Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [133]
29. For the New Year's Eve demonstration, see New York Herald, December 31, 1879, January 1, 1880 (TAEM 94:557-59); Friedel and Israel, Edison's Electric Light, 109-14; Israel, Edison, 187-88.
CHAPTER 4 ELECTRICITY AND LIFE
1. Quotation from Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments, 4th ed. (London: C. Bathurst, 1775), 597-601. Also see Martin S. Pernick, "Back from the Grave: Recurring Controversies over Defining and Diagnosing Death in History," in Death: Beyond Whole-Brain Criteria, ed. Richard M. Zaner (Boston: Kluwer, 1988), 17-74; J a n Bondeson, Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear (New York: Norton, 2001).
2. Quotations from John [sic] Aldini, An Account of the Galvanic Experiments Performed . . . on the Body of a Malefactor Executed at Newgate Jan. 17, 1803 (London: Cuthell and Marin, 1803), 8-10, 37. Also see Morus, Frankenstein's Children, 127.
3. Quotations from Morus, Frankenstein's Children, 128; Authentic Confession of Jesse Strang (New York: E. M. Murden and A. Ming, 1827), 20; New York Times, September 1,1870. Also see Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 173; Commission Report, 67-68; W. Mattieu Williams, "Electromania," Popular Science Monthly 21 (1882): 650-55.
4. Stanley Finger and Mark B. Law, "Karl August Weinhold and His 'Science' in the Era of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: Experiments on Electricity and the Restoration of"Life," Journal of the History of Medicine 53 (1998): 161-80.
5. Quotations from Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, ed. Johanna M. Smith (Boston: Bedford, 2000), 58-60; Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 670. Poe's "Some Words with a Mummy" addresses similar themes.
6. Quotation from advertisement in Monthly Catalogue of the Eden Musee, February 1887, p. 10, Billy Rose Theater Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Also see David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 154; Morus, Frankenstein's Children, 144-45, 234-54; Rowbottom and Susskind, Electricity and Medicine, 59-66,113; M. Allen Starr, "Electricity in Relation to the Human Body," Scribner's Magazine 6 (November 1889): 589-99; Bonnie Ellen Blustein, Preserve Your Love for Science: Life of William A. Hammond, American Neurologist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 127-33.
7. Quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Medical Essays, 1842-1882 (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1893), 2 7. Quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes, 03. Also see Charles Rosenberg, "The Therapeutic Revolution," in Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in The History of Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9-31.
8. Quotations from George M. Beard and A. D. Rockwell, A Practical Treatise on the Medical and Surgical Uses of Electricity, 6th ed. (New York: William Wood, 1888), 217, 222. Also see Rowbottom and Susskind, Electricity and Medicine, 113-14; Lisa Rosner, "The Professional Context of Electrotherapeutics," Journal of the History of Medicine 43 (1988): 64-82; Rowbottom and Susskind, Electricity and Medicine, 103-14.
9. George Beard, "Neurasthenia, or Nervous Exhaustion," Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 80 (1869): 217-21; Charles Rosenberg, "George M. Beard and American Nervousness," in No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
10. Quotation from TAEB 2:204-9. On Beard's relationship with Edison, see Jarvis Edson to Edison, October 26, 1874 (TAEM 27:466); Israel, Edison, 110-15; TAEB 2:321, 734-33. On the induction coil, see Robert C. Post, "Stray Sparks from the Induction Coil: The Volta Prize and the Page Patent," Proceedings of the IEEE 64 (1976): 1279-86; Israel, Edison, 100. Inspired by his success in the medical market, Edison concocted "Edison's Polyform," a patent medicine for "neurologic pains" that contained morphine, alcohol, chloroform,