The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American

The material part Electric: How Strange Machines Built the present American. By Carolyn Thomas de la Pena (New York: NYU Pres 2003 xi plus 328 pp $3500)

Readers of Carolyn Thomas de la Pena's engaging application of mind of bodies and machines in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America will find a zealous attention to the "physical experience of laypersons" (p 13) This is no predictable top-down description of prompt discourse--although some of the usual suspects, similar as George Beard and Thomas Edison, make brief appearances. Rather, de la Pena admirably focuses upon those everyday people who might, [i]or[/i] part of to the other their use of new electrical and mechanical devices, approach 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 material part Electric seeks to understand in what way and why users voluntarily "connect their bodies to machines" (p 43) eventually normalizing understandings of the material part as a tractable energetic a whole In so doing, she not sole helps us to understand the diffusion of contemporary analogs of that kind as Viagra and StairMasters, on the other hand also to appreciate the drawn out complex histories of our "cyborg" selves

Tracing a broad range of devices above the years 1850-1950 (the period in which Americans became leading efficacy consumers on the planet), de la Pena finds a emerging fascination with the connections between power, force, health, and might in American culture. She exhibits how various energy-enhancing artifacts, like as the I-ON-A-CO magnetic collar or the radium-infused beverage Radithor, "physically carried the material substance into the modern era" (3)--enabling average men and women to remake themselves as part of the fresh project on the most intimate, visceral horizontals De la Pena juggles these ambitious themes gracefully, weaving designing discussions of changing social, religious, and sexual mores into lively descriptions of the particular devices used upon around, and even inside the material part She begins by explicating the rise of weightlifting machines and weight-training programs make knowned by Dudley Allen Sargent and Gustav Zander, designed to "balance" the material substance through uniform and symmetrical muscular exhibition and to "unblock" energy trapped within the material part She then explores how, in the years between 1880 and 1930 technologies like as electric belts, vibration devices, and magnetic collars came to be seen as capable of injecting efficiency directly into the body, providing it with smooth greater reserve force. Finally, she particularizes the stunning popularity of radium waters in the early decades of the twentieth hundred following consumers' uses of radium tonics and baths [i]or[/i] part of to the other to their horrifically lethal ends

through every part of de la Pena attends to diverse clusters of actors, not simply the quirky promoter and designers of these tools. The use of these realitys and regimens varied not alone by gender but also by means of class: upper-class consumers tended to have access to expensive health machines and the elite institutions which purchased them; middle-class consumer explored a wide-range of devices, the one and the other through catalogue sales and from one side urban public gymnasia; working-class consumer were more likely to purchase radium water dispensers or electric belts than to visit a commercial spa. Drawing upon novels, cartoons, trade magazines, health fraud investigation records, newspapers, and manuals as well as shut up readings of print advertisements, de la Pena argues that mechanization and industrialization not sole generated new modes of production, on the other hand also new experiences of the human body

De la Pena crafts a composite and sophisticated narrative about the relationship between experiences of technology (defined here as "materials or substances created or discovered from one side 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 one time lauding images of Jeffersonian yeoman farmers or sculpt grecian athletes, and disparaging the vision of menial and inferior physicality allegedly transcended with elite training and expensive gym equipment. De la Pena ties the marketing of energy-enhancing devices to the broader popularity of Spencerian theories of "force" in the Gilded Age, and highlights the exclusionary nature of several fresh practices of the body. De la Pena also nicely stretch outs the kinds of gender analysis rest in other recent social histories of the late nineteenth-century U to include unusually sympathetic and fine-grained descriptions of men's uses of technology. In individual of the book's strongest chapters, for example, de la Pena discusses the numerous electrical belts, probes, and prosthetic devices occupyed by men to address belong tos with sexual function and performance.

The matter of race is handled with somewhat les sophistication; critical attention to the racialization of technology and of the American material part wavers across the study's five chapters. The work notes the "fears of decreasing 'potency' and 'power' in white males" evented by "turn-of-the-century immigration and African-American emancipation" (p 12) relations between neurasthenia and regards about race suicide (pp. 28-29) as well as several other connections among race, potency and the body. Many of these topics, however, near opportunity for additional exploration. For instance, a chapter titled "Measuring Mechanical Strength" which lay opens with two epigraphs about "developed" and "undeveloped" manhood, would certainly benefit from further attention to the racial figure of speechs of barbarity and civilization which upheld late nineteenth-century understandings of disclosure Such attention would allow make comments [i]or[/i] remarks on the racial overtones of the exercise equipment referr to as "Indian clubs" (p 52 55) or to the tension between "brute strength" and "scientific erudition" embodied through Eugen Sandow (p. 68). Similarly, when an 1886 remark by the agency of Bishop Turner of the African Methodist house of worship of Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee about "the white man controlling electricity" is cited as evidence of a clerical fear of "deviation from their perceived natural order," individual wonders whether Turner might have been expressing pertain to with post-Reconstruction race relations as plenteous as with the spread of electricity (p 113)