The Spark of Life: Electricity in the Human Body

by Ashcroft, Frances

  There must be many reasons why humans have evolved consciousness, but perhaps one is that self-awareness is linked with our ability to appreciate the thoughts and feelings of others. This is crucial for teamwork and social cohesion, attributes that have been critical for the success of our species. The only other creatures to evidence self-awareness in the mirror test are also social animals – they include chimpanzees, elephants and dolphins.

  The origin of consciousness is one of the most challenging questions of our time, and something of a minefield for philosophers and neuroscientists alike. It is far too complex to tackle fully here, in just a few lines. Nevertheless, most scientists would now agree that consciousness emerges from the electrical activity of the brain – and that, in turn, derives from the activity of my favourite proteins, the ion channels. And although there remains a huge gulf in our understanding of precisely how neuronal activity shapes cognitive function, new technologies promise that we may eventually understand how behaviour is generated and regulated. They may also provide new insight into the origin of thought and feelings. How our minds work is no longer the province of philosophers and theologians. It is now the subject of neuroscience. For our thoughts and emotions, our feelings of self, reflect a maelstrom of electrical signals whirling around the brain. Mary Shelley was closer to the truth than she perhaps appreciated when she inferred that electricity is the spark of life. We are indeed no more than electrified clay.

  12

  Shocking Treatment

  Your temples, where the hair crowded in,

  Were the tender place. Once to check

  I dropped a file across the electrodes

  Of a twelve-volt battery – it exploded

  Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up.

  Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed

  The thunderbolt into your skull.

  In their bleached coats, with blenched faces

  They hovered again

  To see how you were, in your straps.

  Ted Hughes, ‘The Tender Place’

  On the fourth of January 1903, a state execution was held at Lunar Park on Coney Island in New York city. It was witnessed by more than 1,500 ‘curious persons’ who had flocked there to see the show. The victim was a twenty-eight-year-old elephant named Topsy. Topsy had once toured the United States with the Forepaugh Circus, but ended her days at Coney Island, where she had become violent and aggressive and killed three zookeepers. On at least one of these occasions she had been severely provoked, for her keeper had maliciously tried to feed her a lighted cigarette; he was in for a surprise, as she grabbed him with her trunk and threw him to the ground, killing him instantly. Her owners decided she was too dangerous to keep, but dispatching a six-ton, ten-foot-tall elephant is far from easy. Poison proved a failure. Thomas Edison, who was locked into a battle over the virtues of AC and DC electrical systems, saw a publicity opportunity and suggested she be electrocuted. So Topsy was fitted with copper-lined sandals, anchored in place with chains and given a massive electric shock of 6,000 volts. Death was immediate. Edison filmed the unedifying spectacle with a motion-picture camera he had made and exhibited it to audiences round the country to prove the dangers of AC current.1 It was, as the New York Times said at the time, ‘a rather inglorious affair’.

  Electricity not only powers our bodies, it can also be used to manipulate them. This final chapter considers how electricity has been used for good and ill. It charts the use of electricity in medicine from classical times, through its scientific origin in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to the present day, and reflects on how it has the potential to transform our lives even further. It also considers the darker uses of electricity – to kill, maim or control others.

  Electricity Made Plain and Useful

  The medicinal use of electricity has its origins in antiquity. As long ago as 46 AD, the Roman physician Scribonius Largus recommended the use of the electric ray Torpedo as a cure for the pain caused by gout and headaches. Headache, he wrote, ‘even if it is chronic and unbearable, is taken away and remedied by a live torpedo placed on the spot which is in pain, until the pain ceases’. This induced a numbness that dulled the pain. Scribonius further advised that several fish should be prepared, as two or three were sometimes needed to effect a cure. For gout, ‘a live black torpedo should, when the pain begins, be placed under the feet. The patient must stand on a moist shore washed by the sea and he should stay like this until his whole foot and leg up to the knee is numb. This takes away present pain and prevents pain from coming on if it has not already arisen.’ Torpedoes are not always easy to come by, their effectiveness is limited as they soon die when removed from water, and hanging around on the shoreline is decidedly inconvenient. Thus it was not until the invention of electrostatic generators in the eighteenth century that electrotherapy became widespread.

  One pioneer of electric shock treatment was the preacher John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement. Wesley became interested in electricity in the late 1740s as a result of attending several public demonstrations of electrical fire and reading of Benjamin Franklin’s experiments. Moved by the plight of his flock, most of whom had little access to medicine, he saw electricity as a ‘shockingly cheap and easy way’ to treat a multitude of ailments. Around 1753, he procured an electrical machine and experimented with it both on himself and on others. Its beneficial effects so impressed him that he introduced electric shock machines at free medical clinics in Bristol and London, where the poor could be electrified.

  He wrote, ‘I ordered several persons to be electrified, who were ill of various disorders; some of whom found an immediate, some a gradual cure. From this time I appointed, first some hours in every week, and afterward an hour in every day, wherein any that desired it might try the virtue of this surprising medicine. Two or three years after, our patients were so numerous that we were obliged to divide them: so part were electrified in Southwark, part at the Foundery, others near St. Paul’s, and the rest near the Seven Dials: the same method we have taken ever since; and to this day, while hundreds, perhaps thousands, have received unspeakable good, I have not known one man, woman, or child, who has received hurt thereby.’ Based in part upon his successful results, in 1760 he published Desideratum, a treatise on ‘electricity made plain and useful by a lover of mankind and of common sense’. In it he records many examples of muscle cramps, headaches and rheumatism that were apparently healed by electrotherapy. Interestingly, he felt that electrotherapy was of special benefit in nervous disorders.

  The machine Wesley used appears to have been a simple electrostatic generator.2 Turning a handle caused a glass cylinder to rub against a piece of silk, generating a static charge that was collected by comb-like spikes attached to a thin metal rod, which the patient presumably grasped. Alternatively, the charge generated could be drawn off and stored in a Leyden jar. The magnitude of the shock could be controlled by the number of times the handle of the generator was cranked or, in the case of the Leyden jar, by the size of the jar (smaller jars produce lower jolts of electricity). The doses Wesley used seem to have been based in part upon the work of Richard Lovett, a lay clerk at Worcester Cathedral, and in part on his own experiments and observations. The mild shock felt was seen as the passage of ‘electrical fire’ through the body and was presumed to be of medical benefit. The shocks Wesley used were fairly mild and are likely to have been safe, but it is far from clear whether the treatment was really effective. Even today there is debate about whether mild electrical stimulation can help in the treatment of muscle atrophy and chronic pain, and it seems more likely that any benefit people received was due to the placebo effect and the sympathetic concern of the practitioners.

  Not all patients appeared to be completely happy with the experience of electrotherapy.

  Wesley’s attempts to heal the poor were not met with universal acclaim. Some of the medical profession – whom Wesley considered grasping and greedy – thought he was meddling
in their terrain. However, his success prompted the establishment of the London Electrical Dispensary in 1793, paid for by public subscription. It treated more than 3,000 patients over the next decade. Portable devices treated thousands more.

  The Prince of Electrical Joy

  Another of the early electrotherapists, but in an entirely different mould, was the notorious ‘Dr’ James Graham, an entrepreneur who believed that ‘electricity invigorates the whole body and remedies all physical defects’. James Graham was born in Edinburgh in 1745, the son of a saddler. He studied medicine at Edinburgh University, but never graduated, instead emigrating to the United States in his twenties, where, undeterred by his lack of formal qualifications, he set up as a doctor in Philadelphia.3 There he was introduced to electricity by the striking lecture demonstrations of Ebenezer Kinnersley, a popularizer of Franklin’s experiments, and he quickly became convinced that this new force was not only a universal panacea but also a means of making his own fortune. In 1774, he returned to England where he established a successful practice specializing in using electric shocks to treat a multitude of ills. One of his early patients was the eminent historian and political activist, Catherine Macaulay, who introduced him to her friends. Young, handsome and charming, he quickly became a society figure.

  Emboldened by his success, in 1779 Graham opened the Temple Æsculapio Sacrum (the Temple of Health) in the elegant Royal Adelphi Terrace, facing the Thames. Two huge men clad in ostentatious liveries and hats trimmed with gold lace announced the grand opening by parading around London with handbills effusively extolling the delights of electricity and its effects on the human body, and proclaiming the enchantments that could be sampled at the Temple of Health. The advertisers were nicknamed Gog and Magog, after the two legendary pagan giants who are reputed to have saved the city of London, and whose huge wooden effigies are housed in the London Guildhall today.

  The Temple of Health both fascinated and outraged London society. It quickly attracted a rich and fashionable clientele who included the Prince of Wales and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who consulted Graham over her inability to conceive a son. For an entry fee of two shillings and sixpence, visitors could listen to lectures on health by Graham, enjoy fine music and marvel at the luxurious decorations, opulent furnishings and risqué paintings. Among the attractions were the scantily clad ‘Goddesses of Youth and Health’, one of whom was a beautiful sixteen-year-old called Emma Lyon. She was destined to marry Sir William Hamilton and later become the mistress of Lord Nelson.

  However, the main attractions were the spectacular electrical delights – the ‘magnetic thrones’ and crackling electrical bath tubs. The pièce de résistance, exhibited only after a move to new premises in Pall Mall, was the electrifying and elaborately decorated Celestial Bed that was guaranteed to cure sterility and impotence. In Graham’s words, ‘The barren must certainly become more fruitful when they are powerfully agitated in the delights of love.’ And some of that agitation was electrical. The Celestial Bed was twelve feet long and nine feet wide, supported by forty insulating pillars of brilliant glass, and had a mattress stuffed with hair from the tails of English stallions and sweet new wheat straw, mingled with balm, rose leaves and lavender flowers. Above it arched a vast dome festooned with flowers, live turtle doves, mechanical musicians and numerous statues, including one of Hymen, the god of marriage. But its novelty lay in the fact that sparkling electrical fire streamed from the torch Hymen held aloft and crackled across the headboard, illuminating the phrase ‘Be Fruitful, Multiply and Replenish the Earth’. Reputedly, magnets surrounding the bed also filled ‘the air with a magnetic fluid calculated to give the necessary degree of strength and exertion to the nerves.’ It could be rented for the princely sum of £50 a night.

  Like today’s capital attractions, the Temple of Health also had a shop attached. It sold a variety of patent medicines: Imperial Electric Pills, for purifying the blood and precious bodily juices; Nervous Ætherial Balsam for decayed and worn-out constitutions; and phials of Electrical Ether to protect you against any kind of malignant or infectious disease, which was also reputed to have miraculous aphrodisiacal powers. Graham’s treatises were also for sale.

  The Temple of Health engendered a variety of reactions. The undiscriminating simply enjoyed the spectacle. Others were less impressed – the politician Horace Walpole dismissed it as the ‘most impudent puppet-show of imposition I ever saw, and the mountebank himself the dullest of his profession. [. . .] A woman, invisible, warbled to clarinets on the stairs. The decorations are pretty and odd, and the apothecary, who comes up a trap-door (for no purpose, since he might as well come up the stairs), is a novelty. The electrical experiments are nothing at all singular, and a poor air-pump, that only bursts a bladder, pieces out the farce.’

  After a brief period of notoriety, the Temple soon fell out of favour and closed in 1782. Graham had spent a considerable sum on the venture and was deep in debt. He escaped to Edinburgh, and in later life his behaviour became increasingly eccentric. He eschewed electricity and instead became convinced of the beneficial effects of warm mud baths, took to signing his letters ‘Servant of the Lord, O.W.L.’ (Oh, Wonderful Love) and once fasted for fifteen days wearing nothing but grass turf. He was arrested for indecency in 1794 and died soon after at the age of forty-nine.

  The Tingle Factor

  The exploits of James Graham and others like him engendered the idea that electrotherapy was mere quackery and it gradually fell into decline among the mainstream medical profession. Electricity continued to be used, however, in a variety of pseudo-therapeutic devices. It also enjoyed a vogue as an entertainment. Penny-slot machines flourished in Victorian amusement parks and on piers: grasp the handles of one of these machines and you were rewarded with a small electric current that produced a reputedly ‘pleasurable’ tingling sensation.

  One of the best known of the Victorian medical equipment makers was Isaac Louis Pulvermacher & Co, whose patented electric chain bands were used for treating rheumatism, neuralgia and similar complaints. Advertisements claimed that philosophers, divines and eminent physicians, in all parts of the world, recommended them and that the effects were instant and agreeable. The cheapest cost five shillings, a not inconsiderable sum in those days. The Pulvermacher electric belt was made of copper or zinc and was dipped in vinegar before being applied. Some idea of what it looked like in use may be obtained from a description in Madame Bovary of the one used by the chemist Monsieur Homais. ‘He was enthusiastic about hydro-electric Pulvermacher chains; he wore one himself, and when at night he took off his flannel vest, Madame Homais stood quite dazzled before the golden spiral beneath which he was hidden, and felt her ardour redouble for this man more bandaged than a Scythian and as splendid as one of the Magi.’ Nor were the chains used solely by fictional characters. Charles Dickens, writing to the actress Mrs Bancroft, who had apparently recommended the device to him, said, ‘As I shall be in town on Thursday, my troubling you to order the magic band would be quite unjustifiable. I will use your name in applying for it, and will report the result after a fair trial. Whether Mr. Pulvermacher succeeds or fails as to the Neuralgia, I shall always consider myself under an obligation to him for having indirectly procured me the pleasure of receiving a communication from you.’

  A plethora of similar electrical machines proliferated during the Victorian age. They included devices for curing all manner of ailments, for stimulating muscles, and for invigorating the flagging male organ (it didn’t work). A few are still in use today, such as the diathermy device that uses an electric current to heat the tissue or blood vessel to such a degree that blood coagulates. It is used routinely in surgical practice to cauterize wounds, as it is quicker and simpler than manually tying them off, or to destroy abnormal tissues, such as small polyps or cancer cells. In a bizarre twist, modified medical diathermy machines were used during World War II to interfere with the radio navigation system used by the Luftwaffe to pinpoint bombing t
argets over England, as they broadcast radio noise over a wide range of frequencies that jammed the German transmissions.

  A Shock to the System

  The sensational machines that caused a mild electric tingle subsequently morphed into those that gave a substantial electric shock. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) became the treatment of choice for patients with severe depression in the mid-twentieth century. It was introduced by the Italian physician Ugo Cerletti, who was looking for a new way to treat schizophrenia that had fewer side-effects and greater efficacy. At the time, it was believed that inducing a seizure in the patient could help the condition. This was usually achieved by administration of a drug (insulin, for example), but Cerletti was aware that an electric shock could induce epileptic convulsions in animals and wondered whether this might be an alternative approach for treating schizophrenia. Initially, he rejected the idea, as he was uncertain of the correct ‘dose’ of electricity to use, but he subsequently discovered that the slaughterhouse in Rome was using electric shocks to the head to stun pigs (prior to slitting their throats) and that if the animal was allowed to recover from the electric shock it seemed unharmed. He experimented to find the amount of current needed to stun a pig temporarily and then, in April 1938, he tested it on a human being.

  The patient was a schizophrenic, who had been found wandering around the railway station suffering from delusions, hallucinations and confusion. He uttered incomprehensible gibberish. The first shock – which was given without anaesthesia – induced only an absence seizure, but the patient then spontaneously started to sing. Cerlatti suggested they repeat the experiment with a higher voltage, but before he could actually do so the patient suddenly sat bolt upright up in bed and cried – in perfect Italian – ‘Non una seconda! Mortifera!’ (‘Not another one! It will kill me!’). Undeterred, Cerlatti gave him a series of further shocks. After these, the patient seemed quiet and helpful, and was discharged from hospital professing he was cured. Subsequently, Cerlatti and his colleagues used ECT on hundreds of patients (and animals) and determined both the safest dose and which maladies it was most successful at treating. Its use quickly spread throughout the world.