The series of introducing case studies – belonging to the material our ELBOW team is working with – continues with the fourth case study. This case study is introduced to you by no other than our project leader Soile Ylivuori.

We believe that through giving you insight into the research process it is easier to understand the work of a historian or a researcher. Any research consists of smaller pieces, and when these pieces are put together, they form a research entity that can be a book or an article, for example. These case studies are our pieces that help to build up the results of our research project.

Before moving on to our fourth case study, we would like to encourage you to go through the previous ones as well: the one about curing ”obstructions” of menstruation, the one about experiments including beheaded bodies, and the one about the treatise promoted as ”medicine without medication” – all of these dealing with electricity. How could you say no to these case studies and stories?

And now, it is time for the following case study written by our project leader and researcher Soile Ylivuori.

Animal electricity and conspiracy theories

If you thought that the conspiracy theories that arose during the Covid-19 pandemic among yoga practitioners, alternative medicine enthusiasts, and alt-right internet trolls were somehow unique to the 21^st century, you were wrong. It turns out that Georgians (Georgian era in Britain, years 1714–1830) had their very own alternative medicine conspiracy theories.

In early modern Europe, medicine and medical treatments were based on vastly different theories of the human body than in our modern medicine. Because illness was thought to be caused by an imbalance of so-called humours—four fluids that coursed over the body—it made perfect sense for early modern Europeans to treat diseases by trying to manipulate the humoural balance in different ways.

While humoural balance could sometimes be restored through such moderate means as, say, a specific diet or physical exercise, many early modern medical procedures were highly invasive.  

Standard medical treatments were based on the idea that the ill body needed to be purged of tainted or just superfluous humours in order to restore the humoural balance. The methods to purge were somewhat unpleasant, ranging from bloodletting to induced vomiting and burning the skin to cause blisters that would supposedly “draw out” the “bad humours”.

Such treatments might make the modern reader question if the cure was, in many cases, worse than the original disease! (It was.) The discovery of electricity in the 1740s added another painful tool for the early modern doctor’s bag of cures: it now became possible to also violently shock the patient in order to restore the humoural balance and flow. 

With standard remedies like these, it’s not surprising that many early modern Europeans felt drawn to alternative, less invasive, and less painful treatments. With the discovery of animal electricity and animal magnetism in the late 1700s, these new miraculous phenomena seemed to offer promise of a wholly new way of healing the ailing body.

Galvanists and mesmerists claimed that a universal vital fluid was the origin of all life and movement, and that sickness was caused by a blockage in the body that prevented the flow of the so-called magnetic or electric fluid.

Instead of violent purges, these new therapeutic methods promised relief through a gentle touch of or just proximity to a source of energy, which would then restore the energy balance of the diseased body and make the energy fluid flow freely.

Since the empirical fact basis for the old standard cures was equally vague to the new energy treatments, it’s not exactly surprising that energy healing through touch seemed equally plausible to purging bad humours through blisters. (It was. That is, they were both equally ineffective.)

Because energy healing required no medical training or equipment, it naturally attracted all sorts of quacks and charlatans eager to make an easy profit through a “scientific” laying of hands. This anonymous and aptly-named treatise is a great example of the limitless possibilities that the motley landscape of medicine offered for an enterprising individual in Georgian Britain. The lenghty name of the treatise was the following:

A true and genuine discovery of animal electricity and magnetism: calculated to detect and overthrow all counterfeit descriptions of the same: published with a view of making the science universally beneficial to all Ranks of People; and to prevent Persons from giving large Sums of Money for the Knowledge of the Art. The Manner of Treating; the Diseases most likely to be relieved thereby, and some of the Effects, such as a Crisis, &c. are briefly mentioned; as also some Hints are given respecting the Treatment of Absent Persons (published in 1790).

The author starts by asserting that animal electricity is “no more than the effect produced between two bodies, one of which has more motion than the other”. The more energetic body can therefore “communicate” its “motion” to the other, “until an equilibrium of motion be established between them”.

That is, no expensive electric equipment is any longer necessary for acquiring perfect health: all that is needed is the electric fluid already present in all bodies. “The human body may be therefore compared to an electrical machine, the arms as conductors, the fingers the pointers”. 

In the great tradition of conspiracy theories, the author then claims that this “science has been kept hid and concealed from the multitude”, so that the medical elite can go on monopolising medical treatments and getting rich. This much is said on the booklet’s title:

Published with a view of making the science universally beneficial to all Ranks of People; and to prevent Persons from giving large Sums of Money for the Knowledge of the Art.

The altruistic author, on the other hand, is willing to share this secret way to eternal health with everyone (for the measly sum of however much his little 15-page self-help book cost).

Following these four simple steps (or, in short, the ABIW – abstraction, benevolence, intention, and will – method?), anyone can become a healer: 

1. Be as much abstracted as possible. 

2. Fill your mind with benevolence towards the subject you are treating. 

3. Let there be a constant intention within you. 

4. Exert your will towards the subject you are treating; determine to do good to the diseased.  

Through the method, a “strange connection” between the body of the patient and the healer is formed, as their respective “atmospheres” are joined and the healing energy can flow to the diseased body.

Among the diseases that could be cured through this method, the author lists headache, deafness, “locked-jaw”, eye infections, pains in the body, fever, strains, bruises, burns, sores, and, really, “almost all disorders of the human frame”.

The treatment is most effective when the healer lays their hands on the patient and moves them around until the patient, the healer, or both feel “a kind of warm and glowing sensation”, which is a sign of the energy flow.

However, luckily for all those readers who may sense an opportunity for riches by perfecting their energy fluid channeling skills, the author of the treatise claims that it is also perfectly possible to treat absent people through the “sympathetic power” of the mind by simply retiring to a quiet room and repeating the four steps. Long-distance energy healing for all! 

The treatise, its premises, and its promises bear many similarities to contemporary alternative therapies, health scams, and Big Pharma conspiracy theories. Reiki and other energy healing methods are surprisingly similar to this eighteenth-century practice, both in terms of practical procedure (Reiki can also be performed remotely) and the underlying worldview, which is based on a notion of a vital universal energy.

When established medical community started to recommend invasive and (mentally) painful procedures in the form of lockdowns, masks, and vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic, there was a surge of interest towards alternative ways of ensuring health, including taking vitamin D and avoiding eating cabbage.

Covid-19 denialists, anti-vaxxers, and other conspiracy theorists also display an anti-elite disposition very similar to animal electricity healing’s promise of healing skills for everyone. Much like the 1790 treatise, contemporary conspiracy theorists blame the medical establishment for promoting useless or even harmful expensive drugs while concealing knowledge of cheap and effective “natural” cures. 

In other words, same purged matter, different pit latrine. 

Source material:

A true and genuine discovery of animal electricity and magnetism: calculated to detect and overthrow all counterfeit descriptions of the same: published with a view of making the science universally beneficial to all Ranks of People; and to prevent Persons from giving large Sums of Money for the Knowledge of the Art. The Manner of Treating; the Diseases most likely to be relieved thereby, and some of the Effects, such as a Crisis, &c. are briefly mentioned; as also some Hints are given respecting the Treatment of Absent Persons. J. Parsons. London, 1790.

A true and genuine discovery of animal electricity and magnetism