THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021 67
daily lives, seeing lightning in the
sky or plugging our appliances into
wall sockets, we tend to neglect this
fact. Jorgensen’s aim, in this chatty,
wide-ranging tour of electricity’s role
in biology and medicine, is to show
us that every experience we have of
our selves—from the senses of sight,
smell, and sound to our movements
and our thoughts—depends on elec-
trical impulses.
He starts with amber, the material
with which humans probably first at-
tempted to harness electricity for med-
ical uses. Amber is the fossilized resin
of prehistoric trees; when rubbed, it be-
comes charged with static electricity. It
can attract small bits of matter, such as
fluff, and emit shocks, and these prop-
erties made it seem magical. Amber
pendants have been found dating back
to 12,000 B.C., and Jorgensen writes
that such jewelry would have been val-
ued for much more than its beauty. In
the era of recorded history, accounts of
amber’s use abound. The ancient Greeks
massaged the ailing with it, believing,
Jorgensen writes, that its “attractive
forces would pull the pain out of their
bodies,” and it is the Greek word for
amber—elektron—that gives us an en-
tire vocabulary for electrical properties.
In first-century Rome, Pliny the Elder
wrote that wearing amber around the
neck could prevent throat diseases and
even mental illness. The Romans also
used non-static electricity from tor-
pedo fish, a name for various species
of electric ray, to deliver shocks to pa-
tients with maladies including head-
aches and hemorrhoids.
As late as the sixteenth century,
the eminent Swiss physician Paracel-
sus called amber “a noble medicine
for the head, stomach, intestines and
other sinews complaints.” Not long
afterward, the English scientist Wil-
liam Gilbert found that other sub-
stances, such as wax and glass, could
generate charge if you rubbed them,
and a German named Otto von Gue-
ricke created a crude electrostatic gen-
erator. But there was no reliable way
of studying electricity until the in-
vention of the Leyden jar, in 1745. (The
jar takes its name from the city where
a Dutch scientist developed it, though
a German scientist achieved the same
breakthrough independently around
the same time.) The Leyden jar made
it possible to accumulate charge from
static electricity and then release it as
electric current, and Jorgensen does
not skimp on relating the bizarre ex-
periments that ensued. In 1747, a
French cleric named Jean-Antoine
Nollet demonstrated the effect of elec-
tricity on the human body for King
Louis XV:
He had 180 men from the king’s Royal
Guard stand in line holding hands. He then
had the soldier at one end of the line use his
free hand to touch the top of a fully electri-
fied Leyden jar. Instantly, all 180 men in line
reeled from the strong shock they felt. The
king was impressed.For his next experiment, Nollet outdid
himself, performing the same proce-
dure with a chain of seven hundred
Carthusian monks.
The discovery that electricity not
only shocks the body but is part of
what powers it came in the seven-
teen-eighties, when the Italian scien-
tist Luigi Galvani conducted a series
of experiments in which electric cur-
rent produced movement in severed
legs of frogs. Galvani attributed this
discovery to what he called “animal
electricity,” and for a while the study
of such phenomena was known as gal-
vanism. (Meanwhile, a sometime rival
of Galvani’s, Alessandro Volta, invented
the battery, giving his name to the
volt.) Perhaps the most famous gal-
vanic demonstration was conducted
by Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini,
in January, 1803, in London. In front
of an audience, he applied electrodes
to the corpse of a man, George Fos-
ter, who had just been hanged at New-
gate Prison for the murder of his wife
and child. Jorgensen quotes a report
from the Newgate Calendar, a popular
publication that relayed grisly details
of executions:
On the first application of the process to
the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal
began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles
were horribly contorted, and one eye was ac-
tually opened. In the subsequent part of the
process, the right hand was raised and clenched,
and the legs and thighs were set in motion.Some of the onlookers thought that
Aldini was trying to bring Foster back
to life, Jorgensen writes. He goes on
to note that Aldini’s work drew the
interest of the English writer and po-litical philosopher William Godwin,
who knew many electrical research-
ers. Godwin was the father of Mary
Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein”
(1818), which eventually gave us the
image of Boris Karloff as the monster
with electrodes sticking out from his
neck. That image is pure Hollywood
invention—Shelley’s monster doesn’t
run on electricity—but the book men-
tions galvanism elsewhere and it is
likely that the popular, bastardized
version of the tale brings out some-
thing latent in the original.
As interest in electricity spread,
there was a medical craze for electri-
cal treatments, to address anything
from headaches to bad thoughts or
sexual difficulties. Jorgensen tries out
the Toepler Influence Machine, a de-
vice dating from around 1900, not
long before the Pure Food and Drug
Act of 1906 brought a colorful era of
electro-quackery to an end. The ma-
chine generates electricity with a set
of spinning glass disks, operated by
a hand crank, to produce what was
termed “static breeze” therapy. The
electrotherapist operating the ma-
chine gauges the voltage by moving
two brass balls closer together as
sparks fly between them. Then, with
the flip of a switch, the electricity is
directed to Jorgensen’s head:I brace myself to be shocked. But I feel no
shock. Instead, I feel a cool breeze coming
down from above, the skin of my scalp and
face begins to tingle, and my shirt clings to my
chest. In a word, it feels pleasant.It certainly sounds more pleasant
than the devices described by Dr. Wil-
liam Harvey King, in his 1901 textbook,
“Electricity in Medicine and Surgery.”
King recommended treating gyneco-
logical disorders by placing an electrode
in the vagina and one in the rectum
and then delivering a jolt of electricity.
For men with urogenital complaints,
he advised inserting a slender electrode
up the penis, with a second electrode
in the rectum or on the testicles. If ad-
ministering current to swaying testi-
cles proved a challenge, King offered a
Rube Goldberg approach, with the tes-
ticles dunked into a gravy boat filled
with saline solution, which was then
electrified via a copper plate.
Don’t try this at home. But there