François Zanetti, L’Electricité médicale dans la France des Lumières

From the moment in the first half of the eighteenth century when Europe’s experimental philosophers began to investigate the new force of electricity, a number of them started to explore the possibility of using its power to cure disease, especially paralysis. This book specifically looks at the history of electrotherapy in France in the decade 1775 to 1785. French scientists, such as the abbé Nollet, had used electricity as a medical treatment in the middle of the eighteenth century, but the practice had found little favour before the reign of Louis XVI. At that moment the foundation of the Société royale de médecine dedicated to the improvement of therapeutics, a novel humanitarian concern among the rich for the poor and their ailments, and a series of government ministers anxious to keep the king’s subjects fit to work and fight encouraged the development of electrotherapy as one potential solution to the nation’s many ills. Even the non-existent but much touted problem of depopulation, it was hoped, might be alleviated once electrotherapy had been brought to bear on onanism and mastitis. As the author shows, however, the enthusiasm did not last. The electrotherapists squabbled amongst themselves as alternative practitioners, such as the abbé Sans, crossed swords with the medical establishment, who wanted to limit the use of the therapy to graduate physicians. At the same time, the sick proved very impatient patients: they tended to opt for electrotherapy as a last resort and abandoned the treatment after a few sessions if there was no sign of improvement. Above all, the trials done by the state’s leading supporter of electrotherapy, Pierre Mauduyt de La Varenne, proved inconclusive: before the French Revolution he had turned his attention once again to his original love, ornithology. In the 1790s and early nineteenth century, if there was any interest in France in subjecting the human body to electric shocks, it was to be found among the supporters of Galvinism. But they practised on the dead rather than living, using the heads and trunks of executed criminals to see which parts of the body could continue to be stimulated after death

Alternative medicine · Electrotherapy · Enthusiasm · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Reign · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine · Psychology · History · Law

• Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2019

  Francesco Luzzini•Isis•2019

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