Shocking Subjects: Human Experiments and the Material Culture of Medical Electricity in Eighteenth-Century England.

Abstract

In contemporary Western societies medical patients are accustomed to being tested or treated by means of electrical instruments. Their presence is so familiar that it would be unsettling to enter a hospital or a medical laboratory unfurnished with the high tech apparatus through which research, diagnoses and therapies are routinely carried out. The technologization of medicine has produced systems of trust that rely on black boxed instruments, which profoundly influence contemporary perceptions of the human body and of the self.2 However, the applications of scientific instruments for medical purposes have a history of debates and controversies.3 In the eighteenth century, when the medical profession was regulated by the guild system, the intersections between experimental philosophy and medical practices created uncharted territories that blurred disciplinary divides and gave rise to conflicting epistemologies of medical efficacy. The early applications of electricity as a medical remedy offer a striking case of the tensions that such intersections engendered.4