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

Carolyn Thomas de la Peña has filled an important lacuna in our understanding of how ideas about technology interact with images and beliefs about the body. In The Body Electric, she first traces the development of bodybuilding machines from their origins in the nineteenth century, noting their traditional association with men and masculinity and proceeding to a discussion of how these devices were used not only to add muscular strength but also to measure it and to shape the competitive masculine athletic body in the United States. The innovative work of the Swedish physician Gustav Zander, inventor of dozens of exercise machines—some of them still in use, in modified form—receives its due in this context. In chapters 3 and 4, she explores the technological embodiments of electricity as a metaphor for power, including electric belts, ultraviolet rays, oxygenators, and similar apparatus used not only to improve health generally but to recharge depleted sexual batteries, especially those of men.

The really hair-raising tales are in chapter 5, titled "'Radiomania' Limits the Energy Dream," in which de la Peña describes the three-decade American fascination with radium and X-rays, in the form of liquid medications, water irradiators, and "treatments" for facial hair and minor afflictions, as invigorators and health restorers. (In Cancer Wars [1995], Robert Proctor notes that nowadays "nothing excites fear like radiation," but that there was a time when it was associated with rejuvenation and renewed energy.) De la Peña presents a detailed and insightful examination of "radiomania," including illuminating (as it were) anecdotes that are as horrifying as they are fascinating.

For example, she relates the case of Dr. Henry K. Pancoast at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, later to become famous for his publications on silicosis and asbestosis, who apparently applied X-rays for up to fifteen minutes at a time to the skin of African-Americans, allegedly for the purpose of turning them white. De la Peña presents only the newspaper accounts of this hideous experiment, omitting Pancoast's later denials in his 1938 autobiography, published in the American Journal of Roentgenology, in which he claims to have been merely treating lupus. The contemporary newspaper accounts she cites, however, include the patients' own reports of the "treatments," which have a more convincing ring than Pancoast's denials more than three decades later.

Considerably less repellent is de la Peña's account of the bootleg, jury-rigged electrotherapeutic apparatus in the basement engine room of the Capitol building in Washington, where exhausted legislators could regenerate their intellectual and political powers by grasping a small brass chain. There is something charming about this evidence that members of Congress were as readily persuaded as their ordinary constituents of the beneficial effects of tingling sensations running up their arms. De la Peña quite rightly points out that for fatigue, "neurasthenia," and other minor ills, the placebo effect may well have brought relief.

The Body Electric is marred in a few places by unsupported assertions, such as the claim on page 7 that the nineteenth century was "an age when technology posed the primary threat to human health." This is surely inconsistent with data regarding infectious diseases, death in childbirth, and a host of other conditions that carried off our great-great-grandparents' generation by the thousands. On page 138, de la Peña writes that the late nineteenth century "demanded increased virility in the boardroom and bedroom," but she does not tell us why she believes this, to what previous eras she is comparing it, and by what measures we might observe an increase in a trait as poorly defined as "virility."

On the whole, however, The Body Electric covers its subject well, provides useful context, and makes lively reading for anyone interested in the history of technology, the social context of electricity and radioactive materials, or the history of alternative medicine.