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Galvani had already spoken about neuro-electric fluid [GAL 53, p. 64] and attributed the genesis of animal electricity to the brain. Correlate to this the fact that the nervous structure was thought of in terms of wires for the nerves and voltaic pile for the brain organ. At the same time, the work of Ledru and abbé Sans on the links between artificial electricity and nervous diseases put forward the latter to be treated by the applications of electric fluid. Thus, at the time when electrotherapy was developing, the 19th Century was marked by an imaginary control by electricity of mores and behaviors considered harmful. If humans were beings in which matter generated consciousness, they seemed to be inhabited by a beast that sometimes pushed them to adopt harmful societal behaviors. On the literary side, we find this idea in Stevenson’s novel (1850–1894) or in The Beast in Man where Zola (1840–1902) [ZOL 85] stages the archetype of the mad murderer. This idea also developed in the imagining of galvanic doctors who, realizing the complexity of the links between the brain and consciousness, conceived these therapies as the guarantors of a certain moral security. Electricity then became a tool for the standardization of the individual, inherited from the research of Delgado or Heath in the mid-20th Century:

The key to understanding – and disciplining – the body in this respect was standardization. Just as other items of electrical apparatus and equipment needed to be standardized to function effectively within the new networks of power, so did the electrical body. [RHY 02, p. 102]

There was a division between the idea of reducing the vital functions of a body to that of controlling the subject and his behaviors. A conceptual division between a medicine marked by the Cartesian dualism of the animal machine, then by the materialism of the 18th Century, and a holistic medicine where faculties and consciousness were integrated into the human machine. Yet these two approaches complemented each other. From the beginning of the 19th Century, neuroanatomical research was looking for Galvani’s neuro-electric fluid within the human brain, in order to record it and correlate it with the expression of mental faculties. In 1808, Malacarne was between a post-mortem approach of the brain organ to the idea of acting on its electricity. The analogy of the electrical machine to organic structures extended to the nervous system:

Are not brains, nervous ganglions, and nerves, which are evidently the seat of vital action, in the identities we call animal, real electrical machines; similar in principle, as they are similar in substance and in structure, to the electrical discharging apparatus of the gymnotus and torpedo, which consist of large brain-like ganglions connected with the spinal cord? [MAC 31, p. 94 in RHY 98, p. 131]

Thus, Malacarne published a text entitled “Conoscendo dalla organizzazione del cervelletto in ispezie, e forse anche da più attento esame del cervello e dalla midolla spinale che queste viscere formano qualche cosa di somigliante alla colonna galvanica del Volta” [MAL 08, pp. 122–130]. Probably the first localizer of the faculties within the cerebral organ, his research was marked among the scholars of the 19th Century [CHE 16]. Bayle quotes him in his Encyclopédie des sciences médicales about his notorious influence on Reil’s reflections who:

Reasoning from Malacarne’s observations of the proportion between the development of intellectual faculties and the number of superimposed blades of the cerebellum, he argues that this organ is formed by an aggregation of small galvanic cells. [BAY 25, pp. 798–799, author’s translation]

In 1808, he developed a project in which he designed a series of electrophysiological experiments in which brain slices were connected together like a galvanic column, in order to find the cerebral source of the human machine’s animating fluid. He thus presented the experimental steps necessary to verify the brain organ as a source of animal electricity. The physiological theory according to which the brain would produce, in the same way as a voltaic pile, electricity allowing the body to move, was based on a double metaphor: the first was mechanistic and compared the functioning of the brain to that of a machine; while the second was based on the identity of the shape of the galvanic column with the morphological organization of the brain structures. Animal electricity was conceived as the cause of the anatomopsychological nature of man. Beyond the source of the movement, this project tended to seek in galvanism, a “[…] phenomenon as important for animal functions” [MAL 08, p. 126, author’s translation], a similar functional principle for the expression of intellectual faculties and nervous mechanisms. Brain function was thus brought back to form: “[…] by beginning to subject to it those parts of the brain whose structure is visibly closest to the galvanic column, i.e. the cerebellum, and then moving on to the brain itself […]” [MAL 08, p. 128, author’s translation].

The heuristic fertility of this analogy between the electricity-generating machine and the nervous productions of the brain lay in the resemblance of the structures, from which was induced an identity of the mechanisms:

Let us assume six hundred and add the three hundred slices of the cerebellum that we observe and compare this machine with the galvanic column formed by nine hundred discs, also assuming some analogy in the activity of exercising galvanism. Shouldn’t we expect these powerful phenomena we admire in individuals to be produced by a hitherto unknown prerogative of the nervous and cerebral system? [MAL 08, p. 125, author’s translation]

This research was linked, on the one hand, to neuro-anatomy, since no experiment could be undertaken without prior anatomical knowledge of the central nervous system, and on the other hand, to the experimental dimension of the recordings that Malacarne planned to make. The analogy of the cerebral structures with the galvanic column is traditionally attributed to Luigi Rolando (1773–1831), who from 1809 [ROL 09] stimulated the different parts of the column with current and thus caused violent convulsive phenomena in animal cerebella. In 1810, von Paula Gruithuisen (1774–1852) [GRU 10] described the cortical substance as an inexhaustible source of nerve power and stressed that it was a secretory organ. Reil imagined the cerebellum as a kind of voltaic pile, based on its histological aspect and the idea of a natural circuit. In 1840, Baillarger (1809–1890) [BAI 40] described the cell layers of the cerebral cortex and recommended that with its six alternating sheets of white and gray substances, it would be most similar to a battery and therefore suspected of making animal-electric fluid. The analogy of brain structures with a battery provided a morphophysiological model of a natural circuit conducting electricity from one point in the body to another:

In the cerebellum, there are a large number of separate slices superimposed on each other and joined together by a kind of conductor like the two elements of a galvanic cell. It is also noticeable that the nerves are formed of uninterrupted threads from the brain or spinal cord to their destination, and that these threads are usually wrapped in a fatty material that completely isolates them from each other and from neighboring parts; this gives these nerve conductors much resemblance to the silk-covered metal wires so often used to conduct electricity from one place to another without loss of power. [PAL 47, p. 39, author’s translation]

Although animal fluid and electric fluid were often compared, there was still some ambiguity: their different applications did not require the same equipment. Animal fluid referred to the organic secretion of an energy similar to electricity. However, imagining a brain conceived as the driving force of the human machine, in a holistic perspective, included the production of normal and pathological thought, ideas and mental content. Considered to be responsible for behaviors considered as deviant, disturbances of the electrical cerebral organization needed to be medically and technically taken care of. This research was the catalyst the historical and conceptual articulation of the dominant influence of physics on the life sciences and of a medical discourse that attempted to understand the particularity of cerebral mechanisms in their organic and moral dimensions. Thus, galvanism referred to an imagination of the power of the human brain and contributed to basic cerebral myths on its unknown powers, such as telepathy or telekinesis:

When the Voltaic pile produces incredible phenomena, when all the bodies of nature act and react upon each other, when electricity perhaps presides over all physical and vital phenomena, when its powerful action is perhaps not alien to the reproduction and evolution of living bodies, can we say that nervous action, the nervous fluid, the animal electricity, the magnetic fluid, any word, emanating from the brain of man, whose two substances and their numerous and deep convolutions perhaps form an animated electric instrument, can it be affirmed, I say, that this nervous fluid, after having been powerfully directed at the fingertips, cannot go beyond the limit of the nails? Can it not ally, unite and correspond with another person’s nervous system and impress them? [PIG 39, p. 41, author’s translation]

The beginning of the 19th Century marked the construction of a culture of physical, biological and medical electricity, of which today’s medicine still bears the traces. The links between the development of techniques for transmitting, stimulating and measuring electricity and progress in understanding the body were close. They were strengthened by work on the brain, with the conceptual background of the problem of how electricity maintains unity between mind, body and world. For galvanic doctors, there was no longer any doubt about the electrical nature of a mind-body connection. Thus was born the concept of an electric brain on which it was possible to intervene in order to modify, repair and/or contain the mind. As early as 1810, Matthew Yatman published a treatise entitled Galvanism, proved to be a regular assistant branch of medicine; also, “Interesting Inquiries concerning this influence, with regard to Living Actions” [YAT 10]. As a preamble, he describes animal fluid as the key to understanding all scales of life, from involuntary movements to conscious acts:

The animal vital principle, formerly called ‘The Nervous Fluid’ is the connecting medium between mind and body; the source and regulating spring of animal sensation and expression, action and motion, both voluntary and involuntary; comprehending the circulation of the blood, respiration and all the other vital functions, or living actions. [YAT 10, p. 3]

This harmonious communication between all levels of the organism took place, under what he called, the electrical influence formed in the lungs by the action of respiration, producing oxidation and chemical changes in the blood. Indeed, he took up the theme, largely theorized after 1740, of the influence of natural electricity present everywhere and absorbed by the mechanics of the body. The consideration was that the brain plays a central role in this modeling of the body as it separates electricity from the blood and transmits it throughout the vascular and muscular system, producing action.

Electricity developed as an exploratory science of the central nervous system of control and improvement. This conceptual framework, linked to the current concept of increasing and improving capabilities, triggered a flurry of advertising promoting the merits of electrical accessories capable of improving mores by improving behavior. The fact that electrical treatments were seen as cures for virtually all diseases of the body and mind, from neurasthenia to epilepsy, was a result of this societal imaginary. The term culture, applied to electricity, took on its full meaning:

Such ideas about the hierarchical ordering of the body and society also made sense in light of the connections formed in the early nineteenth century between nervous impulses and other imponderable forces. If nervous impulses acted like electricity, for example, it stood to reason that the nerves existed in a continually active state. Luigi Galvani’s connection between electrical and nervous impulse and Johannes Müller’s law of specific energies both emphasized the extent to which the body could be understood via analogy with machines powered by imponderable forces. [GRE 02, p. 82]

The history of electricity ranges from sensationalism to the moral control of the instincts that lie dormant in every person. From the representation of internal electricity as an indispensable ingredient of life to external electricity applied to moral disorders, we pass from the myth of Frankenstein to that of Hyde between 1803 and 1840. Carpenter (1813–1885) assumed that society was anxiety-provoking, disrupting the links between body and mind, leading to nervous diseases related to the eruption of uncontrollable behavior on the surface of the brain and nerves [CAR 46]. Critical of phrenological localizations, he developed a dynamic and functional brain model, ranging from the most automatic brain layers to those most likely to generate free will. His representations of an organic and hierarchical human nature were based on the evolutionary model developed by Jackson:

On both comparative and anatomical issues he highlighted phrenology’s flaws, and presented an alternative physiology of the mind rooted in anatomical considerations. The human mind was split not into faculties but into levels: automatic reflexes, which were the most basic; instinctual behaviour, of only limited psychological function; and consciousness, the highest level, which was anatomically located in the cerebral cortex. While all cerebral control of the body was mediated in the same way, through the reflex machinery Hall elucidated, there was a key difference between purely reflex and volitional actions, as the latter were dependent on the action of the will. The highest level, consciousness, interacting through the highest centres of the brain, was constituted and acted as a whole: this was the indivisible and non-material aspect of the human mind. [FIN 12b, p. 45]

Electricity was designed as the tool to keep behavioral overflows contained. It focused the hopes of a power that could be mastered by humanity and, acting upon it, would make it possible to discipline the behaviors generated by the most automatic and oldest layers of the brain. Carpenter, in the context of his studies on a physics of a humanity-inclusive world, also argued in favor of the idea that the different forces involved in inorganic processes were modifications of a single life force, itself correlated with the forces at work in matter. Electricity, magnetism, and other forces, including those of the body, would only be the different scales of one and the same energy, the difference then consisting of the devices by which they were manifested and measured. Thus, the mid-19th Century saw a resurgence of mesmerism. The discovery of electromagnetism had as cultural consequences the desire to unify these forces even in the knowledge of the human being on which the medical treatment of mental illnesses depended. This resurgence corresponded to the strong craze for the forces of nature, newly integrated into electrical therapies. In 1845, Thomas Courant, a follower of electric and magnetic medicine, founded the Société Philantropico-Magnétique de Paris as well as a newspaper called L’union magnétique : journal de la Société philanthropico-magnétique de Paris published between 1854 and 1869 [UNI 54–69]. His works, quoted many times by the press,¹² had a magical atmosphere close to mesmerism. The words of Crichton-Browne (1840–1938) reflect the universal role played by electricity since the 19th Century:

We used to explain electricity in relation to matter; now we are trying to explain matter in electrical terms. Could not electricity now be understood through the much more subtle manifestation of a psychic energy that has perhaps always been beyond the reach of research in physics, but in which we live, move and have our being? [CRI 38, p. 187, author’s translation]

After 1840, it became the guarantor of cerebral security by participating in the psychiatrization of moral disorders. Analogies with machines served as theoretical materials for understanding the electrical functioning of the nervous system. At the morpho-functional level, the nerves were considered like electrical wires and conducted instructions from the mind to the body, even if they were recalcitrant. It is in this context that Thomas Laycock’s cerebral-moral considerations on electrical control [LAY 40] came into play:

Thomas Laycock concurred that electricity could prove to be the therapy of choice in treating hysterical women. Electrotherapy could return to normality the bodies of those whom hysteria had transformed from ‘the gentle, truthful and self-denying woman’ into victims of ‘insane cunning, destructiveness, infanticidal impulses, morbid appetites, etc.’. [RHY 02, p. 105]

Laycock was part of this monistic scientific atmosphere where electricity should enable us to understand all the laws of nature, from the phenomena of life to the great terrestrial and cosmic phenomena. Nevertheless, while he drew analogies between the great forces of the universe and mental phenomena, he pointed out that the latter belong to us intrinsically while other phenomena remain external. What did this clarification made in 1863 mean? It appears that Laycock highlighted the fact that while electricity allows us to understand our environment, it also opens up the possibility of knowing ourselves to the depths of our mental schemas, which are themselves of an electrical nature. This electrical definition of our mental sphere complements his remarks on hysteria, a convulsive disease that was the target of medical electricity at the end of the 18th Century:

And it is clear, too, that the primary or essential phenomena of electricity, chemical affinity, heat, light, and even gravity, are just as much beyond the reach of observation as those of mind […]. There is an important difference; however, in favor of mental phenomena in this respect, in the fact that they are in immediate relation with our consciousness, whereas those of all other forces are only in a mediate relationship. [LAY 63, p. 169]

As early as 1840, several representations were at work in the description of the links between the nervous system, consciousness, hysteria and electricity: on the one hand, the woman was considered as the potential victim of her emotions; on the other hand and in a less obvious way, electricity was conceived as the coercive treatment of hysterical disturbances:

The consequences of all this is, the young female returns from school to her home a hysterical, wayward capricious girl; imbecile in mind, habits and pursuits; prone to hysteric paroxysms upon any unusual mental excitement. [LAY 40, p. 142]

He argued for restoring communication between the nervous system and the body through galvanization. Gray matter was compared to a galvanic cell in which an electric current was generated, while white matter was like the electric wires of telegraphs that conducted current within the body. Hysteria was the catalyst for these concerns to the extent that:

Nervous illness, hysteria is movement, excessive movement of body and mind. It has always been said that the hysterical person is unstable, capricious, irregular, that she gives in to ‘fantasy’. Pathological because it is too representative (‘more woman than other women,’ it is often said), this hysterical woman ‘changes ideas and feelings with inconceivable speed’. [BAC 12, p. 167, author’s translation]

Indeed, women were described as being unable to control their bodies, which were different in their nervous system from that of men, and were capricious machines requiring technical guidance in order to function. His conceptions marked a change in the consideration of behavioral disorders which were seen as psychiatric and technical objects that could only be regulated by an electrifying doctor:

Electricity not only provided a dynamical physical mechanism that explicated the link between mind and matter, morality and nature, but also served as a tool that allowed the doctor to intervene directly and correctly regulate the imbalances in the female physiological machine. [RHY 98, p. 245]

Laycock presented galvanic medicine as a solution to a social and moral problem relating to the normalization of women. While his arguments concerned the British context, we nevertheless find this medical imagining in the developments of war psychiatry or more generally in the history of electric shock therapy. Using the case of women, Laycock explored the possibility that electricity could be used to improve human behavior. The notion of improvement was conceived in relation to what society understood by this term. He argued for the electrical restoration of communication between mind and body by advocating localized electrification. In the specific case of hysteria, electric current needed to be applied to the sexual organs, without which there was little chance that the mental disorders it caused could be restored. Galvanism could act as a cleanser, resulting in the disappearance of cerebral pathological phenomena and the return of the mind to normality:

However, the scientific physician enlarges the sphere of his inquiries, the good of man is his great object – the end of all his labours being to prevent moral and corporeal disease, to alleviate pain, to restore health. [LAY 40, p. viii]

For doctors such as Laycock or Millingen, hysteria, trauma or Victorian male hypochondria had in common that they were embodied in the whole body, including the moral and intellectual dimensions. From this incarnation of psychic evils in all the nervous structures, the concept of unconscious cerebration was born:

One of the reasons ‘unconscious cerebration’ is more than a Victorian curiosity is that cognitive scientists have picked up this Victorian thread in theorising the ‘adaptive unconscious’ as opposed to the Freudian unconscious. [LEW 19, p. 77]

This concept is associated in Laycock’s work with the concept of brain reflex [LEF 03, pp. 26–27], made visible, in particular, in phobic reactions translated into reflex and automatic fear. The links between these concepts, heuristics for the development of cognitive sciences and electrical treatment, have scientific but also cultural stakes. If all ailments are nervous-based, then the nervous system becomes the preferred place of treatment for electrical therapies. Beyond his assertions about the feminine nature, Laycock proposed a more profound conception of the exploration of life and the living, from the scale of consciousness to the molecular scale:

They form the connecting link between the phenomena of consciousness, and the molecular changes in organic matter upon which the phenomena of heat, electricity, galvanism and magnetism depend. They point out a new path of experimental inquiry into the phenomena of life and thought and, if traced out in all their relations, cannot fail to change the whole aspect of mental philosophy. [LAY 40, p. 100]

In 1848, Millingen published The Passions or, Mind and Matter [MIL 48], a treatise in which he discussed the galvanization of mores and behavior. While he reinforced a very classical vision of hysteria, linked to the female sexual organs, he correlated this phenomenon to the weakness of “the energies of the brain or the sensorium of woman” [MIL 48, p. 44]. In a literary and romantic style, he questioned the essence of life:

Galvanism, it is true, may produce actions similar to those of many of our functions; but who would dare to assert that life is the result of galvanism or electricity? [MIL 48, p. 121]

He interpreted brain movements, which consist of processing external stimuli, in terms of electrical speed. This point must be understood through the image of a machine brain at the controls of a machine body. Thomas William Nunn (1837–1909) published in 1853 a treatise entitled Inflammation of the breast, and milk abscess in which he extended the comparison of the cerebral organ to a galvanic machine, to the uterus, the breast and the ovaries. They would have, according to him, a morphological organization comparable to a reproductive galvanic cell completed by the female nervous system:

The ovaria, uterus and mammae form, as it were, a reproductive pile, the circuit being completed by the nervous system. [NUN 53, p. 3]

The functional analogy of nerves with electric wires was taken up in a comparison of brain function with the electric telegraph, designed by Baron Schilling in St. Petersburg in 1833:

Again by analogy, just as we have compared the constitution of a swamp to a vast galvanic apparatus, we can also liken the human body to a voltaic pile, since it is also formed by the contact of heterogeneous elements whose nerves and muscles are the conductors, and solids and fluids are both the generators and conductors of electricity. [PAL 47, p. 232, author’s translation]

Electrical therapies cannot be separated from the invention of new technologies. In the same way that the telegraph helped to maintain order by allowing criminals to be reported more quickly; electricity guaranteed moral order by restoring electrical brain power immediately. While the nerves conduct instructions from the body to the mind, communication still has to work. The development of the telegraph, thus gave a model to the nervous functioning, conceived in terms of transfers and electrical communications:

As I have already observed, these instruments of mental transmission, although they are consecutive in their operation, and may be considered sequent in their course, yet act in such a simultaneous manner, that sensations are submitted to the test of our judgment and reason with electric rapidity. [MIL 48, p. 137]

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), daughter of the poet Byron (1788–1824), is a figure in the history of the brain as a machine. A pioneer in computer science [KIM 99] and creator of one of the first computer language programs, she showed an early interest in electricity and the brain-machine. As a patient of Laycock, she crossed paths¹³ with Andrew Crosse (1784–1855) with whom she evoked the fact of making electrical experiments a tool to reach a new understanding of vital mechanisms and consciousness.

The societal and medical stakes of the application of electricity were multiple: from the knowledge of Man in his materiality to the possibility of intervening on his mental physiology, the range was wide and is still developing today. While the cerebralization of behaviors and faculties seems to result from a rational movement, it also stems from an interventionist imaginary and the desire of the human species to control itself. In this context, the imaginary of convulsive behavior joins the electric imaginary. Both of them have had a lasting impact on the history of medicine. While the 19th Century was described as the century of convulsions, its conceptions of human nature were based on the electrical conception of the subject and the secularization of diseases of the mind. Thus, Laycock, Marshall Hall (1790–1857) and William Carpenter wanted to demonstrate that mind-body intricacies were very complex, that much of what the mind did to the body took place on the surface of consciousness and thought, but also that electricity played a crucial role in this research with the technical perspective of manipulating the currents that continually work between these substances. Electrification ranged from the whole body to the brain, making visible the important notion of functional localization, involving a representation of the brain organ as the organic substrate of human instincts, faculties and behaviors. This key notion of cerebralization was concretized and prolonged in a process of internalization of psychological evils. Gradually, the electrical stimulation penetrated deeper into the brain to better reveal its organization and functioning:

At the dawn of the 20th Century, the disturbing strangeness was displaced, no longer in a mysterious Other, but in oneself; in the darkness of one’s own psyche. [BAC 12, p. 184, author’s translation]

While between 1801 and 1840, electricity represented a counter-culture to atheism and materialism, capable of giving life back to the deceased, from 1840 onwards, it became the guarantor of the standardization of mores and a certain representation of happiness. Its developments thus marked the domination of Man over the evolution of his species.

Figure 1.5. French advertisement dating from 1911 for the “Herculex” electric belt

Electrical treatments were seen as universal remedies, or in any case were disseminated as such within public opinion. Everybody could compensate for the weaknesses of their animal fluid and re-establish good connections between their consciousness and their body. Devices were becoming more compact, easier to handle, resulting in a wave of companies producing healthy electrical items. These paramedical products, such as the electric belt, easily accounted for a quarter of advertisements in 1880 [LOE 99].

These devices referred to the fact that in addition to taming the world, bringing light and progress to it, electricity was able to discipline the body and mind. This medical movement, which had its roots in the second half of the 18th Century, could have died out in the face of the uncertain results initially brought about by electrical treatment. Because it corresponded to a time when society was looking for new, stable and rational points of reference to regulate the lives of individuals, its posterity in the history of neuroscience, understood in the broadest sense, is still relevant today. These applications of electricity to a body that had symbolically become a machine could be conceived as a step contrary to hypnotism, insofar as it was not a question of reaching consciousness by disconnecting its link with the body but of intervening directly on the cerebral circuits to regulate behavior. In the context of the development of electrotherapy rooms, we can speak of a naturalization of behavior. While convulsion referred to illnesses that are difficult to differentiate from each other, electricity appeared to be an instrument that could act both on the frozen condition and on the disordered movements, able to differentiate a psychological illness from an organic pathology. Thus, cataleptics, hysterics, ecstatics and epileptics resembled each other and merged together in the medical discourse, in that their lists of symptoms had in common that they did not present a visible organic disorder:

Others, such as the supporters of the École de la Salpêtrière in the 1880s, made it a simple symptom combined with other neuroses: hysteria above all, but also ecstasy, epilepsy, apoplexy, death, chorea. Some speak of ‘hysterical catalepsy’, others of ‘cataleptic ecstasy’; others still of ‘hystero-catalepsy’. [BAC 12, p. 173, author’s translation]

The excerpt from an article in the French newspaper Le monde illustré, dated August 14, 1887, describing the intense therapeutic activity in the electrotherapy department of Salpêtrière, uses the argument of the number of patients treated to assert the effectiveness of electrical treatments. This point underlines the fact that this treatment responded to a societal problem involving ailments about which little was known but which affected a large number of people:

Thousands of patients have been treated in recent years at the Salpêtrière. At each consultation, the average number of patients varies between two hundred and fifty and three hundred. […] It’s called the electric bath. Under its influence, we can observe various physiological phenomena (heat, blood circulation, etc.), too technical to find their place here. Localized electrification is done by means of appropriate exciters. The main ailments that are treated at the Salpêtrière clinic belong to two classes; nervous diseases (hysteria, neuralgia, all kinds of paralysis) and nutritional diseases in which we understand dyspepsia, stomach dilatation, chlorosis, anemia, rheumatism, etc. The ever-increasing number of patients coming in for each consultation is the best proof of the effectiveness of this treatment. Already known, but not yet known enough, this new therapeutic method, which has already taken the largest extension, is destined for the brightest future.¹⁴ (author’s translation)

In addition, the development of psychoanalysis and Charcot’s therapeutic hesitations moderated what could be conceived as a general craze for electrical interventionism on mental ills. Freud, who was first interested in Erb’s work, ended up considering this treatment as chimerical:

Whoever wants to make a living from the treatment of nervous patients must obviously be able to do something for them. My therapeutic arsenal contained only two weapons: electrotherapy and hypnosis, as sending to a hydrotherapy facility after a single consultation was not a sufficient source of gain. I referred to W. Erb’s manual for electrotherapy, which gave detailed prescriptions for the treatment of all the symptoms of nervous diseases. Unfortunately, I soon had to admit that my docility in following these prescriptions was of no avail, that what I had taken to be the result of accurate observations was nothing but a phantasmagorical structure. [FRE 50, p. 40, author’s translation]

Thus, it appears that the notions of the electrical body and then of electric consciousness followed one another during the 19th Century and nourished an already well-established culture of electricity. Difficult to separate from technical advances and exploratory and therapeutic applications, medical electricity permeated research on the integration of Man in nature, on the materiality of his mental mechanisms. From the objectification of this electrical nature, an imagining of the power, technique and capacity that electricity has to change us ourselves was born. Alongside the Neohippocratic movement was also the idea that individuals possess sensitivities to electricity on which their character traits depend or influence.