Therapeutic Attractions: Early Applications of Electricity to the Art of Healing

In the past few decades a number of studies dealing with eighteenth-century natural philosophy in England have pointed out its inextricable links with spectacle and public display. The commodification of cultural products, which was one of the main features of the Enlightenment, extended to science and scientific instruments, textbooks, and demonstrations, as well as to medicine. Pivotal works by Roy Porter have indelibly portrayed the vibrant marketplace in which medical practitioners operated. Even when they had a formal degree, “regular” healers had to compete both with “irregulars” and with a widespread culture of self-treatment (Porter, 1985, 1990, 1995; Porter & Porter, 1989; Schaffer, 1983; Stewart, 1992). In such competitive arena recently invented therapies attracted the attention of both patients and practitioners. From the 1740s onward, “medical electricity” was among the most attractive ones. The term indicated the applications of electric shocks and sparks to the treatment of various diseases, in particular palsies and “nerve disorders.”

Electrical healing was first presented to the eighteenth-century public as a branch of experimental philosophy (Bertucci, 2001a). This essay analyzes the early diffusion of medical electricity, setting it in the context of the experimental culture from which it emerged. I deal with a relatively short span of time – the few decades during which almost instantaneously medical electricity came to be practiced in different European states – and I highlight the role played by itinerant demonstrators and instrument-makers in spreading what would soon become a fashionable, though controversial, healing practice.