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PAOLA BERTUCCI and GIUUAXO PANCALDI (eds.), Electric Bodies: Episodes in the History of Medical Electricity. Bologna Studies in History of Science 9. Bologna: Università di Bologna, Dipartimento di Filosofia, 2001. Pp. 298. ISBN 88-900162-2-1. No price given (paperback),
doi : 10.1017/S0007087405247532
This volume derives from a workshop held in Bologna in June 2001. As editors Paola Bertucci and Giuliano Pancaldi explain, the historiography of medical electricity has come a long way since Margaret Rowbottom and Charles Susskind's Electricity and Medicine: A History of Their Interaction (San Francisco, 1984). No longer can medical electricity be treated as a well-defined hybrid of 'electricity' and 'medicine' considered as stable bodies of knowledge and practice. On the contrary, it is now clear that, since the term 'medical electricity' emerged a little over 250 years ago, there has been no single unifying procedure or institutional formation identified with it.
How, then, to tell the history of such a problematic practice? The Bologna participants have taken the 'episode' to be the appropriate unit of historical study. Their chapters seek to identify the contexts, assumptions and imperatives of a large cast of natural philosophers, physicians, electricians, instrument-makers and patients who, using particular devices and methods, mediated electricity and explored the phenomenology of electrified...