were plenty of electrotherapy devices
designed for home use and mailed di-
rectly—and confidentially—to consum-
ers. Pulvermacher’s Electric Belt, for ex-
ample, was worn around the waist, with
batteries providing a steady electric cur-
rent to the skin. A pouch attached to
the front of the belt held the testicles,
like a jockstrap. This allegedly enhanced
“sexual vitality,” which, Jorgensen ex-
plains, was a euphemism for treating
erectile dysfunction.
E
lectric shocks more often bring
death than enhance vitality, and
people naturally feared lightning bolts
hurled by any number of gods—Greek,
Nordic, Hindu, Maori—long before
they had any notion of electricity. Some
medieval bells bear the Latin inscrip-
tion Fulgura frango (“I break the light-
ning”), a testament to a belief that
ringing church bells could offer pro-
tection against lightning. Of course,
the unintended consequence was that
bell ringers ended up in harm’s way.
In France, between 1753 and 1786, more
than a hundred bell ringers died of
electrocution.
Why are some people injured or
killed by lightning and others not? Jor-
gensen offers an educational vignette.
While on a guided camping trip in the
Blue Ridge Mountains in North Car-
olina, he was caught in a lightning
storm. The guide made the group “stand
on our backpacks in a crouched fetal
position, legs held tightly together, with
our heads down and our rain ponchos
draped over ourselves.” Deaths from
lightning occur in various ways—a di-
rect strike, say, or a current from a strike
nearby that flows through the ground
and up into the body. Crouching down
while standing on a backpack made of
a nonconductive material lessens both
kinds of risk.
The amperage needed to kill a per-
son is surprisingly small. A current of
as little as 0.01 amps can disrupt the
electrical signals f lowing from our
nerves to the muscles of the chest and
diaphragm, causing asphyxiation. Am-
perage ten times higher can stop the
heart outright. What makes lightning
seem “so capricious,” as Jorgensen puts
it, is that some people are killed by
low amperage while others survive di-
rect strikes. The reason is a phenom-
enon called flashover, in which elec-
tric current flows over the surface of
the body and largely bypasses the in-
ternal organs. Flashover occurs when
the surface of the body is more con-
ductive than the inside—for instance,
if the skin is covered in sweat. The
path that the current takes is crucial.
A Danish study of electrocution deaths
found that the current passed through
the victim’s heart in seventy-eight per
cent of cases. Furthermore, in eighty-
one per cent of the victims there was
no observable change to the pathol-
ogy of the internal organs; in other
words, death occurred not because any
tissue was destroyed but because the
current had interfered with the nor-
mal electrical function of the heart’s
cardiac cells, nodal tissues, and con-
duction tracts.
With higher currents, tissue dam-
age does occur, and the grimmest
chapter in Jorgensen’s book deals with
electrocution as a means of execution.
The electric chair was the brainchild
of Alfred P. Southwick, a dentist in
Buffalo, who, one day in 1881, hap-
pened to see a drunk man stumble
and grab an electrical generator.
Southwick ran to the man, but the
man was dead. The speed of death
made him think that electricity could
provide a quicker, less painful end
than hanging. He based the design
for an electric chair on the chair that
his dental patients sat in. After South-
wick had experimented with a vari-
ety of stray animals, a state commis-
sion assessed thirty-four methods of
execution and decided that electro-
cution was the most humane. The re-
ality has proved otherwise, and the
first use of the electric chair, in 1890,
gave a preview of many ugly scenes
in the following century. William
Kemmler, a businessman convicted of
killing his girlfriend with a hatchet,
68 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
“We’ll have the breakfast served all day.”
• •
