From Clouds to the Brain. Celine Cherici
energy, the difference then consisting of the devices by which they were manifested and measured. Thus, the mid-19th Century saw a resurgence of mesmerism. The discovery of electromagnetism had as cultural consequences the desire to unify these forces even in the knowledge of the human being on which the medical treatment of mental illnesses depended. This resurgence corresponded to the strong craze for the forces of nature, newly integrated into electrical therapies. In 1845, Thomas Courant, a follower of electric and magnetic medicine, founded the Société Philantropico-Magnétique de Paris as well as a newspaper called L’union magnétique : journal de la Société philanthropico-magnétique de Paris published between 1854 and 1869 [UNI 54–69]. His works, quoted many times by the press,12 had a magical atmosphere close to mesmerism. The words of Crichton-Browne (1840–1938) reflect the universal role played by electricity since the 19th Century:
We used to explain electricity in relation to matter; now we are trying to explain matter in electrical terms. Could not electricity now be understood through the much more subtle manifestation of a psychic energy that has perhaps always been beyond the reach of research in physics, but in which we live, move and have our being? [CRI 38, p. 187, author’s translation]
After 1840, it became the guarantor of cerebral security by participating in the psychiatrization of moral disorders. Analogies with machines served as theoretical materials for understanding the electrical functioning of the nervous system. At the morpho-functional level, the nerves were considered like electrical wires and conducted instructions from the mind to the body, even if they were recalcitrant. It is in this context that Thomas Laycock’s cerebral-moral considerations on electrical control [LAY 40] came into play:
Thomas Laycock concurred that electricity could prove to be the therapy of choice in treating hysterical women. Electrotherapy could return to normality the bodies of those whom hysteria had transformed from ‘the gentle, truthful and self-denying woman’ into victims of ‘insane cunning, destructiveness, infanticidal impulses, morbid appetites, etc.’. [RHY 02, p. 105]
Laycock was part of this monistic scientific atmosphere where electricity should enable us to understand all the laws of nature, from the phenomena of life to the great terrestrial and cosmic phenomena. Nevertheless, while he drew analogies between the great forces of the universe and mental phenomena, he pointed out that the latter belong to us intrinsically while other phenomena remain external. What did this clarification made in 1863 mean? It appears that Laycock highlighted the fact that while electricity allows us to understand our environment, it also opens up the possibility of knowing ourselves to the depths of our mental schemas, which are themselves of an electrical nature. This electrical definition of our mental sphere complements his remarks on hysteria, a convulsive disease that was the target of medical electricity at the end of the 18th Century:
And it is clear, too, that the primary or essential phenomena of electricity, chemical affinity, heat, light, and even gravity, are just as much beyond the reach of observation as those of mind […]. There is an important difference; however, in favor of mental phenomena in this respect, in the fact that they are in immediate relation with our consciousness, whereas those of all other forces are only in a mediate relationship. [LAY 63, p. 169]
As early as 1840, several representations were at work in the description of the links between the nervous system, consciousness, hysteria and electricity: on the one hand, the woman was considered as the potential victim of her emotions; on the other hand and in a less obvious way, electricity was conceived as the coercive treatment of hysterical disturbances:
The consequences of all this is, the young female returns from school to her home a hysterical, wayward capricious girl; imbecile in mind, habits and pursuits; prone to hysteric paroxysms upon any unusual mental excitement. [LAY 40, p. 142]
He argued for restoring communication between the nervous system and the body through galvanization. Gray matter was compared to a galvanic cell in which an electric current was generated, while white matter was like the electric wires of telegraphs that conducted current within the body. Hysteria was the catalyst for these concerns to the extent that:
Nervous illness, hysteria is movement, excessive movement of body and mind. It has always been said that the hysterical person is unstable, capricious, irregular, that she gives in to ‘fantasy’. Pathological because it is too representative (‘more woman than other women,’ it is often said), this hysterical woman ‘changes ideas and feelings with inconceivable speed’. [BAC 12, p. 167, author’s translation]
Indeed, women were described as being unable to control their bodies, which were different in their nervous system from that of men, and were capricious machines requiring technical guidance in order to function. His conceptions marked a change in the consideration of behavioral disorders which were seen as psychiatric and technical objects that could only be regulated by an electrifying doctor:
Electricity not only provided a dynamical physical mechanism that explicated the link between mind and matter, morality and nature, but also served as a tool that allowed the doctor to intervene directly and correctly regulate the imbalances in the female physiological machine. [RHY 98, p. 245]
Laycock presented galvanic medicine as a solution to a social and moral problem relating to the normalization of women. While his arguments concerned the British context, we nevertheless find this medical imagining in the developments of war psychiatry or more generally in the history of electric shock therapy. Using the case of women, Laycock explored the possibility that electricity could be used to improve human behavior. The notion of improvement was conceived in relation to what society understood by this term. He argued for the electrical restoration of communication between mind and body by advocating localized electrification. In the specific case of hysteria, electric current needed to be applied to the sexual organs, without which there was little chance that the mental disorders it caused could be restored. Galvanism could act as a cleanser, resulting in the disappearance of cerebral pathological phenomena and the return of the mind to normality:
However, the scientific physician enlarges the sphere of his inquiries, the good of man is his great object – the end of all his labours being to prevent moral and corporeal disease, to alleviate pain, to restore health. [LAY 40, p. viii]
For doctors such as Laycock or Millingen, hysteria, trauma or Victorian male hypochondria had in common that they were embodied in the whole body, including the moral and intellectual dimensions. From this incarnation of psychic evils in all the nervous structures, the concept of unconscious cerebration was born:
One of the reasons ‘unconscious cerebration’ is more than a Victorian curiosity is that cognitive scientists have picked up this Victorian thread in theorising the ‘adaptive unconscious’ as opposed to the Freudian unconscious. [LEW 19, p. 77]
This concept is associated in Laycock’s work with the concept of brain reflex [LEF 03, pp. 26–27], made visible, in particular, in phobic reactions translated into reflex and automatic fear. The links between these concepts, heuristics for the development of cognitive sciences and electrical treatment, have scientific but also cultural stakes. If all ailments are nervous-based, then the nervous system becomes the preferred place of treatment for electrical therapies. Beyond his assertions about the feminine nature, Laycock proposed a more profound conception of the exploration of life and the living, from the scale of consciousness to the molecular scale:
They form the connecting link between the phenomena of consciousness, and the molecular changes in organic matter upon which the phenomena of heat, electricity, galvanism and magnetism depend. They point out a new path of experimental inquiry into the phenomena of life and thought and, if traced out in all their relations, cannot fail to change the whole aspect of mental philosophy. [LAY 40, p. 100]
In 1848, Millingen published The Passions or, Mind and Matter [MIL 48], a treatise in which he discussed the galvanization of mores and behavior. While he reinforced a very classical vision of hysteria, linked to the female sexual organs, he correlated this phenomenon to the weakness of “the energies of the brain or the sensorium of woman” [MIL 48, p. 44]. In a literary and romantic style,