Medical Electricity, Embodied Experiences, and Knowledge Construction in Europe and the Atlantic World, c.1740-1840

Project Information

ELBOW

Grant agreement ID: 101042244

DOI

10.3030/101042244

EC signature date 29 June 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 775,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 775,00

Coordinated by

HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
Finland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ELBOW (Medical Electricity, Embodied Experiences, and Knowledge Construction in Europe and the Atlantic World, c.1740-1840)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Scientific knowledge has long been understood to be subjective and situated. ELBOW examines this situatedness from a previously unexplored historical viewpoint by investigating the role of lay embodied experiences in eighteenth-century scientific knowledge construction. The project starts from the premise that knowledge is necessarily filtered through individuals’ embodied cognition and therefore tactile, sensory, and experiential. Using eighteenth-century medical electricity as an empirical case study, the project analyses how patients’ embodied and experiential knowledge influenced the medical knowledge emerging from electrotherapies, as well as whose experiences and ways of knowing ended up contributing to scientific knowledge.

As a novel experimental therapy, medical electricity provides an exceptional window into practices of knowledge construction, authorisation, and marginalisation. Since electrical treatments and the bodily sensations they created were meticulously recorded by doctors and patients alike, these descriptions can be analysed as repositories of experiences and understandings of embodiment as well as epistemological beliefs regarding body, life, and matter. Medical electricity offers the perfect vantage point for examining popular epistemological understandings, their interaction with scientific epistemologies, and the way they manifested themselves in electrotherapeutic practices.

ELBOW devises an innovative methodological approach to tease out patients’ embodied experiences and epistemological beliefs from a variety of sources, including scientific treatises, doctors’ casebooks, advertisements, fiction, and ego-documents. The project aims to answer the following questions: How did patients’ embodied experiences influence the development of medical and scientific knowledge? How was patients’ embodied knowledge filtered through various sources, such as patient records, casebooks, and medical treatises, and transformed into ‘objective’ knowledge?
Combining phenomenology and cognitive science with history of medicine methods, the project proposes a new, theoretically sophisticated approach to analysing historical everyday experiences and embodied knowledge—and thereby a turn towards a new experiential paradigm in history of knowledge.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Through a variety of workshops, seminars, conference presentations, research collaborations, and publications, ELBOW has started to develop methods that allow us to tease out patients’ intersectionally embodied experiences and knowledge. The research team's analyses draw from a variety of primary sources, including private letters and journals, medical and experimental notes, patient records, advertisements, magazine articles, and fiction. The project successfully combines methodological tools from phenomenology and cognitive science with more traditional history of medicine methods. Building on the concept of embodied knowledge, we analyse the embodied vocabulary, metaphors, and imagery used in descriptions of electrotherapies to examine electro-medical patients’ experiences as repositories of epistemological and tactile knowledge.

ELBOW currently has 5 publications under review:
1. Edna Huotari, "Ignored experiments: Examining the place of early medical electricity (1790–1810) in relation to electroconvulsive therapy and the history of psychiatry", under peer review in Journal for the History of Knowledge
2. Annika Raapke, "Ants in the Body and Storms in the Head: Curing with Medical Electricity in 18th century Sweden, 1750-1770", under peer review in Social and Cultural History
3. Stefan Scröder, "Electric sparks as universal remedy? On descriptions of early experiments with electrotherapy in mid-eighteenth German journals and treatises", under peer review in European Journal for the history of Medicine and Health
4. Soile Ylivuori, Edna Huotari, Stefan Schröder & Saara-Maija Kontturi, "Embodied Experiences and Eighteenth-Century Scientific Knowledge Construction: Medical Electricity as a Case Study", under review in Hippokrates
5. Soile Ylivuori (together with Anu Lahtinen & Riikka Taavetti), "Gender and History of the Body: Methodological Considerations", under peer review for an edited collection, publisher Finnish Literature Society

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

ELBOW builds on scholarship that has recently aimed to broaden the definition of knowledge and its historical construction towards applied, implicit, subjugated, and popular approaches. However, it takes this scholarship to a new direction by placing lay tactile knowledge not as liminal, but as a key aspect of how scientific knowledge is constructed. Prioritising patients’ (rather than experts’) embodied knowledge, the project draws from the recent cross-disciplinary ‘bodily turn’ in humanities which has been increasingly focusing on the connections between embodiment, cognition, and knowledge. In this way, ELBOW's results are renewing the field of history of knowledge towards a new experiential paradigm.

ELBOW's results go beyond the current state-of-the-art through in three specific fields of research. First, by map out the social, temporal, and geographical contexts of electro-medical treatments: the project delivers the first ever comprehensive transnational account of the development of medical electricity from a highly experimental and unsystematic therapeutic novelty into a respectable tool of orthodox medicine. Second, by adopting a history-from-below approach, ELBOW contributes to the effort to balance traditional historiography of science which has often ignored popular beliefs, understandings, and experiences; the project thereby offers a more pervasive understanding of the sensory and embodied history of the eighteenth century. Third, ELBOW is ground-breaking in broadening the scope towards popular epistemological understandings. Examining medical electricity as a practical manifestation of vitalism in everyday life provides an exceptional window into laypeople’s epistemological beliefs, allowing an investigation of how patients’ epistemological understandings influenced their conceptualisations of their embodied experiences, and vice versa.