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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Based on research on the links between deep brain stimulation and its applications in the field of psychiatry, the history of techniques is of great importance in this book in order to understand the scope of the fields of application of electricity in brain sciences. The concepts of brain electricity, stimulation, measurement and therapy are further developed to identify lines of convergence, ruptures and conceptual perspectives for a materialistic understanding of human nature that emerged during the 18th century. In an epistemological posture, at the crossroads of the concepts of epistemes, as stated by Foucault, and phenomenotechnics, as conceived by Bachelard, the analyses focus on the technical content of the theories while inscribing them in the language and specificities of each era.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
1 The Birth of an Electrical Culture: From Frankenstein to Hyde
1.1. “Re”creating life?
1.2. Changing and regulating behavior
1.3. Possible electrical profiling?
2 From Physics to Electrifying Physicists
2.1. Physics, knowledge of laws and nature of electricity
2.2. Medical physics: philosophical issues
2.3. Healing machines?
3 Controversial Electricity Applications
3.1. Paralysis
3.2. Nervous disorders
3.3. Electricity: between the normal and the pathological
4 Animal Electricity: Between Medicine and Physiology
4.1. Understanding life: heuristic experiments
4.2. Medical galvanism
4.3. Electrocentric life
5 Between Electrotherapy Rooms and Laboratories: Specializing Electricity
5.1. Electrical therapies: emergencies and interventionism
5.2. Exploration and recording of nervous system activities
6 Disorders and Resurgences of Electrical Neurostimulation Therapies: From Heath to Deep Brain Stimulation
6.1. Stimulation, control and improvement of moral and cognitive capacities
6.2. Deep brain stimulation and psychiatry
6.3. Man, brain and machine
Conclusion
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
References
Index of Names
Index of Terms
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Appendix 1
Table A1.1. The five periods that mark the path from electricity to brain scienc...
Table A1.2. 18th–19th Centuries – chronological points of reference: when physic...
Table A1.3. Some dates in the context of brain control and the modulation of men...
Table A1.4. Expanded history of deep brain stimulation
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1. In 1730, Gray experimented with the “flying boy”, putting the human ...
Figure 1.2. Aldini tests the muscular reactions of a human head and then of the ...
Figure 1.3. Comparative table of the duration of galvanic excitability of the va...
Figure 1.4. In this 1867 illustration, a crowd of scientists watch in horror as ...
Figure 1.5. French advertisement dating from 1911 for the “Herculex” electric be...
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1. “Thus the electric spark of freedom will overthrow all the thrones o...
Figure 2.2. Nollet designs electrical circuits to channel and direct static elec...
Figure 2.3. The circuits thus designed lead to the application of static electri...
Figure 2.4. The physicist imagines and improves his famous static electricity ma...
Figure 2.5. Static electricity and its use in kocalisated therapy. Vigouroux, P....
Figure 2.6. Nollet did many public demonstrations to show the links between the ...
Figure 2.7. The Wimshurt machine, created in 1882 [GAN 94]
Figure 2.8. “Only once, how foolhardy, to Venus on the pitch I gave a kiss. The ...
Figure 2.9. Nollet, J. A. Recherches sur les causes particulières des phénomènes...
Figure 2.10. Medal-winning machine at the 1878 Paris World Fair [ART 81, p. 49]
Figure 2.11. Dr. Arthuis’ machine [VIG 82, p. 28, pl. V]
Figure 2.12. Non-insulated exciter [VIG 82, p. 41, pl. VI]
Figure 2.13. Insulated exciter [VIG 82, p. 41, pl. VI]
Figure 2.14. Created in 1868 by the French engineer Ferdinand Philippe Carré (18...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1. Anonymous representation, Georg Wilhelm Richmann’s accident (1753)
Figure 3.2. This experience describes a treatment applied to a patient in May 18...
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1. From Haller’s work, 1755
Figure 4.2. Diagram of Galvani’s experiment of December 9, 1780, designed to det...
Figure 4.3. Galvani, De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius, o...
Figure 4.4. “A machine that keeps the conductors in the ears. It was constructed...
Figure 4.5. Humboldt offers a classification table of the conductive and insulat...
Figure 4.6. During his experiments in 1799, Humboldt, in addition to frogs and l...
Figure 4.7. Humboldt also switched from cold-blooded animals to human body parts...
Figure 4.8. Aldini separately stimulates the head of a connected ox and the body...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1. Diagram of the best application of electrodes to lead to a pathologi...
Figure 5.2. Trough battery developed by the British chemist William Cruickshank ...
Figure 5.3. This device illustrates the miniutarization of electrotherapy. Consi...
Figure 5.4. Electrical contraction of the skin, of the frontal muscles, with low...
Figure 5.5. Hodgkin’s initial experiment on blocking nerve conduction by localiz...
Figure 5.6. Drawn from a cat, we can see that he sketched the convolutions disco...
Figure 5.7. Left cerebral hemisphere of a chimpanzee with centres determined far...
Figure 5.8. Adrian’s visual assimilation of human brain waves to potential swell...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1. Drawing illustrating the location of the superior surface electrodes...
Figure 6.2. Drawing of the superior-inferior electrode configuration with the in...
Figure 6.3. Indications for deep brain stimulation in the dual field of neurolog...
Appendix 2
Figure A2.1. Nollet, J.-A.: Recherches sur les causes particulières […], op. cit...
Figure A2.2. Nollet (1748) devotes many chapters to the links between electricit...
Figure A2.3. Franklin, B.: Expériences et observations sur l’électricité faites ...
Figure A2.4. Franklin (1756) discusses the penetration of bodies by electricity,...
Figure A2.5. Jallabert, J.: Expériments sur l’électricité, avec quelques conject...
Figure A2.6. Jallabert (1748) goes, in his treatise, from chapters on the laws o...
Figure A2.7. Morin, J.: Nouvelle dissertation sur l’électricité des corps, Paris...
Figure A2.8. In Morin’s treatise (1748), we can see that he indicates how to bui...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
References
Index of Names
Index of Terms
End User License Agreement
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Series Editor
Jean-Claude Dupont
From Clouds to the Brain
The Movement of Electricity in Medical Science
Céline Cherici
First published 2020 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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© ISTE Ltd 2020
The rights of Céline Cherici to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020938719
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78630-595-4
Foreword
Céline Cherici’s book explores the place of electricity in the history of medical science over a period ranging from the 18th to the 21st Centuries, from its discovery to the recent use of deep brain stimulation. Some contextual data helps us to grasp the full importance and scope of this undertaking.
The current importance of chemical and molecular representations, which have become consubstantial with biology, means it is easy that we forget that, from a historical point of view, it is physics that has constantly provided neurophysiology with explanatory models.
Galvani’s use of artificial electricity as a stimulant led him, by analogy, to conceive of muscle fibers as small Leyden jars. Thus, the mysterious nature of nervous fluid, which was therefore electric, a model which was vary different from the humoral model described by the Encyclopedists, was unraveled. The fruitfulness of the polemic between the proponents of metallic and animal electrics is well known in the history of physics, since the voltaic pile battery triggered the development of electrophysics, electromagnetism and electrochemistry, the development of which, in turn, went hand in hand with the invention of two instruments of considerable heuristic value in 19th Century Life Sciences: the galvanometer and the impolarizable electrode. These instruments led to the development of the great German electrophysiology, that is to say, the classical works of du Bois-Reymond, Helmholtz, Hermann, Bernstein, etc., which made it possible to propose various hypotheses on the nature of the action and rest currents. These currents were often considered to be the result of purely physical phenomena occurring in living tissue. In accordance with the dominant physical and technical models, nerve fiber was likened to a metal wire, a circuit, a magnet and, finally, a battery – a living battery the functioning of which physicists sought to understand by taking inspiration from the model of the electric battery. The origin of the battery’s electromotive force, how the nerve impulse was conducted and the changes produced in the fibers by this impulse were also investigated, leading to imported notions such as “polarized structures” or “local circuits”. In France, it was this tradition, that of the physical explanation of the functioning of living organisms, that was taken up by Louis Lapicque when he likened nerve fiber to a radio transmitter.
This electrical power was also supported by electrodiagnosis and electrotherapy. Studying the effect of electricity on the living was done in many ways, depending on the intention. The problem of elucidating the nature of nerve impulses, excitability and underlying processes seemed to be distinct from the problem of investigating the possible use of electricity in medicine. For a physician, knowledge of the laws of excitability, or even that of simple correlations or modifications of excitability according to the pathology making electrodiagnosis possible, as well as the revelation of the therapeutic effects of electricity, could be quite sufficient. In this sense, the electrophysiological studies carried out in the laboratory on animals seemed to have little relevance to medicine. Under the influence of positivism, empiricism and pragmatism, a myth of 19th Century medical thought was forged, that of the independence of the experimental and the clinical.
In fact, the history of electrodiagnosis attests to the close and constant links between the laboratory and the clinic from the very beginning. One of its founders, the clinician Duchenne de Boulogne, who gave his name to various myopathies, conceived it as a true experiment in the examination of patients. In the 19th Century, electrophysiological instrumentation was common to both the laboratory and the hospital. The characters who have marked the history of electrodiagnosis were often both laboratory technicians and clinicians. Duchenne used the induction coil (faradic current), with which it was possible to excite nerves and muscles through the skin at certain points. He established the topography of these motor points, skin regions where the electrodes had to be placed to obtain the muscle jolt with the least possible intensity (bipolar excitation). He thus inaugurated electrical semiology: either the muscles no longer responded to induction excitations (faradic hypoexcitability; Duchenne reaction), or the excitability was normal. As for anatomopathology, it was the electrodiagnosis inaugurated by Duchenne that contributed to the creation of a nosological group, that of degenerative diseases, and, more generally, of an electrical semiology of muscular and neuromuscular diseases.
In France, chairs of medical physics were developed and journals were created for the new specialty, such as the Archives d’électricité médicale (1893) or the Annales d’électrobiologie (1898). Following Duchenne, prestigious names, often both doctors and physicists, devoted themselves to medical electricity and wrote treatises in which electrology held a central place, such as Jean Bergognié, founder of French radiobiology and creator of the first anti-cancer centers, Emmanuel Doumer, who studied the use of electricity in surgery, or Jacques d’Arsonval, a student of Claude Bernard, a Brown-Sequard collaborator who worked with diathermic currents, electrocoagulation (electric scalpel) and electrotherapy with high-frequency currents (darsonvalization, 1913). Forms of electrodiagnosis were developed that were not based on neuromuscular excitability (electrical resistance of the human body, voltaic vertigo), preceding an electrodiagnosis no longer based on stimulation, but simply on detection (EEG, electromyography). It should be noted that while English-speaking countries were engaged in electromyography (Adrian and Bronk), the Netherlands in electrocardiography (Einthoven, Nobel Prize 1924), Germany in electroencephalography (Berger), France’s focus in the thirties remained on chronaximetry with Louis Lapicque, and thus demonstrated a considerable delay between the two wars.
Electrotherapy was another cornerstone of electricity in the medical sciences. In the 18th Century, ignorance of the exact nature of nervous fluid did not prevent the empirical use of electricity for therapeutic purposes by great names such as Nollet, Jalabert, Aldini, or Marat. During the 19th Century, electrotherapy instrumentation developed considerably in the field of galvanization, faradization, galvanofaradization, franklinization and hertzian and other darsonvalization, up to the point of the electroshock of patients.
It is necessary to underline how poor and disappointing neurochemistry remained for a long time, in comparison with this wealth of medical electricity. Moreover, some physiologists still had the diffuse idea, inherited from the 19th Century, that it was not necessary to precisely identify the charge carriers, that is, to penetrate to the deepest level of the phenomena, in order to explain cerebral or nervous functioning. Electricity was still “the essence of life”. The dominant paradigm and culture of electricity explained, for example, the skepticism with which the first real experimental argument in favor of chemical neurotransmission at the ends of the autonomic nervous system was greeted, the experiment of Otto Loewi (1921), and then, from the 1930s onwards, the results of Henry Dale’s school concerning chemical transmission at the lymph node and neuro-muscular scales. In 1936, when Loewi and Dale were awarded the Nobel Prize, the accumulation of divergent data led to major difficulties in chemical theory, giving way to the development of elaborate electrical designs following Lapicque’s ancient chronaxial theory, such as that of John Eccles. While, at the beginning of the 1950s, a consensus had been established among pharmacologists in view of the considerable therapeutic perspectives offered by chemical theory, it remained limited to the peripheral nervous system, especially since explanations of the characteristics of the most elementary central activity, reflex activity, had been proposed, avoiding any departure from a strictly electrical determinism using neuronal circuits. For these reasons, and for reasons of anatomical complexity, the penetration of chemical theory at the central level was slow. It was finally made possible by techniques (microiontophoresis), by the renewal of the neurochemical context (neuroendocrinology), and, above all, by the appearance of psychotropic drugs, despite the subsequent discovery of electrical synapses. Chemical theory offered a considerable range of interpretations of the mode of action of psychotropic drugs, from which one sought to extrapolate the pathogenesis of neurological (Parkinson’s, epilepsy) or even psychiatric (depression, psychoses) diseases.
It is the importance of this culture of electricity that Céline Cherici develops in her book. The judicious choices of the long period and the resonance of different disciplinary fields (physics, physiology, medicine, in particular, neurology and psychiatry) around this theme of electricity have allowed her to propose research at the crossroads of the history of techniques and the history of biology and medicine. Céline Cherici demonstrates the imprint left by electricity in culture and life sciences, focusing her analyses on the links between electricity and the nervous system (“from the clouds to the brain”) and the medical appropriation of electricity. The aim is to describe the establishment of this culture, and to analyze, beyond the origin of ideas and facts, the beginnings (Canguilhem), the epistemical (Foucault, [FOU 06]) and the phenomenotechnical (Bachelard) bases that made this establishment possible. She thus shows how the questions of materiality and the location of the soul and faculties are closely linked, in the 18th Century, to the promotion of electricity as a tool for the treatment of convulsive illnesses.
One can only agree with this idea of a long and profound influence of electrical culture if we remember the resistance to brain chemistry reported above. During the 20th Century, the electric brain model, supported by electroencephalographic data, still predominated, despite the experimental evidence to the contrary. Similarly, when Cherici studies deep brain stimulation applied to the field of psychiatry, which is also an exploratory technique, it is to show its importance in the development of a normal and pathological model of brain function. By paying attention to the instrumental context of the discoveries, Céline Cherici underlines the extent to which Gaston Bachelard’s invitation to understand science as an “empirical inventive thought” applies to medicine. Medical practices require instruments, which they transform as needed. Conversely, medical instruments transform practices, and model representations of diseases, directing them towards certain theoretical options concerning body functions. The history of nervous diseases covered and medical electricity described by Céline Cherici is a masterful illustration of this. From these subtle interactions between the instrument and the concept results a true invention of nervous diseases and a construction of brain models, which a history of medicine had to consider. There are, however, few works that address the question in such a way and to such an extent, François Zanetti’s recent book being limited to the France of the Enlightenment (2017). Cherici’s work thus undoubtedly fills an editorial gap. It also testifies to the vitality of an approach, that of a history of methods and concepts, in the tradition of French epistemology, which the author knows how to extend by insisting on its historical foundation, but also by renewing it, opening it happily to the history of techniques, anthropology and cultural history.
Jean-Claude DUPONTUniversity of Picardy Jules Verne28 May 2020
Introduction
From the clouds to the brain: this is the journey, both historical and epistemological in nature, that this book sets out to retrace. The focus of this book is the history of medical electricity, and it is this journey that is explored, accompanied by a look at electricity’s medical effects on the body, up to and including the center of the human brain. Although this history of explorations and brain simulation may seem recent, we can broaden the scope of this investigation further and take into account the philosophical, scientific and technical roots of medical electricity in the 18th Century. I am part of an important secondary literature, often written in English, tracing the major historical stages of electricity in its links with the body, the living and neuroscience. Indeed, with the exception of François Zanetti’s excellent French-language book [ZAN 17], published in 2017, the summaries on the history of this force are, for the most part, in English. The research on the effects and applications of electricity on the body, the brain and living things has been collected and correlated, in order to show the connections between these fields. The works of Iwan Rhys Morus, published between 1998 and 2011 [RHY 98, 99, 11, 09a, 10, 02, 04, 09b], have also been analyzed to show how the electrical sciences have permeated society and science from the end of the 18th Century onwards, thus opening up a dimension of cultural history. On the other hand, the treatises on the links between the applications of electricity and the birth of neuroscience, notably by Stanley Finger [FIN 94, 99, 11, 12] as well as the works on the exploration of electric life by Marco Piccolino and Marco Bresadola [PIC 03, 13] have been studied at length. The historical period covered by this book is between 1740 and 2010. In addition, epistemological analysis has been tightened around the correlations between electricity, the brain and its nerve ramifications. Thus, we find the representations of an electric culture [RHY 11, p. 9], applied to the body in its physical and moral dimensions, from the second half of the 18th Century. Far from being reduced to a cycle of failures and errors, this period shows the emergence of an electrical tool applicable, not only to human ills, but also to the exploration of the mechanisms of a living being, a category which, of course, includes the human species. As early as 1746, static electricity machines were built, the body was a member of the family of conducting bodies and medicine, marked by physics, became electric. The peak of this movement was reached during the controversies between animal and metal electricity, around 1790.
But how do we retrace that story? How do we differentiate the origins of the knowledge of electricity from its beginnings as knowledge itself? While electricity refers to the Greek term ἤλεκτρον (êlektron), which means Baltic amber, it does not mean that knowledge was being built at that time. However, Thalès de Milet, in the 7th Century BCE, recorded the fact that amber, if rubbed, had the ability to attract light objects and to produce, though not systematically, sparks. Moreover, Hippocrates, Plato and Galien described the remarkable properties of electric rays, so frequent in the Mediterranean. Galien used them on living patients in the treatment of rheumatic afflictions and headaches. In addition, amber, a physical electricity present in nature, was also noted. Sribonius used electric shocks [SRI 55] to treat a wide variety of diseases, including headaches and various kinds of paralysis. Around 1600, William Gilbert (1544–1603) recognized that the property of attracting light bodies was common to certain minerals and stones. Otto von Guericke (1602–1686) made one of the first electrical machines, around 1660, and compared the phenomenon caused to the attraction of the Earth on animate and inanimate bodies.
So, when do we talk about the beginnings of electricity? Do we have to trace them back to Greco-Roman antiquity? To 17th Century mechanics?
For what was electricity when Thales of Miletus discovered it? And what became of it for a long series of centuries, in the hands of Pliny, Strabo, Dioscorides and Plutarch? It was, during this long interval, only a seed stuck in the ground, waiting for happier hands to bring it out […]. [ALD 04, ij, author’s translation]
Its beginnings were initiated by the explorations of the forces of nature through 18th Century physics, which became systematic and also corresponded to a vast questioning of humanity’s place in Nature and its links with the laws at work there. In the same way, it was necessary that a particular epistemology enabled the questioning of the localization of the soul in the brain, the materiality and innateness of the faculties, making them free to develop, in order to found medical electricity as a tool of care for the illnesses of the psychological sphere. This discrepancy between the moment of origins and that of beginnings also made it possible to understand the immediate appropriation of electricity in the medical field. Indeed, as early as 1746, when the Leyden jar experiment by Musschenbroek and his assistant proved dangerous and painful, this first capacitor immediately catalyzed the hopes of a new medicine which was technical, interventionist, economical and beyond all metaphysical considerations.
The history of medical electricity, beyond its periodization, is based on a questioning of the concepts at work in it, such as human nature, natural laws and the study of forces. It also requires an in-depth study of the techniques that are constantly revising its applications, making them more precise and more reliable, as well as the theme of contexts, which appear to be so many different fields of experimentation and the setting up of new protocols. In addition to representing a relatively long period, the period from 1740 to 2010 required more work on the primary bibliography. For example, the Bibliographie francophone des ouvrages et articles relatifs à l’électricité et au magnétisme publiés avant 1820 [BLO 00] has no fewer than 2,000 titles. This is why the theme is centered around the links between electricity, medico-philosophical questions on the naturalization of faculties and the brain as the place where these issues are anchored. It is an epistemological journey to which we are invited by the different chapters of this book.
Research, more than progress, around electric power immediately marks a strong imagination where humanity takes precedence over nature and over itself. First mixed with experiments on magnetism and mesmerism, electricity is part of the context of investigations and experiments on the energies at work in the universe. For example, Mesmer (1734–1815), whose medical thesis was on the influence of the planets on the evolution of humanity, developed the idea that living beings are linked together by a universal magnetic force. This force, present in the macrocosm, could, according to him, have a major influence on health and balance. He thus posed as a practitioner capable of rebalancing the flow of animal magnetism in the body. During public sessions, he used magnets to restore the flow of magnetic fluid in subjects suffering from disorders as varied as hysteria and blindness. While his concept of animal magnetism did not survive the report by the commission of the Académie Française des Sciences (French Academy of Sciences), requested in 1784 by Louis XVI to evaluate his practices, the idea that there were links between the laws governing the universe and the mechanisms of the body permeated research on electricity. The roots of this conception also appealed to the neo-hippocratism that developed in the 18th Century. The advent of electricity, in the field of physiology and therapy, marked a never-ending intertwining of exploration and care. Its entry as a physiological configuration, conceived in terms of organic fluid, was a sign of a break between a medicine still tinged with metaphysics and a medicine of the Enlightenment, intended to be rationalizing. Its developments during the 18th Century were marked by the naturalization of animal spirits, the shift from the notion of fluid to that of energy, the entry into a secularized medical era opening up a materialistic perspective of the psychological and physical nature of the human being. In any case, these are the representations delivered by the research of Jean Antoine Nollet (1700–1770), Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Allamand, Sans and Ledru (1731–1807) from the second half of the 18th Century. One of the paradoxes of this history of the appropriation of electric force by medicine and, more broadly, by physiology and the experimental biological sciences, is that it is, above all, made up of errors and failures, punctuated by the resurgence of hopes carried by electricity.
These developments are structured around six chapters. The first chapter proposes tackling the concept of electric imaginary born of the hopes raised by the new techniques generated from the 18th Century onwards. It is inseparable from the analyses of the different periods in the history of medical electricity1. Masars de Cazeles, considered the designer of care practiced by electric friction, recalled the metaphors of a divine, animist electricity whose applications have been integrated and developed within a medicine that has become experimental:
However, if I were allowed to reason according to the authority of my own people, I would dare to say that the fable of Prometheus stealing the Celestial fire from the wheel of fire of the Sun to animate our clay is, perhaps, only an allegory of the effects of Electricity, formerly glimpsed, little known in the aftermath, brought to light by modern Physicists, & made more interesting by the way in which they now fix the attention of Doctors. [MAS 80, p. 15, author’s translation]
The second chapter addresses the intellectual, scientific and experimental path from physics to electrifying physicists: the theme of studies on the laws of electricity will be addressed in order to show that it is physicists who seek to decipher the mechanisms of electricity, who are primarily interested in its effects on the body as well as its therapeutic potential2. On the one hand, the philosophical stakes for the inscription of humanity in nature will be taken further, but so will the dependence that this link creates with physics, between electrical therapies and machines. Did medical engineering arise in the 18th Century? Thus, between 1745 and 1765, electricity appeared, in the visual sense of the term, as an instrument of movement, initiator of involuntary mobility. It was in the context of the link, born accidentally following the experiments with the Leyden jar, between movement and electric power, that the first actors of a physics that was becoming medicalized applied it to paralysis, while continuing to explore its mechanisms in nature [NOL 46, ENG 56, SAN 72]. In the third chapter, we will discuss the initial electrical turmoil marked by failures that demonstrated controversial applications of this care to tackle nervous and mental illnesses and show how this force began its descent onto the brain. Indeed, after a few years of increased mistrust due, on the one hand, to often fatal electrocutions and, on the other hand, to the ineffectiveness, however distressing, of these treatments, medical electricity moved, between 1770 and 1800, towards the treatment of nervous, convulsive and mental illnesses [LED 83, GAL 91, PET 02–03]. It is also divided, in this same period, between cures of static electricity and medical galvanism. The fourth chapter is thus devoted to the breakthrough generated by Galvani’s (1737–1798) discovery of animal electricity. Between medicine and physiology, perspectives on the living were marked by electrocentrism. At the end of the 18th Century, biology appropriated electricity to make it inherent to matter. This stage marked the definitive appropriation by physiology and medicine of this physical energy, as well as the beginning of Galvani’s research on electric neuro-fluid. Galvanism, which traveled beyond the Italian borders while Europe was suffering from the political consequences of the French Revolution, opened an extremely heuristic program, both for electrophysiology and for future resuscitative medicine. Thus, bodies came to life like automatons, becoming fields of exploration for the delineation and knowledge of the dying process, the central nervous system and its ramifications throughout the body. The successor to Descartes’ (1596–1650) concept of the animal machine, galvanism intended to explore the nervous mechanisms of living beings, as well as medical in its treatment of hysterical and, more broadly, magnetic phenomena. Chapter 5 then discusses the specialization and development of the different branches of biomedical electricity. Between laboratory explorations and clinical applications, electrical medicine, by confronting diseases with vast symptomatologies, contributes to differentiating the fields of psychiatry and neurology. At the same time, the activities of the nervous system are quantified, measured, recorded, objectified and made visible in the form of signs, plots or diagrams. Electrophysiology met Volta’s desire to involve measurement and mathematics. Electroclinical and electrophysiological explorations developed between 1900 and 1950 complement each other. While electrotherapy is equipped with machines and techniques that hope to leave their mark, with regard to the problem of the reversibility of psychoses, particularly in the emergency context of the two world wars, electrophysiology measures, models and describes the impacts of electricity in the body. Finally, Chapter 6 discusses the first applications of electrical neurostimulation therapies, and tries to show that the field of mental illnesses was a favorite one as early as 1950. The aim will be to delineate two aspects of the history of brain electricity and its therapies: a long history beginning in the late 18th Century, completed by a shorter history taking its roots in the second half of the 20th Century. Between 1980 and 2010, brain stimulation techniques, deep or external, following research on brain implantation, which considered the field of mental illness as a therapeutic target, stand out in their renewed applications in the field of psychiatry.
Thus, not only can we speak of therapeutic electricity before Galvani’s discovery of animal electricity, but it is also a question of making one of the paths of medical electricity in the brain sciences, future neurosciences, and within society intelligible. This is where a long investigation begins: it was necessary to differentiate the stages, the phases of enthusiasm and decline, each period marked by the improvement of techniques and advances in knowledge on the different ways of applying currents (galvanization, faradization, etc.), as well as on the human brain and the ills it can be affected by. Marked by its polymorphism, electricity in the medical field requires a broad epistemological study, both at the level of its temporality and that of the knowledge explored. In an epistemological tradition inherited from Canguilhem (1904–1955), “Philosophy is a reflection for which all unknown material is good, and we would gladly say, for whom all good material must be unknown” [CAN 78, p.8].
Thus, everything is material for thought: the success of a theory, but also its failures and errors. The epistemologist, always in search of lines of convergence and divergence, must approach all the states of the scientific discipline under discussion, respecting both its singularity and its continuity. This continuity, in the case of medical electricity, is marked by a large number of technical, societal and scientific breakthroughs that punctuate the waves of successive crazes and discredit that hinder its development. It is built within an experimental design, conceived in terms of trial and error, marked by failures as much as by fantasized or misunderstood successes. The historical, scientific and philosophical interactions between the concepts of machines, techniques and the brain have necessitated historical back-and-forth, to the benefit of the problematization of the subject. This work takes place in the context of an open epistemology3.
How can we analyze the failures of an electrical method that has been constantly changing since the 18th Century? How can we understand the links between physics, medicine and current electrical therapies, whose psychiatric applications are multiplying? Does going back to the roots of the applications of medical electricity on the human brain allow us to understand its past and present implications?
1
See
Appendix 1
, in which chronological tables are provided to give the reader a guide to the major stages of this history.
2
See
Appendix 2
, in which extracts from the tables of contents of physicists, inventors or demonstrators, Nollet, Franklin, Jallabert and Morin, have been selected to highlight their research combining physical knowledge with considerations of the body.
3
Cornelius Borck speaks of “open epistemology” [BOR 18a, p. 264].
1The Birth of an Electrical Culture: From Frankenstein to Hyde
The notion of the electrical culture [RHY 11, p. 9], developed by Rhys Morus in his book Shocking Bodies; Life, Death & Electricity in Victorian England, came about at the beginning of the 19th Century, coming to the fore through the discussion of two issues in which were mixed scientific aspects and the imagining of a force that seemed to possess all powers, such as:
– “re” creating life: indeed, experiments on the bodies of convicts were adjacent to the theme of electricity as the driving force of life. Aldini and Cumming, by re-animating corpses, dramatized demonstrations, thus spreading the links between galvanism and vital properties;
– control of behaviors: in the middle of the 19th Century, electrical medicine broke with the dualistic paradigm of the electrified automaton to locate, in the brain, the areas that would allow the control of behaviors through these therapies. This movement followed a more general shift from moral issues to psychiatric disorders.
From Frankenstein [SHE 18] to the main character in the novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [STE 86], two periods, foundational for medical thought, are articulated. They both contributed to making electricity an intelligible instrument of exploration and treatment, and participated in a strong popular imagining about the possibilities opened up by the application of electrical techniques in medicine. This cultural and medical imagining weaved a context in which these applications took place. The first period took place from Galvani’s experiments through to those by Doctor Ure; then after 1840, a second period marked the passage from a dualistic medicine to a holistic medicine, where consciousness was embodied in convolutions. What seemed to correspond to an objectification of the applications of medical electricity, referred to the construction of a culture in which electricity represented a fantasized scientific positivism.
The use of electricity in the “resuscitation” of those who had drowned and the apparently dead was first proposed in 1778 by Charles Kite (1768–1811) to the Royal Humane Society in London. An active member [ALZ 05] of this learned society, he wrote An Essay on the Recovery of the Apparently Dead [KIT 88] for which he received a medal. In this essay, he distinguished suspended animation from irreversible death and described the importance of collecting the necessary information on each victim of drowning to assess a possible return to life. In his presentation, he stressed that a body that no longer reacts to electrical shocks should be considered dead. Electricity, in addition to revealing the properties of matter, was imagined, early on, as an instrument to explore the boundaries between life and death. In addition to having an important impact on the definition and description of the dying process, it was conceived and massively disseminated in scientific, literary and popular circles as a means of bringing people back to life.
1.1. “Re”creating life?
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]
