ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Science, Sensation, and Schism of Medical Electricity

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

We offer a session of four presentations as a team from the European Research Council project ELBOW: Medical Electricity, Embodied Experiences, and Knowledge Construction in Europe and the Atlantic World, c. 1740-1840.

Central to our analysis is medical electricity – a seemingly miraculous new medical cure of the middle of the 18th century based on new understanding and mechanical inventions around electricity. During the 1740s, medical electricity took hold of the medical communities and private practices in European countries as well as North America and the colonial world. The rapid spread of the phenomenon encourages to study the ways of exchanging knowledge both within and across borders. From Germany and France to Sweden and the Caribbean Colonies, we scrutinize the different local manifestations, perspectives, and phenomena around medical electricity: scientific enthusiasm, spectacles and miraculous cures, but also contests, debates, and skepticism. The performative and embodied aspects of medical electricity placed the patient to a new kind of centered role in medical treatment, creating a specific form of patient-centered knowledge construction and early focus on experiments and empiricism. Rather than a straightforward innovation, medical electricity appears as a dynamic field where knowledge was negotiated through national and transnational exchange at the crossroads of official and unofficial medicine, scientific communities, and private practitioners.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Saara-Maija Kontturi, University of Helsinki

Individual Presentations

• Electric Fish, Colonial Space, and Multi-Species Knowledge Circulation in the Eighteenth-Century Greater Caribbean - Soile Ylivuori, University of Helsinki

• Scientific Optimism, Skepticism, and Developing Methodology in Medical Electricity in Sweden and Finland - Saara-Maija Kontturi, University of Helsinki

• A Spectacle of Science: Medical Electricity, Performance and Gender - Edna Huotari, University of Helsinki