Spring 2008 Colloquia

David J. Rhees, Executive Director, The Bakken
“The Body Electric: From Electric Fish to the Brain Pacemaker”

     This talk presents an illustrated overview of the history of electricity and the body, drawing largely on images from the historical collections of The Bakken Museum.  The body can be viewed as an extremely complicated electrical machine, and it has taken centuries to understand how it works and how we can use electricity to understand and heal the body.  The presentation follows this story from the use of the electric torpedo fish for treating pain in the Roman era to the brain pacemakers of today.  Along the way, we will review Benjamin’s Franklin’s treatment of paralysis with electricity, early experiments with corpses that inspired Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, 19th-century electrical quackery devices, and the invention of the pacemaker and defibrillator. 

Suggested reading:

• Margaret Rowbottom and Charles Susskind, Electricity and Medicine: History of their Interaction (San Francisco Press, 1984)

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