The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (review)

Readers of Carolyn Thomas de la Peña's engaging study of bodies and machines in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America will find a keen attention to the "physical experience of laypersons" (p. 13). This is no predictable top-down description of expert discourse—although some of the usual suspects, such as George Beard and Thomas Edison, make brief appearances. Rather, de la Peña admirably focuses on those everyday people who might, through their use of new electrical and mechanical devices, come to develop an "odd kinship with the telephone, telegraph, and streetcar" (p. 99). A valuable contribution to the social histories of medicine and technology, The Body Electric seeks to understand how and why users voluntarily "connected their bodies to machines" (p. 43), eventually normalizing understandings of the body as a tractable energetic system. In so doing, she not only helps us to understand the diffusion of contemporary analogs such as Viagra and StairMasters, but also to appreciate the long, complex histories of our "cyborg" selves.

Tracing a broad range of devices over the years 1850-1950 (the period in which Americans became leading energy consumers on the planet), de la Peña detects a emerging fascination with the connections between power, force, health, and strength in American culture. She shows how various energy- enhancing artifacts, such as the I-ON-A-CO magnetic collar or the radium-infused beverage Radithor, "physically carried the body into the modern era" (3)—enabling average men and women to remake themselves as part of the modern project on the most intimate, visceral levels. De la Peña juggles these ambitious themes gracefully, weaving subtle discussions of changing social, religious, and sexual mores into lively descriptions of the particular devices used on, around, and even inside the body. She begins by explicating the rise of weight-lifting machines and weight-training programs developed by Dudley Allen Sargent and Gustav Zander, designed to "balance" the body through uniform and symmetrical muscular development and to "unblock" energy trapped within the body. She then explores how, in the years between 1880 and 1930, technologies such as electric belts, vibration devices, and magnetic collars came to be seen as capable of injecting energy directly into the body, providing it with even greater reserve force. Finally, she recounts the stunning popularity of radium waters in the early decades of the twentieth century, following consumers' uses of radium tonics and baths through to their horrifically lethal ends.

Throughout, de la Peña attends to diverse groups of actors, not simply the quirky promoters and designers of these tools. The use of these objects and regimens varied not only by gender but also by class: upper-class consumers tended to have access to expensive health machines and the elite institutions which purchased them; middle-class consumers explored a wide-range of devices, both through catalogue sales and through urban public gymnasia; working-class consumers were more likely to purchase radium water dispensers or electric belts than to visit a commercial spa. Drawing on novels, cartoons, trade magazines, health fraud investigation records, newspapers, and manuals as well as close readings of print advertisements, de la Peña argues that mechanization and industrialization not only generated new modes of production, but also new experiences of the human body.

De la Peña crafts a complex and sophisticated narrative about the relationship between experiences of technology (defined here as "materials or substances created or discovered through modern innovations" [p. xiii]) and class stratification. She deftly notes the ambivalence with which the citified middle- and upper-classes of the late nineteenth-century regarded manual labor: at once lauding images of Jeffersonian yeoman farmers or sculpted Greek athletes, and disparaging the vision of menial and inferior physicality allegedly transcended with elite training and expensive gym equipment. De la Peña ties the marketing of energy-enhancing devices to the broader popularity of Spencerian theories of "force...