“Shocking Subjects. Human experiments and the material culture of medical electricity in eighteenth-century England,” chapter in The Uses of Humans in Experiment: Perspectives from the 17th to the 20th Century, edited by Erika Dick and Larry Stewart 2016
In contemporary Western societies medical patients are accustomed to being tested or treated by means of electrical instruments. Their presence is so familiar that it would be unsettling to enter a hospital or a medical laboratory unfurnished with the high tech apparatus through which research, diagnoses and therapies are routinely carried out. The technologization of medicine has produced systems of trust that rely on black boxed instruments, which profoundly influence contemporary perceptions of the human body and of the self. However, the applications of scientific instruments for medical purposes have a history of debates and controversies.