Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [17]
Physicians in the 1740s had discovered that some people who appeared to be dead could be revived by forcing air into their lungs. Suddenly, the boundary between death and life became blurred, and doctors began to distrust their ability to diagnose death. In the 1760s these doubts inspired the creation of the first "humane societies," organizations dedicated not to the welfare of animals but to reviving the apparently dead. Resuscitation techniques included not only assisted breathing but also vigorous shakes and thumps that were intended to get the blood moving again. The revivalists did not trouble themselves with those who expired after long illness; they focused, rather, on those felled by the sudden misfortune of drowning, suffocation, or lightning strikes. Hoping to learn how to revive lightning's victims, the English experimenter and radical democrat Joseph Priestley used a large Leyden jar to kill a mouse, a rat, "a pretty large kitten," and a dog in the 1760s. He then tried to reanimate his victims by blowing into their lungs through a quill. The attempts failed, and he stopped the experiments, judging that "it is paying dear for philosophical discoveries, to purchase them at the expence of humanity."1
Others thought electricity might help bring back those who had died from some other means. One experimenter revived a suffocated dog with electricity in 1755, and twenty years later another claimed to have shocked a drowned man back to life. The invention of the chemical battery opened new avenues of experimentation. Giovanni Aldini, nephew of Luigi Galvani, staged experiments to determine the value of electricity as a means of resuscitation in cases of asphyxiation. A strong current sent through a dead ox produced such a flailing of limbs that "several of the spectators were much alarmed, and thought it prudent to retire to some distance." Before London's Royal Society in 1803, Aldini conducted experiments on the body of a freshly hanged criminal. When the poles were touched to the jaw and ear, the face quivered and the left eye opened, while a shock from ear to rectum produced a reaction so strong as "almost to give an appearance of re-animation." Aldini concluded that "Galvanism affords very powerful means of resuscitation."2
Giovanni Aldini, a nephew of Luigi Galvani, tested the effects of electricity on the corpses of executed criminals in 1803. The columns are voltaic piles.
In 1818 a Glasgow chemist brought the body of a hanged man to his laboratory ten minutes after it was cut down. When the current from a battery was applied, "laborious breathing instantly commenced," but the man did not revive. At an 1827 hanging in Albany, New York, "eminent surgeons" stood ready "to try galvanic experiments upon the body, in order, if possible, to resuscitate it," but the authorities would not let them try When John Skaggs was hanged in Bloomfield, Missouri, in 1870, the attending physicians pronounced him dead after ten minutes, then carried his corpse into the courthouse and tried to revive him with a hand-cranked magneto generator. The sheriff, who considered it odd to kill a man and then try to bring him back to life, suspected that the doctors cut Skaggs down prematurely to improve the odds of reviving him. "The intention of the law is to hang him till dead," the sheriff told the doctors. "It means dead in the strict sense of the word—enough to stay dead." The physicians nonetheless applied the current and provoked muscular action. "The right leg moves on the table like that of a clog-dancer," the New York Times noted. "Left arm swings around like a pugilist's." Skaggs reportedly developed a pulse and began breathing, but he died later that night.3
Electrical