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

Introduction

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.

Premise

The project starts from the premise that knowledge is necessarily filtered through individuals’ embodied cognition and therefore tactile, sensory, and experiential.

Case Study

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. It also explores whose experiences and ways of knowing contributed to scientific knowledge.

Significance of Medical Electricity

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.

Vantage Point

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.

Methodological Approach

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
• Ego-documents

Theoretical Framework

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 the history of knowledge.