1What were electrical bodies during the nineteenth century made of? Many historians of both medicine and electricity have recently drawn our attention to the conflicted nature of nineteenth-century electrotherapeutic practice in the British Isles. It seems increasingly clear that there was no settled view as to the value of electrotherapy throughout the century, or even of what kind of practice electrotherapeutics might be taken to be. On the one hand, the relationship between electricity and the body had a seemingly respectable pedigree that stretched back to the eighteenth century and Stephen Gray’s incorporation of human bodies into his spectacular electrical demonstrations. On the other, bodily electricity’s cultural connotations of quackery and radical politics made it an uncomfortable prospect for professional medical gentlemen [1]. One outcome of this uncertainty surrounding the practice of electricity on the body, I suggest, was a similar uncertainty surrounding the identity of the electrical body itself. In the face of such contestation, the resources that practitioners turned to in order to construct different and competing articulations of the electrical body bear careful scrutiny. Looking at how (and where) electrical bodies were made during the nineteenth century should help us understand just where those bodies fitted in nineteenth-century culture.

2 There was clearly a prevailing concern with the relationship between electricity and the body throughout the nineteenth century [2]. Awareness of electricity’s apparently intimate connection with things bodily certainly appears to be a constant in popular (for lack of a better word) accounts of electricity and electrical performances more generally. [3] Probing the ways in which electricity’s connection to the body was forged and maintained in different settings seems a useful way, therefore, of starting to understand the peculiarities of nineteenth-century electrical cultures. Bodies were not self-evidently electrical for nineteenth-century interlocutors. The electrical body had to be made, much as other electrical artefacts had to be produced, through the marshalling and manipulation of material resources and the forging of practitioners’ authority through public performance. Just as with other items of electrical cultures, electrical bodies were put together and their stability maintained as the outcomes of specific, local and contingent bodily performances. [4] They were the outcomes of building the appropriate relationship of trust between performers and their audiences. [5] Authority, in this respect, as well as the stability of electrical artefacts such as the body, was the outcome of appropriate choreography. The identity and significance of the electrical body depended on how it was put together and by whom. [6]

3 In this paper I want to look at how the electrical body was put together in two quite different mid-Victorian settings. In a series of lectures at London’s Royal Polytechnic Institution in 1869, the English physician Benjamin Ward Richardson put together an account of the electrical body that took full advantage of the spectacular technologies of display that exhibitionist establishment could offer. I will look at the different instruments and artefacts that Richardson brought together in order to animate his articulation of bodily electricity and suggest how that body’s spatial setting helped determine the ways in which it might be understood by his audiences. A little over a decade and a half later, the electrical body offered by another physician, William Henry Stone, to the Institution of Electrical Engineers was quite differently constructed. Aiming to appeal to an alternative audience to that encountered by Richardson at the populist Royal Polytechnic, Stone used different components to construct his body and persuade his listeners of its utility. Richardson’s and Stone’s efforts to articulate different accounts of the electrical body were designed to appeal to particular constituencies. They drew, therefore, on different conventions of how such articulations were to be rendered and what kinds of performances were to be considered appropriate in particular settings.

4 Two things should become clear by looking at these performances. In the first place, it should become apparent that performers’ bodies and subjects’ bodies were co-constructed. Practitioners’ identities as authorities were the outcomes of bodily performances just as were the electrical bodies that they variously manipulated. Simply expressed, this may seem quite banal – it is impossible to trust an artefact without at the same time trusting in the credentials of its maker. But what matters here is that it is the same performances that underpin trust in both artefact and maker for particular audiences. Trust in artefacts and authors come together rather than separately. [7] Secondly, it should become clear that the electrical body as it appeared to different nineteenth-century audiences was indeed a construct. There was nothing particularly self-evident about the ways in which it was put together or what it might be taken to represent. In order to properly understand its different articulations close attention is needed to the different material components that go into its construction. In this context, context matters. At a superficial level, as we shall see, much the same kinds of artefacts and practices went into making both Richardson’s and Stone’s electrical bodies. What made them different (and what made those artefacts and practices different too, for that matter) was the context in which and with which they were performed.

Dissecting Space

5 As far as most British investigators were concerned, the basic parameters of the electrical body had been established by Giovanni Aldini’s public demonstrations at the beginning of the century. Aldini spent several weeks in London in late 1802 and early 1803 as part of his campaign to defend the reputation of his uncle, Luigi Galvani and his claims concerning the existence of a distinct animal electricity [8]. He had already visited Paris in the wake of his uncle’s bête noire, Alessandro Volta, and performed in front of the Société Galvanique and the Institut Nationale using components of animal bodies to demonstrate his and his uncle’s claims. [9] Aldini’s experiments needed to convey a very specific point. To confound Volta’s claims that animal electricity was in fact the product of contact between the metallic conductors used in the experiments he needed to be able to show that electricity could be produced without the intervention of any metallic substances at all. To this end, he created electrical circuits composed of animal body parts, including himself and his assistant as parts of the circuit and using frogs’ legs as instruments to detect the presence of electricity. [10] Aldini performed his repertoire of demonstrations several times during his visit to London. He gave public lectures and dissections at the Great Windmill Street Anatomical Theatre, at Guy’s Hospital and at the physician George Pearson’s lecturing rooms in Hanover Square. The highlight of his visit, nevertheless, was his public electrical dissection of George Forster, hanged for murder at Newgate, on 17 January 1803, at the College of Surgeons. [11]

6 Aldini’s performance with Forster’s body illustrates some relatively straightforward points about the way the electrical body was constructed in different spaces and contexts and how there was typically rather more going on in such performances than appeared on the surface. Resources needed to be carefully marshalled to make a success out of this kind of performance. Material and social resources (Forster himself, the battery, various witnesses, participants and technicians) had to be deployed appropriately to make things work. How the body then behaved was a highly contingent matter. Aldini noted that the electrical body’s vital principles varied “according to the sex, the age, the temperature, the physical constitution, and even the climate, and the changes of the atmosphere.” [12] This, presumably, is one reason at least why Aldini and his fellow-experimenters were relatively diffident about drawing any certain conclusion from the Forster experience. They knew it was contingent and difficult to read. It only made sense at all through tacit experience and against a backdrop of similar experiments on humans and other animals. [13] Even within such a context, the performance remained susceptible to multiple representations. What Aldini had done could be regarded as anything from an exercise in the possibility of artificial resuscitation, to an effort to resurrect the dead, to a conclusive demonstration of the electrical and material nature of the vital principle. [14]

7 One enduring feature of Aldini’s performances, however, was that whatever else he had demonstrated; he appeared to have established the importance of electricity as a stimulus to nervous and muscular action. During the 1860s, however, the English physician Benjamin Ward Richardson attempted to put together another assemblage of the electrical body: one in which electricity, far from being a stimulant, was a dangerous and potentially lethal soporific. [15] In Richardson’s nightmare scenario, far from being an aid to resuscitation in cases of drowning, galvanism could deliver the coup de grace: “We may excite on the dead face a sardonic smile, or make index finger point to any corner of the compass. We may exhort a deep gasp or startling sigh; but we are doing nothing, or if we are doing anything, it is an act which is unpardonable in its horror; we are restoring a momentary intelligence which we cannot sustain, and we are enabling the prostrate body to look into life only to sink again into cold oblivion.” [16] Richardson was an established and successful physician who had built up a lucrative private practice in London since arriving there from his first practice at Mortlake in Surrey in 1854. Once established in the metropolis he had started acquiring the portfolio of hospital appointments and honorary positions that came with professional success. In 1873, he delivered the Royal Society’s Croomian Lecture on “Muscular Irritability after Systemic Death”. The lecture was based on his longstanding and ongoing research into the possibility of resuscitation. [17] It was, of course, this research that drew his attention to the electrical body and Aldini’s experiments. Richardson’s interest in resuscitation (and in electricity’s role in the process) was closely linked to his research on local and general anaesthesia. [18] Broadly speaking, he was interested in the ways in which animals, or different animal body parts, could be sedated and stimulated, either through the administration of specific chemicals, electricity, or other mechanical means: At the British Medical Association’s meeting in Leeds in 1869, for example, he demonstrated his “painless knife”, consisting of a rapidly revolving circular blade, and demonstrated how he was able to “cut the ears of a rabbit into strips while the creature was contentedly munching green stuff in entire ignorance of the way in which it was being injured.” [19] By using galvanism as a way of trying to resuscitate animals that had been anesthetized or placed in suspended animation by some means or other, Richardson had come to the conclusion that Aldini and his fellow experimenters had been dangerously mistaken in their view of electricity’s possibilities as a resuscitating agent. Galvanism was as likely to provoke muscular paralysis as it was to cause contraction. In one experiment, Richardson claimed to have successfully operated on a dog that had been “rendered insensible” by an electric shock delivered by a Leyden Jar. The difference in effect was the outcome of the way electricity travelled through different parts of the body: “When death does not follow the discharge, the shock has affected those nervous centres only which govern voluntary muscular motion and sustain common sensibility. When the shock kills its effect extends to the centres which govern the involuntary muscular acts first, the respiratory; second; the circulatory.” [20]

8 Richardson’s experiments with the Royal Polytechnic Institution’s large induction coil in the summer of 1869 were an effort to sort out the different effects of galvanic shocks on animal tissues. In these experiments, which culminated in a series of public lectures at the Polytechnic, Richardson was particularly concerned to elucidate the effect of galvanism on different kinds of tissue - blood in particular. He demonstrated the outcome to his audience to spectacular effect, making full use of the Polytechnic’s substantial resources for the technology of display: “I place in glass tubes, a foot long and of equal diameter, portions of animal substance - blood, muscular fibre, brain matter, spinal cord, gelatine, water, fat; I arrange that the mass of each substance shall be the same. I pass a metal conductor the same distance into each, and I carefully insulate the tubes at both ends. I now make these tubes form part of the circuit of the coil and, acting on the very happy suggestion of Mr. Tobin, I interpose between the poles two of Gassiott’s [sic] electric fountains or cascades. When the room is darkened, see how beautiful is the light as it streams over the glass within the globe; we are using at this moment a metallic conductor. See, now, the light is decreased, and the current from the coil, instead of making its way silently, flies across from a point to a point; we have interposed our tube containing fat, and the current, resisted by that, strikes across. See, again, the fountain is nearly as beautiful as at first; we have removed our tube containing fat, and interposed blood. See, again, the light is less; we have changed blood for distilled water. Lastly see the difference between blood and spinal cord.” [21]

9 The Polytechnic, where Richardson carried out these experiments and performed his public demonstrations, was one of London’s premier sites for spectacular science. [22] Established in 1838, over the subsequent thirty years it had carved out an important niche for itself as a site for scientific lectures and demonstration, exhibitions of apparatus and inventions and curious shows of all kinds. During its early years, it was famous for its magic lantern dissolving views, its impressive hydro-electric apparatus and its famous diving bell. During the 1860s, the Polytechnic was managed by John Henry ‘Professor’ Pepper, one of London’s foremost scientific impresarios. [23] In 1862 he had been responsible for introducing ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ to the Polytechnic - a spectacular optical illusion that made it appear as if the Polytechnic’s lecture theatre itself was haunted. In 1869, just a few months before Richardson’s experiments, Pepper at the Polytechnic had unveiled the Great Induction Coil, set to “be a source of endless delight and wonder, and enable Professor Pepper to display effects, beautiful or terrible, such as have never been seen before.” The coil, constructed by the well-known instrument-maker, Alfred Apps, was almost ten feet in length and two feet in diameter, and powered by a Bunsen battery of forty cells. Pepper with his usual showman’s patter, prophesized that the “coil will not only amuse audiences, but will be diligently used at other times to promote the researches of electricians and physiologists.” [24]

10 Induction coils had been a staple part of the electrical technology of display since their invention in the 1830s by Nicholas Callan. [25] Consisting of two concentric coils of wire, with the inner coil attached to a battery; they were a convenient source of relatively high-intensity electrical currents that were particularly useful for administering shocks and producing spectacular shows of electrical sparks. They were useful sources of electricity for medical purposes as well as being important for telegraph technology. With the development of new and more powerful induction coils by the German instrument-maker Heinrich Ruhmkorff and others during the 1850s, electricians soon established a whole new repertoire of effects. With the high tension currents produced by the coils, not only could electricians put on show the traditional displays of shocks and sparks they could exhibit spectacular discharge effects as well. When electricity passed between electrodes inside partially evacuated and sealed glass tubes or flasks, spectacular glowing discharges became visible. Displays such as these were the mid-Victorian equivalents of the aurora borealis experiments of the previous generation. [26] The glowing discharges could be manipulated by holding a magnet, or even the demonstrator’s finger up against the glass tube. They were powerful additions to the technologies of display put on show at places like the Polytechnic Institution. [27]

11 One of the most spectacular of these discharge experiments, devised by John

12 Peter Gassiot, was the cascade. In this experiment a glass cup lined with tinfoil was placed inside an airpump with an electrode placed at its mouth. When the terminals of the induction coil were attached and the pump evacuated, “at first a faint clear blue light appears to proceed from the lower part of the beaker to the plate; this gradually becomes brighter until by slow degrees it rises, increasing in brilliancy, until it arrives at that part which is opposite or in a line with the inner coating the whole being intensely illuminated. A discharge then commences from the inside of the beaker to the plate of the pump in minute but diffused streams of blue light; continuing the exhaustion, at last a discharge takes place in the form of an undivided continuous stream, overlapping the vessel as if the electric fluid were itself a material body running over .... streams of lambent flame appear to pour down the sides of the plate, while a continuous discharge takes place from the inside coating.” [28] Gassiot’s Cascade experiment was often described as “one of the most beautiful that can be made with the Induction Coil.” [29]

13 This is the context that defined Richardson’s construction of the electrical body for his audiences - and by putting himself, his experiments and the electrical body on show there he was certainly adding weight to Pepper’s claims that the Great Induction Coil was an instrument that transcended any distinction between discovery and dissemination. Richardson’s performances - on this occasion at least - did not take place in the elite bastions of the Royal Institution or the Royal Society, though he had, of course, performed in such places before. Richardson’s articulation of the electrical body was put together using the spaces and resources of a place immediately identified in his audience’s mind as the stronghold of entertaining science. Richardson’s spectacular and stunning visual performances took full advantage of what the Polytechnic could do as well. In few if any other places could he have out together such a show of the electric body’s inner workings. Few places had such resources in terms of appropriate spaces, material resources and personnel. The Polytechnic’s place in the networks of production and consumption that underpinned London science was therefore crucial. [30] The space where he performed also mattered a great deal to the ways in which his experiments were understood. It put his performances in context for his audiences. This version of the electrical body belonged in the same space as Pepper’s Ghost and the Polytechnic’s spectacular magic lantern shows. It was put together using resources that were generally used to mount brilliant and dramatic displays of nature’s (and the performer’s) powers.

Bodies of Evidence:

14 Richardson’s electrical body was made up of disaggregated components. The way to understand the body’s electrical characteristics on this view was to take the body apart. Disassemblage, measurement and reconfiguration could make an electrical body that was the sum of its parts. William Henry Stone’s experiments in measuring the electrical resistance of the human body adopted a similar perspective, albeit in a very different setting. Making sense of the body’s characteristics in this way meant finding appropriate surrogates to stand for the body. [31] Stone was one of London’s most eminent doctors - he had the dubious privilege of being the first individual to be made a Fellow of both the Royal College of Surgeons and the Royal College of Physicians. He was Physician at St. Thomas’s Hospital and held the usual long list of honorary appointments. Stone was also a prominent early member of the Society for Psychical Research. [32] Stone was widely recognized as a pioneer in electrotherapeutics. His experiments on the electrical resistance of the human body were mainly carried out during the early 1880s and formed the basis for a number of lectures and lecture series to a variety of audiences. In 1886, he delivered the Royal College of Physicians’ Lumleian Lectures on the electrical conditions of the human body. [33] In view of his particular concerns, it is hardly surprising that the Society of Telegraph Engineers and its members were a crucial audience for Stone’s experiments. [34]

15 As Stone presented his paper on measurement in the medical application of electricity, co-authored with W.J. Kilner, to the Society of Telegraph Engineers in 1882 he had to work carefully to position himself appropriately to this important audience of electrical professionals. Medical and electrical cultures had differing perceptions of experimental practice and conduct. Stone needed to persuade his audience of hard-nosed and practical telegraph engineers that he was to be taken seriously too. He adopted the position of a supplicant to his audience. What electrotherapeutics needed, he told them, was a good dose of proper physics and they were the men to deliver it: “You can be of very great service to us physicians and physiologists by giving us suggestions, especially in the department with which you are no doubt most conversant (more conversant than we are), viz., the department of measurement. Medicine and its kindred departments lend themselves extremely ill to measurement. The tone of mind required in the physician is not that of the mathematician – it is rather judicial than computative. It is often a question of weighing doubtful evidence and of balancing alternatives rather than of solving an equation. But in electricity we have to solve equations, and, until we begin by settling the fundamental units, the whole department must remain in the condition to which I have adverted. Men who work by measurement are generally sterling and accurate men.” [35] Stone had to convince his audience that he too was a “sterling and accurate” man. [36]

16 Stone’s experiments, as he presented them at the Society of Telegraph

17 Engineers and elsewhere, basically consisted of putting a potential across various parts of the human body and measuring the resistance through a variety of methods. Measurements were typically taken from hand to hand, from foot to foot and from hand to foot. Stone reckoned that the third of these alternatives provided the “best test of the average conductivity of the body.” [37] The method also had the advantage of providing definite anatomical points between which measurements could easily be taken – the prominent ulna on the inside of the wrist and the lower edge of the malleolus on the ankle. In one experiment, for example, the resistances of three individuals of different heights were measured and compared. Two of these (measuring in at 5 foot 6 inches and 6 foot 3 inches respectively) were students at St. Thomas’s, the other, the fancifully named Hungarian Giant measured in at 7 foot 8 inches. The Giant was currently on show in London at the Aquarium and had been “kindly lent to the writer for examination”. [38] The potential was delivered through standard bichromate cells of 1.8 volts each, with between three and ten being used at different stages in the experiment. Stone discussed how various variations such as temperature and the relative states if health and fitness of the individuals being measured affected the results.

18 The reliability of Stone’s results depended crucially, of course, on the reliability of his measuring instruments. They not only had to be trustworthy, they had to be appropriate for the job in hand – in other words, they had to be the right kinds of instruments to reliably and accurately measure the characteristics of the human body. Clearly, then, Stone had a great deal invested in the validity of his assumptions as to just what kind of electrical object the body was. It mattered, for example, whether the body had the general conductive characteristics of a solid or a liquid, since different measuring instruments and protocols would be more appropriate in the respective cases. Stone argued that the body behaved more like a solid than a liquid, comparing it in one nice analogy to “a faulty submarine cable, in being at once a conductor, a condenser, and an electrolyte.” He also speculated that the living body “acts as a secondary battery” setting up a counter-emf opposing the applied potential and distorting the measurements. [39] Stone gave careful descriptions of his measuring apparatus, such as Wheatstone bridges, and of the extensive protocols he adopted in order to minimize error. He described different technologies he had investigated as ways of producing reliable readings.

19 The Society of Telegraph Engineers appeared more than happy to take Stone’s word for it that he wanted their assistance and advice. [40] The discussions following his presentation provide a nice example of the negotiated character of the electrical body. Audience members offered advice about measuring instruments and protocols. William Henry Preece suggested that the “very beautiful device” exhibited by Werner Siemens at the Paris Exposition would be a suitable instrument for measuring induced currents in the human body and the advice was endorsed by Desmond FitzGerald, editor of the Electrician. [41] Walter Coffin recommended “an excellent little vertical galvanometer made in London.” [42] One participant, Herbert MacLeod, suggested that the surface area of the electrodes was surely a relevant parameter. He was sufficiently enthused to have rushed home and carried out his own experiments the following morning to determine “the resistance of my assistant, a boy of about 19.” He found, incidentally, that electrode area appeared to make little difference after all. [43] Successive performances and publications by Stone show how the evening’s discussions fed into his subsequent experiments as he adopted some suggestions and rejected others and particularly how he bolstered his arguments to make his view of the body as an imperfect solid (as opposed to liquid) conductor more robust in the face of ongoing criticism. [44] Stone’s electrical body was a composite in two ways. It was composed, so to speak, of disaggregated body parts - a collection of resistances, or at least of their measurements - and was also the outcome of negotiation over how evidence should be adduced and what kind of information counted as evidence in any case.

Constructed Bodies

20 In an anonymous review of the telegraph engineer and economist Fleeming Jenkin’s textbook, Electricity and Magnetism (1873), James Clerk Maxwell drew his readers’ attention to a dichotomy in contemporary electrical culture: “The author of this text-book tells us with great truth that at the present time there are two sciences of electricity - one that of the lecture-room and the popular treatise; the other that of the testing-office and the engineer’s specification. The first deals with sparks and shocks which are seen and felt, the other with currents and resistances to be measured and calculated.” [45] Jenkin drew unfavourable comparisons between the “science of the schools” and “that of the practical electrician”, dismissing the former as “an apparently incoherent series of facts” and “disjointed experiments”. [46] Maxwell was already inclined to be sympathetic towards Jenkin’s suggestion. He had already said much the same thing in the preface to his own Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873), announcing that his own work was aimed at those “who have been brought face to face with quantities to be measured, and whose minds do not rest satisfied with lecture-room experiments.” [47] Lecturing at Cambridge in 1871 he had drawn a distinction between “experiments of illustration”, designed “to present some phenomenon to the senses of the student in such a way that he may associate with it some appropriate scientific idea” and “experiments of research ..... those in which measurement of some kind is involved,” which were “the proper work of a physical laboratory.” [48]

21 We can see that the two kinds of electrical bodies put together by Richardson and Stone belong respectively to these different electrical worlds. Richardson’s body was made to fit into the world of spectacular demonstration and display that could be encountered at places such as the Royal Polytechnic Institution during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was made from the characteristic apparatus of the technology of display and as historians we need to recognize it as an artefact of that culture. Stone’s body, on the other hand, was made to fit into the world of electrical engineering and the professionalizing culture of the Society of Telegraph Engineers. To understand these two versions of the electrical body we need to see them in the context in which and for which they were assembled. They were designed to fit into different spaces, to appeal to different audiences and to bolster their creator’s authority in their own particular contexts. There was, as a result, nothing natural about them. As bodies, they were just as much artefacts as the components with and from which they were put together. If we want to understand these bodies, therefore, we need to look at place and at performance. We need to recognize them as products and pay careful attention to just what went into their making.

22 It is, however, too easy to see electrical bodies – and nineteenth-century electrical cultures more generally – in terms of these kinds of simple dichotomies. They are, after all, the categories that Maxwell wished to impose on contemporary electrical practices and practitioners for his own very particular and specific local pedagogical and strategic purposes. [49] Nineteenth-century electrical bodies were far more mutable and mobile than such straightforward categorizations suggest. Throughout the period in question and beyond, the characteristics of electrical bodies changed continually as they colonized different cultural spaces and were appropriated by different practitioners and audiences for a variety of different purposes. The very malleability of electrical bodies suggests their power and versatility as cultural resources. As the radical Thomas Simmons Mackintosh’s appropriation of Aldini’s work, or the electrical belt salesman Cornelius Bennet Harness’s cheerful hijacking of Stone’s and others’ electrical measurements indicate, electrical bodies were always ripe for refashioning. [50] Increasingly, by the end of the Victorian period, electrical bodies were commodities as well, as Harness’s example should remind us. Their status as commodities should only serve to remind us that electrical bodies are best understood as material artefacts. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, they were above all else manufactured articles, too. As such, they gained their surplus value from the performances that went on around and with them.