso’s neck muscles quiver when touched with a probe. Deeper contact caused muscle contractions strong enough to arch the back and to abduct the arms that had been folded with fingers interdigitated. A light touch of the probe on the cut end of the spinal cord in the neck likewise evoked facial muscle twitches, especially around the lips, and occasional retraction of eyelids. Deeper probing again caused massive contraction of all facial and tongue muscles. Such grotesque grimaces forced some shuddering observers to leave. The results led to the conclusion that consciousness probably persisted after decapitation. [KEV 85, p. 219]

Sœmmerring’s experiments are discussed here. Indeed, he experimented, following Galvani’s experiments [DIC 22, v. 6, p. 294], on the properties of bodies in a post-mortem context. In fact, as early as 1791, electricity was considered capable of revealing the conditions of the passage from life to death. An all-powerful medical imagining was at work:

It was not enough for science to have made itself master of the fire of the sky by means of lightning rods; to have learned to reproduce at will most of the circumstances of the terrible phenomenon, to have found in the battery a device from which the electric fluid escapes in a continuous burst which the hand of man provokes and stops, activates and slows down, directs and uses in a thousand ways; to have, by the combination of the electric fluid with the magnetic fluid, given rise to the mechanical and physiological agent whose effects we have reported so varied and so powerful; to have, in a word, applied electric force to the accomplishment of so many wonders which without it would have remained forever chimeras whose thought the most ardent imagination would hardly have dared to conceive; […]. [MAN 63, pp. 131–132, author’s translation]

After starting his experiments on animals and the dead at the same time in Italy, Aldini came to repeat his experiments at the Veterinary School of Alfort. For example, he connected the head of an ox placed on a table to an electric current. Its eyes opened and rolled in their sockets, its ears quivered, suggesting that the animal felt anger. They contributed to the transition from the warm-blooded animal model to the human model. At the beginning of the 19th Century, scholars were engaged in comparative thanatology to understand the effects of galvanism on the vital forces:

I repeated on the corpse of a beheaded criminal the observations I had made on the head and torso of an ox. I established an arc from the spinal cord to the muscles: a prepared frog was part of this arc. I always got strong contractions without the help of the battery, without the slightest influence of metals. I have observed proportionately the same result on naturally dead men. [ALD 04, pp. 9–10, author’s translation]

Then he experimented on:

[…] the head of a dog, passing the current of a strong battery: this single contact excited truly frightening convulsions. The mouth opened, the teeth clattered, the eyes rolled in their sockets; and if reason did not stop the struck imagining, one would almost believe that the animal had returned to suffering and life. [ALD 04, pp. 9–10, author’s translation]

These descriptions, worthy of horror novels, contributed to the imagining of the mad scientist who creates life from a subject presumed dead. In November 1803, in Mainz, the leader of a group of bandits, named Schinderbannes, was beheaded, along with 19 of his accomplices. The town’s doctors hastened to recover the bodies in order to submit them to the galvanic experiment. Nevertheless, the delays in the arrival of the bodies did not allow them to experiment on more than four torture victims [FIG 67, v. 1, p. 650]. They derived the following physiological principles from it:

That the muscular contractions which were obtained by means of the Voltaic pile on recently killed individuals reproduced mechanically, in a most perfect manner, the movements performed during life; That the action of the battery was all the more sensitive, the more precisely the electric current followed the direction of the nerves; That the muscles subjected during life to the influence of the will obeyed, better than those which are independent of it, the electric agent. [MAN 63, p. 192, author’s translation]

At least two remarks can be made: the expression “mechanically reproduced the movements of life” shows the aspect of a medicine marked by the human automaton model. Furthermore, the idea that the muscles subject to consciousness were those that “obeyed” electricity best was not insignificant. This point, in apparent contradiction to the first, underlines the medico-philosophical significance of this research: do feelings and willpower persist for some time after beheading? [TIL 15]

On January 17, 1803, in London, in front of members of the Royal College of Surgery, Aldini experimented on the body of Georges Forster, a criminal hanged for the murders of his wife and children.

Figure 1.2. Aldini tests the muscular reactions of a human head and then of the whole body [ALD 04, slide 4, fig. 1-6]

By using the Voltaic pile, it led to waves of contractions and convulsions, marking in a first series of experiments, the face of the grinning murderer:

The head was first subjected to the action of galvanism, by means of a pile of 100 silver and zinc plates: two metal wires, one from the base and the other from the top of the pile, came to the inside of the two ears, which were moistened with salt water. I first saw strong contractions in all the face muscles, which were contorted so irregularly that they imitated the most awful faces. The action of the eyelids was very marked, although less sensitive in the human head than in the ox’s head. [ALD 04, p. 70, author’s translation]

After animating his face, the scientist plugged a cable into the ear and another directly into the rectum. Forster’s body then began to move frantically, in a disarticulated manner. You can imagine the impression made on the assembly. His experiments were driven by a genuine scientific curiosity on Aldini’s part and could not be reduced to a mere spectacle. The latter, on the other hand, played an important role in the dissemination of knowledge. For example, on the subject of sensitivity or insensitivity of the brain, he carried out animal electrophysiology to show that with: “[…] an iron plate, or by touching them with silver nitrate: then the live animals feel the most pain, as when they are inflamed” [ALD 04, p. 87, author’s translation]. Moreover, these post-mortem experiments on whole corpses enabled a deeper understanding of the respective places of the heart and the brain in the dying process. It was also an opportunity to explore the technical possibilities of restarting the heartbeat beyond the cessation of the pulse. Experiments on the galvanization of the heart provoked exciting debates in electrophysiology in the early 19th Century:

This muscle² which, according to Haller’s principles, is the first to receive life and the last to lose it, follows a different law when subjected to the action of galvanism. [ALD 04, pp. 99–100, author’s translation]

Aldini explored the influence of galvanism on the heart while experimenting with direct galvanization of the isolated brain. The challenge was to determine which of the two organs could be considered as a physiological center in the dying process and therefore whether galvanization could have the most important action:

Then Dr. Mondini, with all his skill, tried to separate in the brain the medullary substance, the corpus callosum, the striated bodies, the layers of the optic nerves, and the cerebellum. All these parts were successively brought into an arc, and the results of the experiments previously carried out on the bodies of other criminals were confirmed with full success. [ALD 04, p. 82, author’s translation]

Volta considered the heart to be an insensitive organ, whereas Humboldt and Grapengiesser claimed, on the contrary, that it reacted strongly to galvanic stimulus. Thus, within the framework of controversial experiments, a field of medical observations opened up on the action of galvanism on the cardiac organ, the cessation of which was the first symptom, at least until 1940, of the process of dying. The polemics on its status played a dual role: on the one hand, the experiments on its state, after the passage to immobility and unconsciousness, enabling the passage from a resurrection envisaged medically to the techniques of eanimation; on the other hand, they played a fundamental role in the electrical imagining which developed around questions on life, death and the porosity of these two states:

What was my surprise, in carrying out this kind of research, to recognize that the heart, despite all the assertions made to date about its insensitivity to galvanism, is of all the organs, the one that retains its excitability the longest under the influence of this agent, and therefore occupies the first place in relation to the duration of galvanic excitability, […]. [NYS 02, p. 8, author’s translation]

Thus, Nysten (1771–1818)³ conducted galvanic experiments on dogs freshly poisoned with opium. He used a vertical Volta device, consisting of 38 zinc discs, 3 coins and 38 cloths soaked in a solution of ammonia muriate:

As a result, this substance does not annihilate the galvanic excitability; but I did not pay enough attention to this kind of experiment to dare to ensure that it does not diminish the energy of this property […]. [NYS 02, p. 14, author’s translation]

In order to test the excitability of the heart in a post-mortem situation, he tried to recover⁴ the bodies of convicts just after their execution. Thus he obtained the body of a 27-year-old man, considered to be of a hot-headed temperament due to his having committed a criminal act and having just been beheaded:

I opened his thoracic cage […]; the muscles that I irritated with my scalpel while making this opening, such as the sterno-humeral (large pectoral), the costo coracoidian (small pectoral), the sterno-pubic (large right of the abdomen), contracted strongly. I freed the heart from its pericardium: the sinus of the pulmonary veins (the left atrium) and the aortic ventricle (the left ventricle), mechanically irritated, remained perfectly immobile; but the sinus of the vena cava (the right atrium) and the pulmonary ventricle (the right ventricle), showed obvious contractions. [NYS 02, pp. 17–18, author’s translation]

Let’s take an interest in the temporality of these experiments: Nysten started at 2.45 pm, and by 6.30 pm he was still stimulating the body. He pointed out that after four hours of galvanic applications, the only organ still sensitive to the action of this agent was the heart, since the sinuses of the pulmonary veins and the vena cava, essential parts of it, continued to contract. From 6.45 pm onwards, the contractions became completely imperceptible. While the body had been stimulated for four hours, death could no longer be considered as an instantaneous state but as a process taking place in stages. Moreover, the reaction of each organ to galvanism and the duration of their sensitivity were here the subject of a precise temporal determination, which went in the direction of a rationalization of the action of galvanism on the body. Such an approach can be seen in the tables shown in Figure 1.3.

Figure 1.3. Comparative table of the duration of galvanic excitability of the various organs subjected to the experiments recorded in this book [NYS 02]

Using an electrophysiological approach, Nysten compared the excitability times of human organs to those of animals. What did he conclude from his experiments? The long influence of comparative anatomy made itself felt in his conclusions: he advocated a unity of the laws of Nature according to which there is no reason why galvanization should have different effects on humans or warm-blooded animals. Yet the context of the death, the state of the body, human or animal, were all conditions that influenced these effects. He therefore highlighted the importance of the experimental protocol, which must include everything that is relevant to the information on the experimental model chosen. Indeed, on a man who died a violent, natural death or disease, or on an animal, stimulation influenced differently the energy of the heart, its durability and its sensitivity. The experimental protocol could be refined, specified in relation to the specificities of the organs’ reactions to stimulation. For example, the high frequency of stimuli caused an inhibition of activity that need not be confused with permanent cessation. These were all mechanisms that the galvanist needed to take into account. Nysten, by maintaining a central status in the process of dying, paved the way to experiments of restarting its activity beyond the limits of life. Between the heart or the brain, which organ determined the state of death? The brain, in the perspective of the naturalization of the intellectual faculties, was becoming increasingly important. So he argued for the place of the primary organ with the heart. Nysten was involved in these quarrels:

But I have not only determined the contractions of the heart longer than the physicists of Turin, I have also proved that this organ is of all, the one which retains the longest faculty of contracting under galvanic influence, and I have thereby retained for it the title of ultimum moriens⁵ which it was about to lose. [NYS 02, p. 35, author’s translation]

The main conclusion being that galvanic action, in addition to maintaining the excitability of the heart, brings it back when it is ready to die:

The sinus of the pulmonary veins was apparently insensitive to any excitation, either mechanical or galvanic; but its excitability, so to speak extinguished, was revived by galvanic action, to the point that it then contracted not only by this action, but also by that of mechanical agents […]. [NYS 02, p. 36, author’s translation]

Bichat, in the second part of his book Physiological Researches On Life and Death [BIC 99–00], recorded his work on galvanism, discussing the influence of brain death on heart death in the context of the ultimum moriens debates. He reported on five experiments in which he tended to show that the heart does not immediately stop working when brain function is interrupted. He saw galvanism as a technique to shed light on the relationship between the heart and the brain:

There is another kind of experiment similar to these, which can still shed light on the relationship between the heart and the brain: that of galvanism. I will not overlook this means of proving that the first of these organs is still currently dependent on the second. [BIC 99–00, p. 393, author’s translation]

Bichat chose to experiment on the animal model of the frog and followed a classical experimental protocol, made of zinc and lead metal frames and organic materials:

I have equipped several times in a frog, on the one hand his brain with lead, on the other hand his heart and lower limb muscles with a long zinc blade which touches the first one by its upper extremity, and the second one by its lower extremity. [BIC 99–00, p. 394, author’s translation]

Although he established communication between the muscles and the brain, no acceleration was noticeable in the heart while it was still beating, and no movement occurred after it stopped. His physiological research focused not only on the passage from life to death, its different stages and the possibility of modifying its parameters through stimulation, but also on the interactions between organs. Following the idea that every body is subject to the harmonious functioning of the systems of the animal economy such as the nervous, cerebral or blood systems, Bichat explored the idea of hierarchy to determine which organ lives or functions the longest between the heart and the brain. In addition, the Société Médicale d’Émulation de Paris, which he founded in 1797, rewarded the text written by Malacarne (1744–1816) [MAL 03, 98, 99] in 1802 on the physiological landscape formed by the different physiological systems. It is a fundamental theme for the understanding of brain and heart physiology. Does the brain directly influence the heart? Bichat also investigated whether there is an irritating movement of the heart that can be differentiated from cardiac movement:

1st to detach the heart from the chest; 2nd to place it in contact, with two different metals, by two points on its surface, or with portions of flesh armed with metals; 3rd to make the armatures communicate by a third metal. [BIC 99–00, p. 396, author’s translation]

Given the proximity of the physiology of warm-blooded animals and that of humans, he experimented on the former. However, the brain-heart circuit does not give specific movements:

These different considerations, are a manifest proof that the communicating branches of the ganglions, should no more be considered as a continued nerve, than the branches, which pass from each of the cervical, lumbar and sacral nerves, to those which are immediately above and below them. In fact, notwithstanding these communications, each pair of the latter mentioned nerves is regarded as a separate pair. [BIC 99–00, p. 397, author’s translation]

This lack of movement of the heart in relation to the brain would indicate that the two organs die independently⁶. Bichat, in order to avoid movements due to the effect of galvanic irritation and artifacts due to experimental protocols, first placed his circuit and established communication in a second step:

2dly in dogs and guinea pigs, I have repeatedly applied the metals, first to the brain and the heart, then to the trunk of the spinal marrow, and the heart; then to the par vagum and the heart. The communication being made, was followed by no apparent result. 3dly, on making the communication between the metals, when applied to the cardiac nerves and the heart there was no very sensible motion. [BIC 39, p. 261]

As long as he tried to provoke cardiac movements by connecting the heart to the central nervous system, it achieved little. It had to be detached, insulated and brought into direct contact with metals:

Besides, in admitting even these different results, I do not see how it is possible to refuse acknowledging, that with respect to the stimulus of galvanism, there is a wide difference between the susceptibility of the muscles of the animal life, and those of the organic life. Again, supposing that the galvanic phenomena were the same in both sorts of muscles, the fact would prove nothing more […]. [BIC 39, pp. 261–262]

This experiment showed that cardiac movements reacted to a localized and direct galvanism, independently of a direct action of the brain. Bichat differentiated between the effects of galvanization on animal muscles, subject to the action of the brain, and on those of organic life, which depended only very occasionally on the will. So there was no direct action of the brain on the heart, nor any technical means of triggering it. The two organs did not cease to function simultaneously. The knowledge of the life of the organs but also the definition of death was one of the stakes of this research. The description of brain death, which was not completed until the middle of the 20th Century, depended on research on resuscitation and on the possibility of identifying all the stages that marked the boundaries between life and its cessation.

Aldini also noticed that the cardiac function appeared to be subdued in some of the suppressed patients, while it was easily reactivated in all muscles in others. He used three procedures to verify the resumption of cardiac movement post-mortem:

 – by supplying the spinal cord with a lead cylinder inserted into the canal of the cervical vertebrae and then bringing one end of a silver arc over the surface of the heart and the other to the spinal cord framework. The heart, which in the individual subjected to galvanism still enjoyed great vitality, immediately presented very visible and quite strong contractions;

 – by supplying the nerves of the wave pair and the large sympathetic nerves without the help of a battery;

 – by means of Volta’s devices and making use in general of a battery composed of 50 silver discs and as much zinc with the cards soaked in a solution of muriate of soda.

He noted in several decapitated people, very strong cardiac contractions and concluded that the tip of this organ was, of all its parts, the most mobile and the most sensitive to galvanic influence. The contractions produced by the last of these three processes were not only stronger but also longer lasting. In the same perspective of verifying or corroborating scientifically the irritability of the heart and thanks to electrophysiology applied to the body as a whole, he was able to test the different organs separately and together and to specify the duration of excitability during which they could still imitate the movements of life:

1. That if the mechanical irritation of the pin and scalpel excited, from the beginning, visible contractions in the intestines, heart and diaphragm; the same contractions were much stronger with the battery. 2. That when neither the heart nor the diaphragm was no longer irritated by the scalpel, the scalpel still excited contractions in the muscles of the extremities. 3. That after the intestines, the heart first lost galvanic susceptibility; then the diaphragm, and finally the muscles of the extremities. [ALD 04, p. 93, author’s translation]

Thus, Aldini’s experiments on the actions of the heart muscle formed some of these whole-body demonstrations. The medical imaginary, deeply embedded in scientific explorations, could hardly be separated from them. While Aldini chose tortured bodies to experiment on, the reasons were not only related to the history of the links between the bodies of those condemned to death and the history of vesalian anatomy, but also, and perhaps above all, to the possibility of having subjects whose vital forces had not been altered by disease and in which the springs of the fibers were not destroyed. In addition to galvanizing excitable points on the body, Aldini also connected isolated brains to raise their reflex actions:

I sawed the skull to determine the action of the battery on the different parts of the brain, in the same order as they were presented by the anatomical dissection. All these parts obeyed the force of galvanism; but the corpus callosum and the cerebellum gave a more lively action. [ALD 04, pp. 62–63, author’s translation]

Excerpts from Aldini’s texts allow us to highlight an underlying questioning of the links between facial expressions caused by galvanization and possible thought content retained even after the cessation of visible life. The following passage retranscribes both this questioning, already found in the revolutionary period on the subject of decapitated heads just after the killing when the eyes or face are still affected by movement, and a scientific theme on the links between muscles and the mechanics of emotions that were discussed in more detail by Duchenne de Boulogne (1806–1875):

So I placed the two heads of the torture victims horizontally on a table (sl. 4, fig. 6.), so that the two sections communicated with each other by animal moisture alone. It was wonderful, and even frightening, to see these two heads at the same time making horrible faces at each other, so that some of the spectators who did not expect such results, were truly frightened. […] Having removed the upper part of the skull by a dissection parallel to the base of the brain, I incized the meninges, and made an arc from one of the ears to the medullary substance: first I saw sharp convulsions in the facial muscles. […] I separated the lobes of the brain, and applied the arc to the corpus callosum and to the ears, and then to the lips: and there was a violent shock over all the head, and over all the muscles of the face. Some of the spectators even believed that the corpus callosum had been affected by a convulsion of its own […]. [ALD 04, pp. 73–74, author’s translation]

Thus, by applying localized galvanization directly to selected nerves and not to the spinal cord, Aldini used the expression experimental myology [ALD 04, p. 100], the only one capable of making the fixed and mobile points of muscles and the true term of their action sensitive to the eye. Did Aldini really seek to bring the dead back to life? Nothing is less certain. In any case, it appears that he did not seek to bring criminals back to life, but accident victims, drowning victims or suicides caught in an apparent and perhaps reversible death. Indeed, the industrialization of the 19th Century, accompanied by the growth of cities, created the study of new neuroses, a psychiatricization of mores but also an increasing suicide rate, as Brierre de Boismont points out:

It is impossible not to notice, when going through them, that the study of suicide touches upon the great questions of our time, such as pauperism, work, salary, family, property, the future of craftsmen, the future of society perhaps, etc. All these subjects and many others find in the etiology of many teachings, at the same time as they reveal the depth of an evil that has claimed no less than 300,000 victims in France since the beginning of this century. [BRI 56, viii–ix, author’s translation]

Thus, Aldini’s perspective was that of a public health problem affecting several countries and of emergency medicine coming to the aid of unfortunate people who, as soon as they died, may have already regretted their action:

Nevertheless, it cannot be opposed that the help of galvanism should be given, together with any other, to these unfortunate people who, in despair, have sought their destruction by strangulation or other means. Such accidents are unfortunately all too frequent in large cities; and galvanism deserves all the more confidence because its application, in all these cases, suffers no delay. [ALD 04, p. 141, author’s translation]

Helping people in distress, defining death, understanding it in the depth of its physiological mechanisms were the goals pursued by Galvani’s nephew who promoted galvanism as an instrument of medical philanthropy. In fact, if galvanization contributed to differentiate, beyond the absence of movement and consciousness, the living from the dead, then it could help to save people who were not dying:

A host of facts have shown us many times that people have raced to their graves before death struck them irrevocably. [ALD 04, p. 143, author’s translation]

It was thus conceived as a diagnostic tool to make visible the conditions conducive to life:

Before we finish talking about the useful applications of Galvanism, we must indicate it as a means that could be used to prevent the premature burial of people who had fallen into lethargy. To judge whether death was real or apparent, it was sufficient to insert the tips of a Galvanic exciter into the muscle parts. [CAS 03, p. 38, author’s translation]

While Bichat positioned himself to provide a physiological description of the process of dying⁷, Aldini placed his studies in a societal perspective by linking them to the development of a resuscitation medicine⁸. The demonstration made in London on Forster is detailed in the newspaper The Times from January 22, 1803. It made a strong and lasting impression on the minds of scientists but also on all those present. As we have seen, Aldini did not seek immortality or miraculous resurrections. This discrepancy, between the imaginary linked to the representations given of his research and the scientific aspects, was the catalyst for Mary Shelley’s novel featuring a scientist facing his contradictions. Indeed, the idea that electricity can be the source of a resurrection is more a cultural representation than a medical theory:

If, after the extinction of general life, a remnant of life remains in the corpse, this remnant still shows electrical phenomena: once the nerves and muscles are dead, the electrification no longer produces any movement in them, and there is no electrical discharge that is able to revive a corpse. Electricity is therefore not the principle of life; it is only a form in which the principle manifests itself, a form of activity which the organism possesses in common with inorganic bodies, but to which it nevertheless imprints a particular modification. [PAL 47, p. 60, author’s translation]

Aldini had a much more humble goal: to demonstrate that galvanism could be a useful tool in a variety of resuscitation procedures for people who had died from asphyxiation or drowning. His stay in London was financed by the Royal Humane Society, for which it had been a concern for several decades. Thus, his work is considered on the borderline of the transition from resurrection to resuscitation:

I invite them today to employ in similar cases the action of galvanism in the manner I have proposed. It is good to multiply the means to relieve our fellow human beings, especially in circumstances where old medicine offers us very few resources. In the meantime, I think it would be useful to do some tests on asphyxiated animals in different ways. These tests could be valuable, and provide a lot of perspective to saving the lives of men. [ALD 04, p. 98, author’s translation]

The fact that the experiments were practiced on individuals who had died without having suffered from illness brings to light the process described by Aldini for returning consciousness and movement. This process, far from being imbued with magic, required an organism whose unaltered organization could make a return to functionality:

Galvanism must not be placed among these chimerical agents; its action is real and well observed, its devices and their construction are not hidden, their strength is known and felt by everyone. [ALD 04, p. 139, author’s translation]

While it was possible to bring subjects back to life, it was not in any biological condition, which already underlined a demarcation between the theme of resurrection and that of reanimation. Indeed, only subjects who were not dead could be brought back:

I think, therefore, that the application of this highly-active stimulus should be limited to cases where the animal suspension is affected at a single point, which still gives hope for the recovery of life. If the heart, if the circulation, if the lungs, if the nervous system is inactive, provided that the organism still exists, and that the vital functions are not suspended for long, galvanism can be administered. [ALD 04, p. 141, author’s translation]

Following this, the idea of the profound connection between galvanism and vital phenomena traveled beyond the spheres of physics and medicine. His experiments in reviving the hearts of bodies marked human power over life itself. This spectacular and public dimension played a decisive role in the fact that electricity could impress society and be seen as the cure for all ills. A visible sign of this was the high presence of electroshocked bodies in dissecting rooms or anatomical theaters. This development placed the electric body in its singularity among bodies and technical tools:

Making the electric body a viable cultural construct was to make it blend into its environment. The body gained its significance in the same way as any other technological artefacts that inhabited the same space. It mattered therefore for the sense of Aldini’s or Ure’s versions of the electrical body that they were articulated in a dissecting room. [RHY 02, p. 114]

The human body, by becoming an electric body, became the post-mortem electro-experimental field of invisible energy. It represented the possibility for galvanists to experiment on the body as if it were alive. While the animal model could be experimented with in vivo, the human body was reified as a scientific object when it was inert. Galvanism opened up the possibility of experimenting on a body that had been temporarily and mechanically put back into motion. Electricity made it possible to make the link between the dissected body and the animated body and was part of the fantasized vision that society had of science and its actors. In a reprint from 1839, Bichat related an experiment on the setting in motion of pieces of human bodies and how they regained mobility and precision of movement:

The last galvanic experiment was made by transmitting the electric fluid from the spinal marrow to the cubital nerve near the elbow; the fingers moved quickly like those of a performer on a violin; one of the assistants who endeavored to keep the hand shut, found that it opened in spite of his efforts. A wire was applied to a slight incision made at the end of the first finger; the hand had been previously shut; the finger was instantly extended, and, after a convulsive agitation of the arm, the dead man seemed to point his finger at the spectators, some of whom thought that he had come to life. [BIC 39]

The imaginary supernatural powers attributed to galvanism transcended public boundaries and were recounted even in certain scientific treatises. Thus, in the early 19th Century, Petetin described it as follows:

The recent discovery of a new fluid is occupying all the savants. Its appearance has been accompanied by prodigies. It was not far from resurrecting the dead; at least it has the well-established property of reproducing movement in them: it is already considered to be the precious fluid which animates all parts of the human body; and this insight gives hope of giving man long youth and prolonging his life. [PET 02–03, pp. 2–3, author’s translation]

Experiments on human automatons continued during the 19th Century, with some paradigmatic cases of fascination with the vital spark returned to these bodies. The soul of the criminals who inhabited them was often perceived as the soul of life. Expressions such as “demonic smile” and “crazy eyes” flourished in the accounts of these demonstrations. The experiment by Scottish chemist Andrew Ure (1778–1857), carried out on November 4, 1818 [URE 19], on the corpse of a torture victim, which he subjected to a voltaic pile 10 minutes after he had been taken down from the gallows, is a significant episode in this story. He performed this demonstration in an anatomy theater at the University of Glasgow where students mingled with curious anatomists and doctors. From vesalian dissection to the galvanization of lifeless bodies, there was an epistemological separation between an inert, resolutely post-mortem anatomy and an animated electrical anatomy. The obstacle that was overcome between the 16th and the 19th Centuries was that of animating human bodies. This moment when the body started moving again corresponded to a technical feat of the galvanist who, by combining the new technologies of his time, became a symbol of the almighty scientist. Ure exposed the spinal cord by ablation and made incisions to uncover the sciatic, ulnar and diaphragmatic nerves. By electrifying these different nerves with two metal rods charged by a 270-plate voltaic pile, contractions were caused in the torso and limbs:

The success was truly extraordinary. Full and labored breathing began at once; the chest was raised and lowered; the abdomen felt movements corresponding to those of the diaphragm […] Third experiment. The supraorbital nerve was exposed at the point on the forehead where it exits from the supraciliary hole above the eyebrow; one of the ends of the apparatus was brought into contact with this nerve, and the other with the heel. The strangest grimaces appeared on the face. […] Rage, horror, despair, anguish, atrocious smiles were painted in turn on the murderer’s face, with a hideous expression that no brush could render. Several of the curious ones ran away shivering, and one of them lost consciousness. [BAR 06, pp. 38–39, author’s translation]

It is said that the leg was thrown so violently that a helper was almost knocked over. Thus the corpse rose, seeming to look at the spectators and showing signs of breathing movements:

By placing the electrified corpse’s gesticulations in the context of the stylized gestures of Regency stage and art, Ure was also reminding his audience, as Aldini had done with his experiments, that electricity seemed to hold out the very real possibility of restoring the dead to life. [RHY 02, p. 98]

Figure 1.4. In this 1867 illustration, a crowd of scientists watch in horror as Andrew Ure shakes and shocks Matthew Clydesdale’s lifeless body with electricity

In 1819, Thomas Weem, executed for murder, was galvanized by James Cumming (1777–1861), a chemist at Cambridge and considered a pioneer of electrical instrumentation [STO 76, p. 29]:

The execution of Thomas Weems for murder on 6 August 1819 has become very famous in criminal histories. His condemned body was subjected to a number of quasi-scientific experiments to explore the nature of electricity, resuscitation and brain death, all associated with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). [HUR 16, p. 241]

Cumming tried to make the body breathe by exciting the vagus nerves from the brain to the heart, lung, and digestive organs. His idea, according to the identity of the nervous fluid with the electric fluid, was to revive the organism’s regulating nervous fluid by means of galvanization. From Aldini to Cumming the concept of “experimental resurrection of inanimate flesh” was developed [BAR 06, p. 38]. Between these galvanic experiments, from the beginning of the 19th Century, and contemporary reanimation, the potential of the control of life mechanisms by medicine was taking shape:

Friday 6 August 1819 – The body, after being suspended for an hour… was immediately conveyed in a cart to the Chemical Lecture of the Botanical Garden, where Professor Cumming had prepared a powerful galvanic battery (which formerly belonged to Professor Tennet) with the intention of repeating some of the experiments lately described by Dr. Ure of Glasgow in the Journal of the Royal Institution.⁹

The Cambridge Journal kept a full account of the experimental stages of this research and helped to disseminate it in society, where it asked a fundamental question: what is dying?:

The beheaded and hanged men of London and Glasgow were only the prelude to a medicine of reanimation, which throughout the 19th Century was concerned with the freshest cadavers, multiplying discussions on the definition of the thresholds of death and its reversibility. [BAR 06, p. 41, author’s translation]

Between the belief in the persistence of a consciousness that some believed they could see through the distortions of galvanized criminals’ features and the fact of managing death for a definitive and irremediable moment, the refusal of human finiteness emerged. These experiments were the culmination of medical utopias and the imagination of a potential victory over death. They tell the story of galvanism in terms of the connection between its applications and the mechanisms of life:

Sturgeon’s Lectures¹⁰ constructed a strikingly novel genealogy for galvanism. Rather than tracing the development of experiments and ideas from the Volta’s pile through Humphry Davy’s heroic experiences, he pointed to a different history. His heroes were Galvani and Aldini (….). The history of galvanism, on the one hand, was the history of the discovery and demonstration of electricity’s connections with and role in the animal economy. [RHY 98, p. 129]

In terms of physiology, knowledge acquired on an animated anatomy and for future resuscitation techniques, they were extremely heuristic:

If these (still?) fantastical practices seem anecdotal, they nevertheless reveal the preponderance of the utopia of victory over death and over the body corrupted by life, of which we have brought to light during a few moments. They also point out to us that under their strange, curious and disturbing aspect, the experiments of Andrew Ure or Giovanni Aldini are always on the horizon of the technical utopias of our time. [BAR 06, p. 43, author’s translation]

The idea of the reversibility of death referred to the notion of stages in this process on which medicine could still intervene. This idea was based on the fact that the vital principles present in the body do not stop working immediately. The heart plays an important role. Seen as a pump, a mechanical part, it is considered as being able to be re-launched and capable, by its action on the blood circulation, to start again to excite the centers of innervation, those of the general motricity, and thus to ensure the redistribution in all the points of the organism, of an always present energy:

However speculative such assumptions may be, they nonetheless provide a precise measure of what death means: they establish the exact meaning of this physiological transformation. Just as life as a whole was nothing but a result and harmony, its disappearance cannot be the ruin of any principle, and the death of this whole is reduced to an accident which restores to their freedom – a fatal freedom, since it must this time bring about a real annihilation – the partial energies whose association was necessary for the constitution of the individual. The death of the whole is thus only the breaking of the united pact that creates individuality: there is no life that perishes, for real life is concentrated entirely within the organic element. [BER 05, p. 18, author’s translation]

The spirit of the early 19th Century permeates the novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus [SHE 18], which Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) published in 1818; the book quickly became a classic in the field of Gothic horror literature:

Mary recalled that, after some days of ‘blank incapability’, the night of 16 June, she had a ‘waking dream’ that was at the origin of her own story: ‘I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out; and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy-half-vital motion.’ This description shares many similarities with what happened in London on January 17, 1803 when Aldini showed that Galvanic stimulation of the brain seemed able ‘to give an appearance of re-animation’. In the second chapter of Mary’s novel, the echo of the electrical experiments on dead bodies became even stronger, as Dr. Frankenstein specifically refers to electricity […]. [CAM 18, p. 28]

Mary Shelley was the daughter of the British philosopher, political theorist and novelist William Godwin (1756–1836) [GOD 20]. He was fascinated by the recent discoveries of galvanism, which he felt was an agent of materialism. These considerations led him to conclude the materiality of the soul and the non-necessity of a god. Moreover, inspired by the spirit of Enlightenment and the French Revolution, he proposed societal reforms designed according to the data of reason. His notoriety, as a defender of the most innovative ideas, failed to have him accused of materialism and atheism in the same way as his friend, Thelwall (1764–1834). He is considered part of the reformists and utopians projecting a society based on an egalitarian system, against whom the economist Malthus (1766–1834) wrote. Thelwall [THE 02] used electricity to argue for the material basis of life and human rights as a natural consequence of the laws of nature. While electricity was a sign of scientific progress, it became a paradigm for political progress:

Machines appeared to provide a concrete way of articulating and making sense of new relationships between natural and political economies, between human labour and the natural forces increasingly being harnessed to power industrial progress. From this perspective, the human body itself could be regarded as a machine, embodying the newly articulated doctrine of the conservation of energy in just the same way as did an electric battery or a steam engine. [RHY 99, p. 249]

This inscription of the history of electricity in the post-revolutionary context makes it possible to understand to what extent the craze that it provoked symbolized the advent of a society marked by the progress of technology. The passage in Mary Shelley’s novel in which the scientist, Victor Frankenstein, explains how he glimpsed the links between light and the possibility of animating matter offers several interpretations. The most likely is the link between natural electricity such as lightning and the vital spark that animates matter in vivo:

[…] from the midst of this darkness, a sudden light broke in upon me – a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised that among so many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret. Remember, I am not recording the vision of a madman. The sun does not more certainly shine in the heavens than that which I now affirm is true. Some miracle might have produced it, yet the stages of the discovery were distinct and probable. After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter. [SHE 18, pp. 75–76]¹¹

Shelley’s text is not without ambivalence on the technical aspects. As mentioned above, her father was a supporter of galvanism. Her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), took part in lively debates, notably with Dr. William Lawrence (1783–1867), on the physical origins of life and the possibility of sparks bringing the dead back to life. The novel Frankenstein represents the fascination for the possibility of artificially creating life, but also, and perhaps above all, a surpassing of the dualism present in the fact of animating human automatons, insofar as the creature is not a machine but possesses a consciousness embodied in its matter. Mary Shelley, in a holism and materialism in which spirit is generated by matter, linked the organic parts from which the creature is formed, coming from different criminals, and their influence on consciousness. From the project of distinguishing the stages that range from life to death, the powerful myth of making life or giving it to organic matter in its modern, technical and progressive version, represented in the Frankenstein epic where materialism is next to the technical power of Man, was born:

From the suggestion of these experiments came a wide range of Gothic literature, especially in Germany, England and America, of which the most famous expression, but also the most open to multiple interpretations, was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. [FRE 14, p. 254, author’s translation]

Thus the exploration of the possibilities of reanimating matter had clearly taken hold of many experimenters in medical electricity. The voltaic pile, symbol of major technical progress, made the hand of the modern Prometheus powerful. Works of fiction on these issues were not uncommon and some can be considered gems of the genre. Here is an excerpt from a play, published in 1854, symbolizing the fascination and fear of galvanism but also the human ambiguity of its position in nature. The scene takes place in Bologna, in 1797:

(Galvani alone, sitting by the table.) Bringing the dead back to life! Recalling the divine breath in an inanimate body! O thought of breaking the brain! A thought that contains a hundred times more pride than it took to lose the first man! Giving life to the dead! But it is to want to correct the work of God; to want to be God himself! And yet, it is certain that since the earth has been turning, there has been a misunderstanding between the Creator and his noblest creature: that one should die when one has reached the limits of extreme old age, when the springs of the organism are worn out, one understands it: this is the universal law; but in the prime of life, in the flower of youth, to die! To die altogether is a nonsense that God did not commit. [AND 54, p. 3, author’s translation]

In the rest of the story, a murder and a galvanic resurrection are staged during which a female character stands at one end of a semi-organic circuit with a Leyden jar and transmits the electric fluid to her lover’s lifeless body, under the instructions of the doctor [AND 54, p. 123].

Another renowned author, who was not insensitive to the electric imaginary and the Promethean culture that emerged from it, is Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). An assiduous reader of the Medico-Chirurgical Journal; or, London Medical and Surgical Review edited by Dr. James Johnson (1777–1845) and published between 1820 and 1847, and of the famous medical journal The Lancet, he dispersed in his tales and essays episodes of galvanism or dead people coming back to life, not without a certain irony.

In his 1844 short story “The Premature Burial”, he captures the societal anguish of being buried alive and emphasizes the galvanic apparatus as a diagnostic tool for death:

The mention of the galvanic battery, nevertheless, recalls to my memory a well known and very extraordinary case in point, where its action proved the means of restoring to animation a young attorney of London, who had been interred for two days. This occurred in 1831 and created, at the time, a very profound sensation where it was made the subject of converse. The patient, Mr. Edward Stapleton, had died, apparently of typhus fever, accompanied with some anomalous symptoms which had excited the curiosity of his medical attendants […]. An incision of some extent had been actually made in the abdomen, when the fresh and undecayed appearance of the subject suggested an application of the battery. One experiment succeeded another, and the customary effects supervened, with nothing to characterize them in any respect, except, upon one or two occasions, a more than ordinary degree of life-likeness in the convulsive action. It grew late. The day was about to dawn; and it was thought expedient, at length, to proceed at once to the dissection. One student, however, was especially desirous of testing a theory of his own, and insisted upon applying the battery to one of the pectoral muscles. A rough gash was made, and a wire hastily brought in contact, when the patient, with a hurried but quite unconvulsive movement, arose from the table, stepped into the middle of the floor, gazed about him uneasily for a few seconds, and then spoke. What he said was unintelligible, but words were uttered; the syllabification was distinct. Having spoken, he fell heavily to the floor. [POE 44, pp. 757–758]

The theatricalization underlines the stupor of the subject who awakened fully conscious, differentiating him from the automaton to which mobility is infused in the experiments of Aldini or Ure. The body was clearly not brought back to life since it did not bear the post-mortem alterations. So he was alive but unconscious. Beyond the literary aspects, galvanization was rationally applied to a body that could not be considered dead. The point here is to differentiate between galvanic culture and the imaginary symbolized by the novel Frankenstein. Another of Poe’s texts will help us to make this distinction. In Some Words With a Mummy [POE 45], he recounts, not without humor, the case, much closer to the myth than to a societal application of galvanism, of a mummy three or four thousand years old. His nerves exposed and feeling the first effects of the application of a galvanic cell caused movements very close to Aldini’s descriptions of the tortured corpses. Absorbing contractions of the palpebral muscles and lower limbs, the mummy ended up giving a strong kick to a scientist. The fictitious dimension made it possible to go further than the description of automatic movements. This text refers to the popular fear of the dead returning from the dead, the novelty of which lies in the fact that the mummy’s return was under the effects of the technique and not under supernatural conditions. The comparison of the two texts shows very divergent cultural and literary instrumentalizations of galvanization. While in the first, Poe relates the fictional conditions of reanimation; in the second, under the guise of mocking traditional fears, he takes the experience of the tortured to the absurd by taking as his object a mummy several millennia old. Poe’s reference to electricity corresponds to a long reflection on the unity of the laws of physics in the universe, culminating in Eureka [POE 48], an essay dedicated to Alexander von Humboldt. Body and soul of the universe, electricity allows us to understand nature in its totality, material and spiritual, to which we must relate the phenomena of vitality and consciousness:

The cosmos was a vast electrical machine that could be understood and manipulated in much the same way as they understood and manipulated the electrical machines and artefacts with which they plied their trade. Human bodies were part of the electrical universe too. [RHY 02, p. 102]

From the research on clouds, whose meteorological disturbances generate thunderstorms, a culture of the powers of electricity was born. From the sky to the body of the torpedo fish, electricity seems to flow everywhere. In this materialistic mechanics, it found its political and cultural foundation in the revolutionary period and developed to the core of organic fibers. From inorganic to matter, it permeated all 19th Century research. Several medical branches developed from the knowledge of electricity and the way it intervenes in vital phenomena: diagnosis, resuscitation, electrophysiology and electrotherapy are all fields born from the physics of this energy. The history of electricity is not only played out in medical circles, it permeates societies shaken by political events. In addition to allowing the development of medical and physiological experimentation, it poses the exploration of the boundaries of life and death as a philosophical, medical and societal issue. The concepts of the electrical body, electrical culture or galvanic culture are the results of this intertwining of electricity and society. Within a materialistic philosophy, it promotes the awareness that not everything stops with voluntary movement and that there is a certain permanence of life in death, especially through chemical and physical processes. From the culture of electricity to the culture of galvanism, the notion of scientific scales of the living developed to understand the sequence of non-life, life and the living as a whole. Moreover, the idea of a galvanist culture refers to a certain type of representation of the individual in the 19th Century: an individual, living in ever-larger cities whose mores must meet the standards of the society in which they evolve. The result of this societal expansion of galvanism is that electricity, in addition to stimulating a body that has become electric, also heals its consciousness. The historical value of medical electricity is not reduced to the technical prowess it achieves, but responds to the epistemology of each context, by being inscribed and renewed in it. From success to failure, at each stage it answers medical-philosophical questions about human beings and matter, about an organism whose functions generate consciousness:

One reason why electrical engineers saw electrotherapeutics as an area where their own expertise was relevant was because they recognized the electrical body as being made up of the same kind of components, organized in the same kind of system as that on which they plied their trade. [RHY 02, p. 106]

The creation of the electric chair is rooted in the large number of deaths by electrocution as well as in research into the medical boundaries between life and death and is the result of the acute awareness of the power taken by this energy. In North America, it thus became a killing instrument in the early 1890s. This invention was not insignificant in relation to the fact that electricity was developing as the guarantor of a certain societal order. While at the beginning of the 19th Century it was a question of bringing people back to life, electricity could then be used to punish criminals for their crime. But the cultural impact of electricity did not stop at the physiological understanding of states of life and death. From 1770, medical electricity was applied to nervous and psychic illnesses, particularly in the work of Ledru [LED 83]. This research into the fundamentals of electrotherapy for nervous and psychic diseases will be developed further. From 1840 onwards, galvanic electricity became a symbol of control and standardization of the subject. From the myth of Frankenstein, we move into the context of Dr. Jekyll unwillingly transforming himself into Hyde. From this beast that sleeps in each one of us, electricity symbolizes the cage:

And it chanced that the direction of my scientific studies, which led wholly toward the mystic and the transcendental, re-acted and shed a strong light on this consciousness of the perennial war among my members. With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two. [STE 86, p. 75]

This shift in the applications of these techniques cannot be detached from the organicist and materialist movement that integrates the mental faculties within the brain structures.