Medicalising Electricity in the Dutch Republic, 1745-1789

This article sheds light on the processes and tactics used by eighteenth-century electricians in making medical electricity a legitimate remedy in the Dutch Republic. Electricity’s medical value was by no means self-evident in the years following 1746, when the first Dutch patient was treated with it. Understandings of its effects on the body were still unclear and judgements on the efficacy of electrotherapy varied. The subsequent four decades saw the development of various theories, practices, and instruments of electrotherapy across Europe and North America. This development has thus far been little studied in the context of the Dutch Republic, despite the Republic’s prominent role in the wider history of electricity. Understanding how electricity became a legitimate component of the Dutch materia medica provides an insight into the ways transnational scientific knowledge is translated in local contexts. history of snowflake the century, practices of observation and visualisation, the


Introduction
This article traces how electricity became a legitimate medical tool in the Dutch Republic during the second half of the eighteenth century. 1 The earliest ways of treating a patient with electricity -otherwise known as electrotherapy -involved having them sit on an insulated stool and electrifying their skin surfaces (the 'electric bath'), doing this and bringing a conducting rod near their body ('drawing sparks'), or momentarily passing a large amount of electric charge to them (giving 'electric shocks'). Around the middle of the 1740s, as reports of spectacular electrical experiments started to circulate around Europe, so too did the first reports of ill persons cured via these methods, particularly in Italy and Germany. 2 Word spread quickly across Europe, including in the Dutch Republic, where in late 1745 the natural philosopher Pieter van Musschenbroek (1692-1761) had devised a way to store electric charge in water using a device called a Leyden jar (see Figure   1), enabling electricians to discharge electricity instantaneously and at will.

Writers of the history of electricity in eighteenth-century Europe and North
America have focussed mainly on developments in electrical instrument making and entertainment. Medical electricity received a burst of scholarly attention from historians about two decades ago, but, apart from a 1999 article by Lissa Roberts, little attention has been paid to its Dutch context.

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Given that 'medical electricity was', as Oliver Hochadel puts it, 'a central pillar in the architecture of electricity as a public science' in the eighteenth century, it deserves a more prominent place in the history of electricity in the Dutch Republic. 4 Roberts' article, which remains the most comprehensive account of medical electricity in the Dutch Republic, looks more broadly at the commercial-scientific nature of eighteenth-century electricity. 5 If her study has a drawback, it is that it gives the impression that the value of electricity as a medical tool was self-evident and unchanging throughout the latter half of the century. This perspective obscures many of the processes through which electricity gained medical legitimacy. In this article, designed to complement Roberts' work, I intend to elevate these processes, referring to them collectively as the 'medicalisation' of electricity. The term medicalisation has most commonly denoted the ways in which everyday aspects of human and social life are made into medical problems. Originally employed by critics of modern medicine in the 1960s and 1970s to denounce the overreach of medical authority, the term's uses have multiplied over the past half century. 6 In this article, I leave behind its socio-moral roots and use it solely as a catchall for the ways in which an object or phenomenon -in this case electricitythat is not inherently medical adopts medical value and status. By providing insight into this process, I intend to elucidate how electricity went from being unknown to medicine to becoming a legitimate component of the medical toolbox. My use of medicalisation corresponds to that of François Zanetti, who used it to denote the progressive inclusion of electricity in the materia medica -the body of knowledge concerning healing substances (i.e. medicines) -of ancien régime France. 7 How something becomes part of the materia medica is a profoundly social process. During the 1770s and 1780s in particular, Zanetti argues that qualified physicians made electricity legitimate when they administered it in dedicated spaces, such as the physician's home or the hospital, and according to specific standards, such as the use of precision instruments, dosage, and localised treatment. By making the practice of electrotherapy more conditional on the knowledge, skills, tools, and access to spaces required for administering it, non-medically-trained individuals were excluded from practicing it. As a result, electricity shed its 63 winckel status as a miraculous panacea, becoming an increasingly legitimate, albeit still controversial remedy. Zanetti's framework of medicalisation ultimately highlights how the medical use of electricity was by no means self-evident, a fact which remains true beyond the French context.
To demonstrate how electricity was medicalised in the Dutch Republic between 1745 and 1789, the heyday of static electricity, I begin by providing an overview of how electricity was thought to be medically useful between Their outlining work is akin to that of 'boundary-work', which refers to the process by which 'boundaries of science are drawn and defended in natural settings'. 9 Hochadel uses boundary-work to describe similar processes happening in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century. 10 However, although appropriate when discussing the distinctions that were made between 'good' and 'bad' electrotherapeutic practice, the term also implies a deliberate effort to draw distinct boundaries of disciplinary authority. This is slightly problematic in the context of early Dutch electrotherapy, given that the organisation of scientific knowledge in eighteenth-century Europe was far less compartmentalised than it became throughout the following century. Indeed, electricity was not only being studied and used for medical purposes in the Republic, but also elsewhere  winckel emphasise how understandings and practices of medical electricity are shaped as much by local as transnational processes of medicalisation.
When used in this article, the term 'science' signifies the contemporary Dutch notion of wetenschap, which encompassed all forms of academic knowledge. 11 Here, 'academic' refers to the manner in which knowledge is obtained -in a scholarly or systematic fashion -and not to the type of person who obtained it. This means not only the university professor, but also the artisan or amateur may be engaged in wetenschap. People in the Republic who were professionally engaged in the wetenschap of the natural world were commonly called 'philosophers' (wysgeeren). Hence, I will continue to use the Anglophone convention 'natural philosophers' to denote them. In the absence of a coherent and contemporary Dutch word which encompasses all those involved specifically with electricity, I will use Benjamin Franklin's term 'electrician', coined in 1749, and used to describe someone who studied or was knowledgeable about the science of electricity. 12 In the context of medical treatment, an electrician may also be called an electrotherapeutic 'practitioner' if they routinely treated patients. Far from referring to well-defined vocations, these labels simply apply to individuals with a knowledge of electricity and the gestures involved in manipulating it. As such there were many types of electricians, including academics, instrument makers, entertainers, healers, and enthusiastic amateurs. This plurality of backgrounds should remind us that medical electricity represented a shared body of knowledge rather than a specialist trade.

Early responses to medical electricity
Historians usually point towards Jean Jallabert, Gianfrancesco Pivati, Giuseppe Veratti, and Johann Heinrich Winkler as the progenitors of electrotherapy, given that these men were the first to widely disseminate reports of their successful treatments in the 1740s. 13 In fact, Dutch contemporaries believed the first deliberate and successful medical application of electricity was not performed in 1747 by Jallabert in Geneva, but by Jacob Herman Kleyn, an Amsterdam gommer (likely a hair product  article -artikel maker), in the previous year, when he cured a woman of her lame arm. 14 However, as knowledge of this new therapeutic tool spread across the continent, there seemed to be a meagre response to it in the Dutch Republic.
The first Dutch-language publication dedicated solely to the subject was a 1745 translation of a German tract by Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein (1723-1795), then a young medical student at the University of Halle. In his work he confidently claimed that electricity could cure a variety of ailments, such as build-ups of blood, insomnia, illnesses caused by congestion (including headaches and colds), illnesses of a 'sulphurous' nature, and even fatness. 15 Kratzenstein purported that it was electricity's 'driving force' which gave it its healing powers. This was observed in its ability to increase blood circulation and push out disease-causing matter like sulphurous particles and alkaline salts through the skin; electrified persons were observed to sweat, for instance. 16  In arguing that 'nature is bound to the fire element', he drew heavily from the ideas of the famous Dutch natural philosopher Herman Boerhaave, who understood the world as saturated with a subtle matter called 'Fire'. His In contrast to these optimistic voices, the few university professors who contributed to early discussions about medical electricity generally erred on the side of caution, basing their judgements primarily on personal experience.
It was initially the professor of medicine and chemistry Hiëronymus Gaubius (1705-1780) who, after hearing the rumour of Kleyn's treatment, sent him a letter asking whether the story was true. The professor of mathematics and philosophy Jean-Nicolas-Sébastien Allamand (1713-1787) wrote in 1754 that he encountered many difficulties whilst trying to replicate the successes of Italian physicians, although a recent positive result in the treatment of a girl who suffered from epilepsy revived his optimism. 23 Pieter van Musschenbroek, whose Leyden jar enabled these treatments, was markedly more severe in his assessment of this new form of medicine, suggesting that exalted claims about its efficacy could be fuelled by dishonest motives: Many doctors have resorted to electricity for curing several diseases, and have thought this method of healing to be very advantageous to many desperate cases, and moreover have attributed several successes to it; I wanted to test the truth of this fact, knowing how much we are accustomed to taking advantage of the gullibility and trust of the public in order to take their money. 24 He found it hard to believe electricity had healing properties, especially given the bodily discomfort he and his wife often experienced after performing  electrical experiments, with aches and nausea usually lasting for more than 24 hours. He recalled that on three separate occasions around 1749, he was asked to electrify someone in order to heal them. None resulted in success.
One of the paralysed patients did not respond to the drawing of sparks over a period of two months, whereas -Van Musschenbroek bitterly noted -other people present did respond to electrification. 25 He was a sceptic, not because he objected to the treatment of patients with electricity, but because he did not experience the same degree of success claimed by others.
Two decades after the first Dutch patient was treated with electricity, the few who commented on it made disparate claims about its efficacy. Such findings rested predominantly on limited personal anecdotes and speculation.
Up to the mid-1770s, electrotherapy remained a peripheral topic of interest, even whilst rapidly gaining popularity in neighbouring countries. It is in this decade, however, that we see a clearer outline of electrotherapy starting to take shape.

Outlining medical electricity
In the 1771 entry on electricity in Egbert Buys' scientific dictionary, Nieuw en volkomen woordenboek van konsten en weetenschappen, its medical applications are only included as an afterthought. The entry casts doubt on the efficacy of electrotherapy, but notes that the pervasiveness of electricity in human bodies suggests it may at some point become useful, pointing towards a few individuals across Europe who have started to show limited success treating paralysed or lame patients. 26 By the end of the decade, these limited successes had expanded into a large corpus of case studies, allowing practitioners to make more confident statements on the efficacy of electrotherapy. Three of the most prominent authorities, known in the Republic and abroad, who helped compile this corpus and used it as the foundation for electrotherapeutic theory and practice, were the mentioned Jan Rudolph Deiman, Willem van Barneveld, and Adriaan Paets van Troostwijk. All three published handbooks for a general audience on medical electricity, in which they downplayed its status as a panacea. Drawing from various case studies, they defined ways in which medical electricity worked well and identified a range of diseases that it could treat, thereby also 'rescuing' its respectability. 27 Their publications, in which they outlined the value and practice of electrotherapy, were built on decades of medical and electrical research. Examining how they outlined medical electricity helps us understand how electricity became medicalised.     Van Barneveld and his peers maintained that the most reliable way to determine the efficacy of medical electricity was by experiment. Together they therefore gathered a plethora of reports -over three hundred individual case studies -which in turn were collected by other practitioners from across the continent. This emphasis on reliable experiences relates to the importance practitioners ascribed to observational data and case studies to inform theory, but also arises from a history of contested authority and distrust across Europe with regard to electricity. For the German states, Hochadel has shown how electricians bemoaned the fact that many untrained hands were unsuccessfully treating people with electricity, providing fodder for medical electricity's critics. 44 Similarly, Van Barneveld commented that electricity was being used with far too much indifference by both 'noble and ignoble' people as a remedy. 45 He admitted many accounts rightfully elicit doubt, particularly those by the French electrician Pierre Bertholon de Saint Lazare (see Figure 3), whose often exalted claims Van Barneveld denounced as mere 'trifles' (beuzelaryen). 46 The Amsterdam doctor Jan Petersen Michell echoed this sentiment, writing to Van Barneveld that although electricity was beneficial in many cases as a cure, it could be considered 'poison' in the hands of an untrained practitioner, and should sometimes not be used at all even by a trained practitioner. 47 Paets van Troostwijk and Krayenhoff similarly argued that the 'charlatanerie' of certain Italian physicians did more harm than good to the prospect of medical electricity in its early years, because they stifled more pragmatic approaches to its potential uses, delaying useful studies. 48 Overall, a great deal of effort was made by Deiman, Van Barneveld, and Paets van Troostwijk in distinguishing 'good' and 'bad' practices, within and outside the Republic.     medicalising electricity in the dutch republic, 1745-1789 77 winckel was essentially built into these guidelines, with Deiman recommending that increases in severity -moving from electric sparks to shocks for exampleshould only be made after several days of no results, ensuring that the pace of electrical treatment remained relatively slow. 60 An underlying motivation for this convention would almost certainly have been the desire not to cause undue harm to the patient, which might discredited the practice. Like the acknowledgement of electrotherapy's fallibility, the extension of treatment over long periods of time was ultimately designed to help protect the practice.
Concurrent with the development of procedures in the 1780s was the development of specific tools, prominently displayed in Figures 4-6. Rather than being simply repurposed from experimental or show electrical apparatus as early electrotherapeutic tools often were, these instruments were made with specific theory and procedure in mind, thereby representing in a sense the material manifestation of medicalisation. Van Barneveld in particular provided detailed descriptions of the quality, materials, and dimensions of all the components he used, noting for example how he had Leyden jars of at least seven different sizes, with each producing sparks of different strengths, or how he used small, custom-made wooden blocks of exact lengths between three and twelve inches to precisely measure the distance between discharging points. 61 At his disposal were also a number of different discharging rods, each made with varying lengths, tips, and materials. These differences helped administer particular types of treatment. Note, for example, how in Figure 3 the rod in the top-left corner has a metal, spherical tip, better for delivering electric shocks, whereas the rod in the bottom-right corner has a pointed end, better for delivering a stream of electricity. When streams delivered from metal tips were too weak, they could be replaced by wooden ones. 62 Van Barneveld and his peers also specified that larger machines generated a more consistent stream of electricity than smaller ones, recommending machines with two discs of at least eighteen inches in diameter. 63 Any smaller size would not be able to affect all types of electrification. This ensured that Dutch practitioners following these handbooks did not adopt the peripatetic style of treatment like Wesley in England, who mostly used small, portable machines. 64 Indeed, portable machines are never mentioned by Deiman, Van Barneveld and Paets van Troostwijk, making it unlikely that Dutch practitioners travelled much to see their patients. This is one way in which the materiality  Superficially, these handbooks detailing instructions for how to electrify patients read like do-it-yourself manuals. But alongside providing a standardised body of knowledge for practitioners and even other members of the public to refer to, I believe the primary intention of these authors was to strengthen their claims to authority over medical electricity, in very much the same way historian of science Steven Shapin describes how natural knowledge was transferred from the private to the public sphere in seventeenth-century England. 65 In the Republic, electrical treatment was administered almost exclusively in private spaces (such as the practitioner's home), witnessed by limited audiences. For practitioners, publicising the apparatus, gestures, and techniques was a means of communicating their expertise and reliability to the public, allowing anyone to become 'virtual witnesses' to this form of treatment. 66 Through these texts practitioners could be seen to move between spaces of public knowledge and private practice, which was particularly Importantly, this extent of collaboration is not at all self-evident.
Wesley, a self-declared man of the people, believed doctors in England were far too self-interested to incorporate electricity in their medical toolkit, and was convinced that its expeditious and inexpensive nature was in contradiction with the medical establishment's greed. He boldly predicted that by the end of the century, electricity would cure more people in one year than the entire article -artikel than a demonstration of genuine or equal collaboration. 80 The overwhelming majority of Van Barneveld's patients, on the other hand, were actually referred to him by a physician, sometimes even by multiple physicians. We clearly see the symbiotic relationship between electricians and doctors not just in practice, but also in theory. Deiman, one of the most respected doctors in Amsterdam, remarked that medical electricity was not only a matter of interest to natural philosophers, but particularly so for practitioners of medicine, 'who, experienced in this part of physics (natuurkunde fw), are best placed to investigate what the true effects of electricity on the human body are [...] and in which circumstances electricity can be used as a remedy on the human body'. 81 Evidently, electricity had found a place in the Dutch materia medica, even if only a limited one, as suggested above by the uses of electricity as a last resort.
The common narrative advanced by historians such as Paola Bertucci and Giuliano Pancaldi -that electrotherapy lacked a recognised field of expertise within the medical profession far into the nineteenth century, and that practitioners therefore battled to preserve their niche -obscures the fact that legitimate and productive collaboration was occurring between electricians and physicians by the end of the eighteenth century. 82

Conclusion
When it first entered the Dutch public sphere, the medical value of electricity was contested and unclear. By the end of the 1780s, a dominant theory of medical electricity had been defined, which was built on empirical case studies from across Europe and North America, along with guidelines for electrotherapeutic procedures and a set of standardised tools and instruments.
This transformation may be understood as the medicalisation of electricity and occurred all across Europe and North America during the second half of the eighteenth century. How this transformation materialised, however, also depended on local factors. Historians have addressed these factors by exploring how electrotherapy took hold in French, English, and German contexts; in this entangled history we can now identify the shape of Dutch medicalisation.
Contrary to Roberts' statement that 'important treatises on the subject appeared throughout the second half of the century', we see that in the Republic, authoritative works on medical electricity only started to Electrical equipment still required purchasing, but in theory anyone with the means and a copy of an electrotherapeutic handbook could start practicing.
That some individuals acted on this is evident in the cases of Poncelet, Bosch, Beeldsnyder, and probably many more.
Although I have focused on the medicalisation of electricity in the Dutch Republic during the eighteenth century, these processes are ultimately part of a wider history and therefore not specific to this place nor even this time. Looking at Victorian Britain in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Iwan Rhys Morus has shown how British electrotherapists and commentators sought to bolster the status of Victorian electrotherapy. They presented the practice as 'unsystematic and empirical'meaning it was practiced by trial and error -up until the 1830s, when it began its transformation into a robust science. They aligned themselves with physicists to ground their theory in contemporary physics, rationalised electrotherapeutic practice by rooting it in (physiological) experimentation, and used their connections with the electrical community to develop new and easy-to-use devices. 84 Clearly, these tactics were similar to those used by the likes of Deiman, Van Barneveld, Paets van Troostwijk, and Cuthbertson a century earlier -when medical electricity was still, according to these Victorian commentators, in its 'dark age'. Morus' assessment, that 'by the 1850s, doctors and natural philosophers were sharing a material and intellectual technology', could very well have applied to the Dutch Republic of the 1780s. 85 Regardless of its local shape, medicalisation ultimately remains a transnational phenomenon.

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Floris Winckel is a PhD student at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, where he is part of the international doctoral program Rethinking Environment. His research examines the history of snowflake science from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, with a particular focus on practices of observation and visualisation, and their relationship to different environments. His previous research addressed episodes in the history of eighteenth-century Dutch science and medicine. He is currently interested in intersections between history of science and environmental history. E-mail: floris.winckel@rcc.lmu.de.