ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Electric Fish, Colonial Space, and Multi-Species Knowledge Circulation in the Eighteenth-Century Greater Caribbean

• In Event: The Science, Sensation, and Schism of Medical Electricity

English Abstract

In mid-eighteenth century, Europeans were living an ‘electric craze’, as the nature and functioning principles of this newly tamed natural force were under intense speculation. Especially electricity’s miraculous effects on the human body promised to make it a cure-all for all ailments, and scientists developed intricate theories of electricity as the universal fluid of life itself. While previous scholarship has examined electricity and its medical application largely as a European and North American phenomenon, this paper argues that the development of medical electricity cannot be separated from Europe’s global empire of knowledge. The paper develops this argument by examining how tropical electric fish (especially the electric eel) influenced the construction of scientific, anatomical, and medical knowledge in the Greater Caribbean during the eighteenth century. In this liminal colonised space, sensations, experiences, and knowledge flowed between humans and animals of a variety of race, species, and genus, as experiments on the eel shocks’ effects on human and non-human bodies were passed from European colonisers to Indigenous and enslaved communities and back again. Drawing on eighteenth-century scientific treatises, natural histories, and magazine articles, the paper demonstrates that electric fish came to play a central role in developing European understandings of so-called animal electricity and electricity’s connection to the nervous system. In this way, the paper suggests that eighteenth-century scientific knowledge construction was an embodied, multisensory, and multi-species effort where tropical colonial space held not a marginal but, indeed, a pivotal place.

Author

• Soile Ylivuori, University of Helsinki