Bodily Electricity in Nineteenth-century Scientific Culture

The nineteenth century was full of shocking (and shocked) bodies. Throughout the century, electricity was the stuff of life - and death. When people thought about their own bodies - how they worked, what the relationship was between body and soul, how the relationship between the sexes worked, or ought to work, even the politics of individual rights and obligations, they turned to electricity as a way of making sense of difficult questions. Electricity was fundamental to the ways many people made sense of themselves and their bodies as their society was transformed around them. During the nineteenth century, electricity replaced God as the ultimate tool for explaining humanity's place in the universe. Saying life was electrical was much the same thing as saying there was no such thing as a soul and therefore no such thing as God either. Later on in the century, the slogan was an invitation to buy new commodities like electric belts or corsets that could revitalize a flagging body.
Looking at the history of electricity from this perspective completely changes the way we think about the origins of physics as a science. Nineteenth-century physics was as much a tool for people to try and make sense of their own bodies as it was to make sense of the world around them. Thinking about physics as intimately connected to the body in this way helps to remind us that physics emerged during the nineteenth century not as abstract mathematical speculation but as a way of dealing with very immediate and intimate concerns about who we are and about our place in the universe.
This book explores the ways in which nineteenth-century people thought about the relationship between electricity and the body and its implications by looking at four individual bodies. First, readers will meet Thomas Weems, who after murdering his wife in 1819 was hung by the neck until dead on Castle Hill in Cambridge before being ceremonially carried through the town to the university's chemical rooms where a series of electrical experiments were publicly carried out on his corpse. The next body belongs to Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace. Lovelace was an accomplished mathematician and is often celebrated these days as a computer pioneer on the basis of her work with Charles Babbage on his famous Analytic Engine. In reality, she was rather more interesting than that. Like many of her contemporaries, Ada thought of her body as an electrical machine and used her own illnesses and obsessions as experiments to try and figure out how her own mind and body worked in electrical terms. Constance Phipps's body will provide a window into the ways the mid-Victorians thought about electricity, showmanship, the relationship between mind and body, medicine and sexuality. Our last body belongs to Mr. Jeffery, a largely obscure clerk working in London during the 1880s and 1890s. His activities give us an insight into the shady world of electric quackery and helps us understand the nature of scientific authority at the end of the nineteenth century. These four bodies, taken together, help tell the story of how electricity emerged during the nineteenth century as a powerful new tool for making sense of our bodies and ourselves and how bodies mattered for the emergence of the new physics.