From Clouds to the Brain. Celine Cherici

it is true, may produce actions similar to those of many of our functions; but who would dare to assert that life is the result of galvanism or electricity? [MIL 48, p. 121]

      He interpreted brain movements, which consist of processing external stimuli, in terms of electrical speed. This point must be understood through the image of a machine brain at the controls of a machine body. Thomas William Nunn (1837–1909) published in 1853 a treatise entitled Inflammation of the breast, and milk abscess in which he extended the comparison of the cerebral organ to a galvanic machine, to the uterus, the breast and the ovaries. They would have, according to him, a morphological organization comparable to a reproductive galvanic cell completed by the female nervous system:

      The ovaria, uterus and mammae form, as it were, a reproductive pile, the circuit being completed by the nervous system. [NUN 53, p. 3]

      The functional analogy of nerves with electric wires was taken up in a comparison of brain function with the electric telegraph, designed by Baron Schilling in St. Petersburg in 1833:

Again by analogy, just as we have compared the constitution of a swamp to a vast galvanic apparatus, we can also liken the human body to a voltaic pile, since it is also formed by the contact of heterogeneous elements whose nerves and muscles are the conductors, and solids and fluids are both the generators and conductors of electricity. [PAL 47, p. 232, author’s translation]

      Electrical therapies cannot be separated from the invention of new technologies. In the same way that the telegraph helped to maintain order by allowing criminals to be reported more quickly; electricity guaranteed moral order by restoring electrical brain power immediately. While the nerves conduct instructions from the body to the mind, communication still has to work. The development of the telegraph, thus gave a model to the nervous functioning, conceived in terms of transfers and electrical communications:

      As I have already observed, these instruments of mental transmission, although they are consecutive in their operation, and may be considered sequent in their course, yet act in such a simultaneous manner, that sensations are submitted to the test of our judgment and reason with electric rapidity. [MIL 48, p. 137]

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), daughter of the poet Byron (1788–1824), is a figure in the history of the brain as a machine. A pioneer in computer science [KIM 99] and creator of one of the first computer language programs, she showed an early interest in electricity and the brain-machine. As a patient of Laycock, she crossed paths¹³ with Andrew Crosse (1784–1855) with whom she evoked the fact of making electrical experiments a tool to reach a new understanding of vital mechanisms and consciousness.

The societal and medical stakes of the application of electricity were multiple: from the knowledge of Man in his materiality to the possibility of intervening on his mental physiology, the range was wide and is still developing today. While the cerebralization of behaviors and faculties seems to result from a rational movement, it also stems from an interventionist imaginary and the desire of the human species to control itself. In this context, the imaginary of convulsive behavior joins the electric imaginary. Both of them have had a lasting impact on the history of medicine. While the 19th Century was described as the century of convulsions, its conceptions of human nature were based on the electrical conception of the subject and the secularization of diseases of the mind. Thus, Laycock, Marshall Hall (1790–1857) and William Carpenter wanted to demonstrate that mind-body intricacies were very complex, that much of what the mind did to the body took place on the surface of consciousness and thought, but also that electricity played a crucial role in this research with the technical perspective of manipulating the currents that continually work between these substances. Electrification ranged from the whole body to the brain, making visible the important notion of functional localization, involving a representation of the brain organ as the organic substrate of human instincts, faculties and behaviors. This key notion of cerebralization was concretized and prolonged in a process of internalization of psychological evils. Gradually, the electrical stimulation penetrated deeper into the brain to better reveal its organization and functioning:

      At the dawn of the 20th Century, the disturbing strangeness was displaced, no longer in a mysterious Other, but in oneself; in the darkness of one’s own psyche. [BAC 12, p. 184, author’s translation]

      While between 1801 and 1840, electricity represented a counter-culture to atheism and materialism, capable of giving life back to the deceased, from 1840 onwards, it became the guarantor of the standardization of mores and a certain representation of happiness. Its developments thus marked the domination of Man over the evolution of his species.

      Figure 1.5. French advertisement dating from 1911 for the “Herculex” electric belt

Electrical treatments were seen as universal remedies, or in any case were disseminated as such within public opinion. Everybody could compensate for the weaknesses of their animal fluid and re-establish good connections between their consciousness and their body. Devices were becoming more compact, easier to handle, resulting in a wave of companies producing healthy electrical items. These paramedical products, such as the electric belt, easily accounted for a quarter of advertisements in 1880 [LOE 99].

      These devices referred to the fact that in addition to taming the world, bringing light and progress to it, electricity was able to discipline the body and mind. This medical movement, which had its roots in the second half of the 18th Century, could have died out in the face of the uncertain results initially brought about by electrical treatment. Because it corresponded to a time when society was looking for new, stable and rational points of reference to regulate the lives of individuals, its posterity in the history of neuroscience, understood in the broadest sense, is still relevant today. These applications of electricity to a body that had symbolically become a machine could be conceived as a step contrary to hypnotism, insofar as it was not a question of reaching consciousness by disconnecting its link with the body but of intervening directly on the cerebral circuits to regulate behavior. In the context of the development of electrotherapy rooms, we can speak of a naturalization of behavior. While convulsion referred to illnesses that are difficult to differentiate from each other, electricity appeared to be an instrument that could act both on the frozen condition and on the disordered movements, able to differentiate a psychological illness from an organic pathology. Thus, cataleptics, hysterics, ecstatics and epileptics resembled each other and merged together in the medical discourse, in that their lists of symptoms had in common that they did not present a visible organic disorder:

      Others, such as the supporters of the École de la Salpêtrière in the 1880s, made it a simple symptom combined with other neuroses: hysteria above all, but also ecstasy, epilepsy, apoplexy, death, chorea. Some speak of ‘hysterical catalepsy’, others of ‘cataleptic ecstasy’; others still of ‘hystero-catalepsy’. [BAC 12, p. 173, author’s translation]

      The excerpt from an article in the French newspaper Le monde illustré, dated August 14, 1887, describing the intense therapeutic activity in the electrotherapy department of Salpêtrière, uses the argument of the number of patients treated to assert the effectiveness of electrical treatments. This point underlines the fact that this treatment responded to a societal problem involving ailments about which little was known but which affected a large number of people:

Thousands of patients have been treated in recent years at the Salpêtrière. At each consultation, the average number of patients varies between two hundred and fifty and three hundred. […] It’s called the electric bath. Under its influence, we can observe various physiological phenomena (heat, blood circulation, etc.), too technical to find their place here. Localized electrification is done by means of appropriate exciters. The main ailments that are treated at the Salpêtrière clinic belong to two classes; nervous diseases (hysteria, neuralgia, all kinds of paralysis) and nutritional diseases in which we understand dyspepsia, stomach dilatation, chlorosis, anemia, rheumatism,