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

2004, Technology and Culture

Reviewed by Karen Halttunen "Quacks and quackery," "medical instruments and apparatus," "electrotherapeutics": the designated subject categories for this book fail to do it justice. The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American is a fascinating study of "the relationship between technology, energy, and the body in modern American culture" (p. xi). Since the mid-nineteenth century, Carolyn Thomas de la Pena demonstrates, Americans have used an inventive range of machines and technological devices in an effort to restore vitality, cure disease, and build stronger, more vigorous bodies. To dismiss as mere "quackery" such outmoded technologies as early weight-lifting machines, electric belts, and radium water jars is to reject out of hand their historical significance, in service to the same Whiggish narrative of medical science that informed the American Medical Association's opposition to these therapeutic practices. The guiding insight of this study is that "when we allow a technology intimate entry into our bodies, we become, on some level, complicit in the culture that technology represents" (p. xii). The body technologies she explores served to domesticate frightening new forms of energy in a rapidly industrializing society, mediating between the growing fear of machines and an expanding sense of their ultimate promise, and propelling the human body itself into the modern era. The Body Electric focuses on three areas of body technologies that emerged over three overlapping time periods, between 1850 and 1950, and promised three different modes of revitalization. First, the musclebuilding machines of the mid-to late-nineteenth century promised to "unblock" energy already present in the body. The first mass-marketed American machine to link technology with physical health was the Health Lift, designed by Bostonian David Butler in 1870, which targeted tired businessmen suffering from neurasthenia. The overwhelming sense of physical depletion that characterized that epidemic ailment was widely attributed to Kelvin's second law of thermodynamics, "the universal tendency in nature to the dissipation of mechanical energy" (p. 27). Proper muscle-building, according to Butler and his followers, would offset entropy by tapping the body's energy reserves and diffusing them, not only to the working muscle, but also throughout the body. This theory influenced other fitness entrepreneurs, such as Dudley Allen Sargent, first director of physical education at Harvard, who built a graduated weight-training system that emphasized symmetrical