Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [18]
Weinhold's tests may have inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, first published in 1818, the story of a doctor who, using body parts scavenged from the "dissecting room and the slaughter-house," cobbled together a creature and managed to "infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing." Edgar Allan Poe played corpse revival for comic effect in "The Premature Burial," in which a man is buried alive but then exhumed before he expires. He "seemed to be in a fair way of ultimate recovery," Poe wrote, "but fell a victim to the quackeries of medical experiment. The galvanic battery was applied; and he suddenly expired in one of those ecstatic paroxysms which, occasionally, it superinduces."5
TO THE WITNESSES of resuscitation experiments, the contortions of dead creatures proved that there was a link between electricity and the spark of life. Although no one managed to revive the dead with electricity, there was a widespread belief that it could improve the health of those still living. "Electricity is life" became the mantra of those touting the medical uses of electricity. In the 1830s some hospitals created "electrifying rooms" for therapeutic shocks, and instrument makers in Boston sold small magnetos with electrode attachments that could be applied to, or inserted in, various parts of the body. During the Civil War, the U.S. surgeon general set aside wards for soldiers with nervous system illnesses and used electricity in attempts to cure them. Although elite physicians claimed to use electricity only for a few complaints such as nervous disorders and paralysis, those less interested in respectability treated electricity as a cure-all. One company promised that its electrical device would heal "rheumatism, paralysis, neuralgia, sciatica, asthma, dyspepsia, consumption, erysipelas, catarrh, piles, epilepsy, pains in the head, hips, back or limbs, diseases of spine, kidneys, liver and heart, falling, inflammation or ulceration." The Sears catalog offered the "Giant Power Heidelberg Electric Belt" as a cure for impotence.6
History has not been kind to the nineteenth century's medical therapies. In i860 Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that if most drugs then in use, such as mercury and arsenic, "could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind,—and all the worse for the fishes." Physiological theory held that health depended on maintaining the equilibrium between the body's intake (food, liquid, air) and outgo (bodily excretions). At a time when physicians lacked the instruments to see inside the body, their primary diagnostic tools were what came out of it. Their job was to manage a patient's delicate balance of forces and fluids, and they did so with drugs that caused sweating, urination, defecation, and vomiting. The therapies helped the body's systems regain balance. Just as important, the dramatic physiological reactions reassured patient and doctor that something was being done to cure the illness.7
Electrical medicine fit neatly into this scheme. The current from a battery or magneto was thought to preserve the healthful balance of a "fluid"—nerve force or animal electricity—that had become blocked or depleted. Although milder in its effects than many drugs, a medicinal electric shock produced tingles and shocks and sparks that served as clear evidence of therapeutic action. And it was impressive: By using electricity, physicians showed that they were masters of the arcane secrets of the era's most advanced technology. George Beard and A. D. Rockwell distilled the wisdom of decades of electrical medicine into A Practical Treatise on the Medical and Surgical Uses of Electricity, which was first