2.  The Deaf to Hear, and the Lame to Walk

A BURMESE ELEPHANT has the same set of genes whether it toils in a logging camp or runs free in the forest. But its DNA will not tell you the details of its life. In the same way, electrons cannot tell us what is most interesting about electricity. Like elephants, electricity has been forced to bear our burdens and move great loads, and we have worked out more or less precisely its behavior while in captivity. But we must not be fooled into believing we know everything important about the lives of its wild cousins.

What is the source of thunder and lightning, that causes clouds to become electrified and discharge their fury upon the earth? Science still does not know. Why does the earth have a magnetic field? What makes combed hair frizzy, nylon cling, and party balloons stick to walls? This most common of all electrical phenomena is still not well understood. How does our brain work, our nerves function, our cells communicate? How is our body’s growth choreographed? We are still fundamentally ignorant. And the question raised in this book—“What is the effect of electricity on life?”—is one that modern science doesn’t even ask. Science’s only concern today is to keep human exposure be-low a level that will cook your cells. The effect of nonlethal electricity is something mainstream science no longer wants to know. But in the eighteenth century, scientists not only asked the question, but began to supply answers.

Early friction machines were capable of being charged to about ten thousand volts—enough to deliver a stinging shock, but not enough, then or now, to be thought dangerous. By way of comparison, a person can accumulate thirty thousand volts on their body in walking across a synthetic carpet. Discharging it stings, but won’t kill you.

A one-pint Leyden jar could deliver a more powerful shock, containing about 0.1 joules of energy, but still about a hundred times less than what is thought to be hazardous, and thousands of times less than shocks that are routinely delivered by defibrillators to revive people who are in cardiac arrest. According to mainstream science today, the sparks, shocks, and tiny currents used in the eighteenth century should have had no effects on health. But they did.

Imagine you were a patient in 1750 suffering from arthritis. Your electrician would seat you in a chair that had glass legs so that it was well insulated from the ground. This was done so that when you were connected to the friction machine, you would accumulate the “electric fluid” in your body instead of draining it into the earth. Depending on the philosophy of your electrician, the severity of your disease, and your own tolerance for electricity, there were a number of ways to “electrize” you. In the “electric bath,” which was the most gentle, you would simply hold in your hand a rod connected to the prime conductor, and the machine would be cranked continuously for minutes or hours, communicating its charge throughout your body and creating an electrical “aura” around you. If this was done gently enough, you would feel nothing—just as a person who shuffles their feet on a carpet can accumulate a charge on their body without being aware of it.

After you were thus “bathed,” the machine would be stopped and you might be treated with the “electric wind.” Electricity discharges most easily from pointed conductors. Therefore a grounded, pointed metal or wooden wand would be brought toward your painful knee and you would again feel very little—perhaps the sensation of a small breeze as the charge that had built up in your body slowly dissipated through your knee into the grounded wand.

For a stronger effect, your electrician might use a wand with a rounded end, and instead of a continuous current draw actual sparks from your ailing knee. And if your condition were severe—say your leg was paralyzed—he could charge up a small Leyden jar and give your leg a series of strong shocks.

Electricity was available in two flavors: positive, or “vitreous” electricity, obtained by rubbing glass, and negative, or “resinous” electricity, originally obtained by rubbing sulfur or various resins. Your electrician would most likely treat you with positive electricity, as it was the variety normally found on the surface of the body in a state of health.

The goal of electrotherapy was to stimulate health by restoring the electrical equilibrium of the body where it was out of balance. The idea was certainly not new. In another part of the world, the use of natural electricity had been developed to a fine art over thousands of years. Acupuncture needles, as we will see in chapter 9, conduct atmospheric electricity into the body, where it travels along precisely mapped pathways, returning to the atmosphere through other needles that complete the circuit. By comparison electrotherapy in Europe and America, although similar in concept, was an infant science, using instruments that were like sledgehammers.

European medicine in the eighteenth century was full of sledgehammers. If you went to a conventional doctor for your rheumatism, you might expect to be bled, purged, vomited, blistered, and even dosed with mercury. It’s easy to understand that going to an electrician instead might seem a very attractive alternative. And it remained attractive until the beginning of the twentieth century.

After more than half a century of unceasing popularity, electrotherapy fell temporarily out of favor during the early 1800s in reaction to certain cults, one of which had grown up in Europe around Anton Mesmer and his so-called “magnetic” healing, and another in America around Elisha Perkins and his “electric” tractors—three-inch-long metallic pencils with which one made passes over a diseased part of the body. Neither man used actual magnets or electricity at all, but they gave both those methods, for a while, a bad name. By mid-century electricity was again mainstream, and in the 1880s ten thousand American physicians were administering it to their patients.

Electrotherapy finally fell permanently out of favor in the early twentieth century, perhaps, one suspects, because it was incompatible with what was then going on in the world. Electricity was no longer a subtle force that had anything to do with living things. It was a dynamo, capable of propelling locomotives and executing prisoners, not curing patients. But sparks delivered by a friction machine, a century and a half before the world was wired, carried quite different associations.

There is no doubt that electricity sometimes cured diseases, both major and minor. The reports of success, over almost two centuries, were sometimes exaggerated, but they are too numerous and often too detailed and well-attested to dismiss them all. Even in the early 1800s, when electricity was not in good repute, reports continued to emerge that cannot be ignored. For example, the London Electrical Dispensary, between September 29, 1793, and June 4, 1819, admitted 8,686 patients for electrical treatment. Of these, 3,962 were listed as “cured,” and another 3,308 as “relieved” when they were discharged—an 84 percent success rate.¹

Although the main focus of this chapter will be on effects that are not necessarily beneficial, it is important to remember why eighteenth century society was enthralled with electricity, just as we are today. For almost three hundred years the tendency has been to chase its benefits and dismiss its harms. But in the 1700s and 1800s, the daily use of electricity in medicine was a constant reminder, at least, that electricity was intimately connected with biology. Here in the West, electricity as a biological science remains in its infancy today, and even its cures have been long forgotten. I will recall just one of them.

Making the Deaf Hear

In 1851, the great neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne achieved renown for something for which he is least remembered today. A well-known figure in the history of medicine, he was certainly no quack. He introduced modern methods of physical examination that are still in use. He was the first physician ever to take a biopsy from a living person for the purpose of diagnosis. He published the first accurate clinical description of polio. A number of diseases that he identified are named for him, most notably Duchenne muscular dystrophy. He is remembered for all those things. But in his own time he was the somewhat unwilling center of attention for his work with the deaf.

Duchenne knew the anatomy of the ear in great detail, in fact it was for the purpose of elucidating the function of the nerve called the chorda tympani, which passes through the middle ear, that he asked a few deaf people to volunteer to be the subjects of electrical experiments. The incidental and unexpected improvement in their hearing caused Duchenne to be inundated with requests from within the deaf community to come to Paris for treatments. And so he began to minister to large numbers of people with nerve deafness, using the same apparatus that he had designed for his research, which fit snugly into the ear canal and contained a stimulating electrode.

His procedure, to a modern reader, might seem unlikely to have had any effect at all: he exposed his patients to pulses of the feeblest possible current, spaced half a second apart, for five seconds at a time. Then he gradually increased the current strength, but never to a painful level, and never for more than five seconds at a time. And yet by this means he restored good hearing, in a matter of days or weeks, to a 26-year-old man who had been deaf since age ten, a 21-year-old man who had been deaf since he had measles at age nine, a young woman recently made deaf by an overdose of quinine, given for malaria, and numerous others with partial or complete hearing loss.²

Fifty years earlier, in Jever, Germany, an apothecary named Johann Sprenger became famous throughout Europe for a similar reason. Though he was denounced by the director of the Institute for the Deaf and Dumb in Berlin, he was besieged by the deaf themselves with requests for treatment. His results were attested in court documents, and his methods were adopted by contemporary physicians. He himself was reported to have fully or partially restored hearing to no less than forty deaf and hard of hearing individuals, including some deaf from birth. His methods, like Duchenne’s, were disarmingly simple and gentle. He made the current weaker or stronger according to the sensitivity of his patient, and each treatment consisted of brief pulses of electricity spaced one second apart for a total of four minutes per ear. The electrode was placed on the tragus (the flap of cartilage in front of the ear) for one minute, inside the ear canal for two minutes, and on the mastoid process behind the ear for one minute.

And fifty years before Sprenger, Swedish physician Johann Lindhult, writing from Stockholm, reported the full or partial restoration of hearing, during a two-month period, to a 57-year-old man who had been deaf for thirty-two years; a youth of twenty-two, whose hearing loss was recent; a seven-year-old girl, born deaf; a youth of twenty-nine, hard of hearing since age eleven; and a man with hearing loss and tinnitus of the left ear. “All patients,” wrote Lindhult, “were treated with gentle electricity, either the simple current or the electric wind.”

Lindhult, in 1752, was using a friction machine. Half a century later, Sprenger used galvanic currents from an electric pile, forerunner of today’s batteries. Half a century after that, Duchenne used alternating current from an induction coil. British surgeon Michael La Beaume, similarly successful, used a friction machine in the 1810s and galvanic currents later on. What they all had in common was their insistence on keeping their treatments brief, simple, and painless.

Seeing and Tasting Electricity

Aside from attempting to cure deafness, blindness, and other diseases, early electricians were intensely interested in whether electricity could be directly perceived by the five senses—another question about which modern engineers have no interest, and modern doctors have no knowledge, but whose answer is relevant to every modern person who suffers from electrical sensitivity.

When he was still in his early twenties, the future explorer Alexander von Humboldt lent his own body to the elucidation of this mystery. It would be several years before he left Europe on the long voyage that was to propel him far up the Orinoco River and to the top of Mount Chimborazo, collecting plants as he went, making systematic observations of the stars and the earth and the cultures of Amazonian peoples. Half a century would pass before he would begin work on his five-volume Kosmos, an attempt to unify all existing scientific knowledge. But as a young man supervising mining operations in the Bayreuth district of Bavaria, the central question of his day occupied his spare time.

Is electricity really the life force, people were asking? This question, gnawing gently at the soul of Europe since the days of Isaac Newton, had suddenly become insistent, forcing itself out of the lofty realms of philosophy and into dinnertime discussions around the tables of ordinary people whose children would have to live with the chosen answer. The electric battery, which produced a current from the contact of dissimilar metals, had just been invented in Italy. Its implications were huge: friction machines—bulky, expensive, unreliable, subject to atmospheric conditions—might no longer be necessary. Telegraph systems, already designed by a few visionaries, might now be practical. And questions about the nature of the electric fluid might come closer to being answered.

In the early 1790s, Humboldt threw himself into this research with enthusiasm. He wished, among other things, to determine whether he could perceive this new form of electricity with his own eyes, ears, nose, and taste buds. Others were doing similar experiments—Alessandro Volta in Italy, George Hunter and Richard Fowler in England, Christoph Pfaff in Germany, Peter Abilgaard in Denmark—but none more thoroughly or diligently than Humboldt.

Consider that today we are accustomed to handling nine-volt batteries with our hands without a thought. Consider that millions of us are walking around with silver and zinc, as well as gold, copper, and other metals in the fillings in our mouths. Then consider the following experiment of Humboldt’s, using a single piece of zinc, and one of silver, that produced an electric tension of about a volt:

“A large hunting dog, naturally lazy, very patiently let a piece of zinc be applied against his palate, and remained perfectly tranquil while another piece of zinc was placed in contact with the first piece and with his tongue. But scarcely one touched his tongue with the silver, than he showed his aversion in a humorous manner: he contracted his upper lip convulsively, and licked himself for a very long time; it sufficed afterwards to show him the piece of zinc to remind him of the impression he had experienced and to make him angry.”

The ease with which electricity can be perceived, and the variety of the sensations, would be a revelation to most doctors today. When Humboldt touched the top of his own tongue with the piece of zinc, and its point with the piece of silver, the taste was strong and bitter. When he moved the piece of silver underneath, his tongue burned. Moving the zinc further back and the silver forward made his tongue feel cold. And when the zinc was moved even further back he became nauseated and sometimes vomited—which never happened if the two metals were the same. The sensations always occurred as soon as the zinc and silver pieces were placed in metallic contact with each other.³

A sensation of sight was just as easily elicited, by four different methods, using the same one-volt battery: by applying the silver “armature” on one moistened eyelid and the zinc on the other; or one in a nostril and the other on an eye; or one on the tongue and one on an eye; or even one on the tongue and one against the upper gums. In each case, at the moment the two metals touched each other, Humboldt saw a flash of light. If he repeated the experiment too many times, his eyes became inflamed.

In Italy, Volta, the inventor of the electric battery, succeeded in eliciting a sensation of sound, not with one pair of metals, but with thirty, attached to electrodes in each ear. With the metals he originally used in his “pile,” using water as an electrolyte, this may have been about a twenty-volt battery. Volta heard only a crackling sound which could have been a mechanical effect on the bones of his middle ears, and he did not repeat the experiment, fearing that the shock to his brain might be dangerous.⁴ It remained for German physician Rudolf Brenner, seventy years later, using more refined equipment and smaller currents, to demonstrate actual effects on the auditory nerve, as we will see in chapter 15.

Speeding up the Heart and Slowing it Down

Back in Germany, Humboldt, armed with the same single pieces of zinc and silver, turned his attention next to the heart. Together with his older brother Wilhelm, and supervised by well-known physiologists, Humboldt removed the heart of a fox and prepared one of its nerve fibers so that the armatures could be applied to it without touching the heart itself. “At each contact with the metals the pulsations of the heart were clearly changed; their speed, but especially their force and their elevation were augmented,” he recorded.

The brothers next experimented on frogs, lizards, and toads. If the dissected heart beat 21 times in a minute, after being galvanized it beat 38 to 42 times in a minute. If the heart had stopped beating for five minutes, it restarted immediately upon contact with the two metals.

Together with a friend in Leipzig, Humboldt stimulated the heart of a carp that had almost stopped beating, pulsing only once every four minutes. After massaging the heart proved to have no effect, galvanization restored the rate to 35 beats per minute. The two friends kept the heart beating for almost a quarter of an hour by repeated stimulation with a single pair of dissimilar metals.

On another occasion, Humboldt even managed to revive a dying linnet that was lying feet up, eyes closed on its back, unresponsive to the prick of a pin. “I hastened to place a small plate of zinc in its beak and a small piece of silver in its rectum,” he wrote, “and I immediately established a communication between the two metals with an iron rod. What was my astonishment, when at the moment of contact the bird opened its eyes, raised itself on its feet and beat its wings. It breathed again for six or eight minutes and then calmly died.”⁵

Nobody proved that a one-volt battery could restart a human heart, but scores of observers before Humboldt had reported that electricity increased the human pulse rate—knowledge that is not possessed by doctors today. German physicians Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein⁶ and Carl Abraham Gerhard,⁷ German physicist Celestin Steiglehner,⁸ Swiss physicist Jean Jallabert,⁹ French physicians François Boissier de Sauvages de la Croix,¹⁰ Pierre Mauduyt de la Varenne,¹¹ and Jean-Baptiste Bonnefoy,¹² French physicist Joseph Sigaud de la Fond,¹³ and Italian physicians Eusebio Sguario¹⁴ and Giovan Giuseppi Veratti¹⁵ were just a few of the observers who reported that the electric bath increased the pulse rate by anywhere from five to thirty beats per minute, when positive electricity was used. Negative electricity had the opposite effect. In 1785, Dutch pharmacist Willem van Barneveld conducted 169 trials on 43 of his patients—men, women, and children aged nine to sixty—finding an average five percent increase in the pulse rate when the person was bathed with positive electricity, and a three percent decrease in the pulse rate when the person was bathed with negative electricity.¹⁶ When positive sparks were drawn the pulse increased by twenty percent.

But these were only averages: no two individuals reacted the same to electricity. One person’s pulse always increased from sixty to ninety beats per minute; another’s always doubled; another’s pulse became much slower; another reacted not at all. Some of van Barneveld’s subjects reacted in a manner opposite to the majority: a negative charge always accelerated their pulse, while a positive charge slowed it down.

“Istupidimento”

Observations of these kinds came quickly and abundantly, so that by the end of the eighteenth century a basic body of knowledge had been built up about the effects of the electric fluid—usually the positive variety—on the human body. It increased both the pulse rate, as we have seen, and the strength of the pulse. It augmented all of the secretions of the body. Electricity caused salivation, and made tears to flow, and sweat to run. It caused the secretion of ear wax, and nasal mucus. It made gastric juice flow, stimulating the appetite. It made milk to be let down, and menstrual blood to issue. It made people urinate copiously and move their bowels.

Most of these actions were useful in electrotherapy, and would continue to be so until the early twentieth century. Other effects were purely unwanted. Electrification almost always caused dizziness, and sometimes a sort of mental confusion, or “istupidimento,” as the Italians called it.¹⁷ It commonly produced headaches, nausea, weakness, fatigue, and heart palpitations. Sometimes it caused shortness of breath, coughing, or asthma-like wheezing. It often caused muscle and joint pains, and sometimes mental depression. Although electricity usually caused the bowels to move, often with diarrhea, repeated electrification could result in constipation.

Electricity caused both drowsiness and insomnia.

Humboldt, in experiments on himself, found that electricity increased blood flow from wounds, and caused serum to flow copiously out of blisters.¹⁸ Gerhard divided one pound of freshly drawn blood into two equal parts, placed them next to each other, and electrified one of them. The electrified blood took longer to clot.¹⁹ Antoine Thillaye-Platel, pharmacist at the Hôtel-Dieu, the famous hospital in Paris, agreeing, said that electricity is contraindicated in cases of hemorrhage.²⁰ Consistent with this are numerous reports of nosebleeds from electrification. Winkler and his wife, as already mentioned, got nosebleeds from the shock of a Leyden jar. In the 1790s, Scottish physician and anatomist Alexander Monro, who is remembered for discovering the function of the lymphatic system, got nosebleeds from just a one-volt battery, whenever he tried to elicit the sensation of light in his eyes. “Dr. Monro was so excitable by galvanism that he bled from the nose when, having the zinc very gently inserted in his nasal fossae, he put it in contact with an armature applied to his tongue. The hemorrhage always took place at the moment when the lights appeared.” This was reported by Humboldt.²¹ In the early 1800s, Conrad Quensel, in Stockholm, reported that galvanism “frequently” caused nosebleeds.²²

Line engraving from Abbé Nollet, Recherches sur les Causes Particulières des Phénomènes Électriques, Paris: Frères Guérin, 1753

Abbé Nollet proved that at least one of these effects—perspiration—occurred merely from being in an electric field. Actual contact with the friction machine wasn’t even necessary. He had electrified cats, pigeons, several kinds of songbirds, and finally human beings. In carefully controlled repeatable experiments, accompanied by modern-looking data tables, he had demonstrated measurable weight loss in all of his electrified subjects, due to an increase in evaporation from their skin. He had even electrified five hundred houseflies in a gauze-covered jar for four hours and found that they too had lost extra weight—4 grains more than their non-electrified counterparts in the same amount of time.

Then Nollet had the idea to place his subjects on the floor underneath the electrified metal cage instead of in it, and they still lost as much, and even a bit more weight than when they were electrified themselves. Nollet had also observed an acceleration in the growth of seedlings sprouted in electrified pots; this too occurred when the pots were only placed on the floor beneath. “Finally,” wrote Nollet, “I made a person sit for five hours on a table near the electrified metal cage.” The young woman lost 4½ drams more weight than when she had actually been electrified herself.²³

Nollet was thus the first person, back in 1753, to report significant biological effects from exposure to a DC electric field—the kind of field that according to mainstream science today has no effect whatsoever. His experiment was later replicated, using a bird, by Steiglehner, professor of physics at the University of Ingolstadt, Bavaria, with similar results.²⁴

Table 1 lists the effects on humans, reported by most early electricians, of an electric charge or small currents of DC electricity. Electrically sensitive people today will recognize most if not all of them.

Table 1 - Effects of Electricity as Reported in the Eighteenth Century

Therapeutic and neutral effects	Non-therapeutic effects
Change in pulse rate	Dizziness
Sensations of taste, light, and sound	Nausea
	Headaches
Increase of body temperature	Nervousness
Pain relief	Irritability
Restoration of muscle tone	Mental confusion
Stimulation of appetite	Depression
Mental exhilaration	Insomnia
Sedation	Drowsiness
Perspiration	Fatigue
Salivation	Weakness
Secretion of ear wax	Numbness and tingling
Secretion of mucus	Muscle and joint pains
Menstruation, uterine contraction	Muscle spasms and cramps
	Backache
Lactation	Heart palpitations
Lacrimation	Chest pain
Urination	Colic
Defecation	Diarrhea
	Constipation
	Nosebleeds, hemorrhage
	Itching
	Tremors
	Seizures
	Paralysis
	Fever
	Respiratory infections
	Shortness of breath
	Coughing
	Wheezing and asthma attacks
	Eye pain, weakness, and fatigue
	Ringing in the ears
	Metallic taste