Marketing the machine: the construction of electrotherapeutics as viable medicine in early Victorian England.

In 1863, Desmond Fitz-gerald, the editor of The Electrician, a popular electrical magazine, responded to his readers' frequent requests for more information about the medical uses of electricity with an editorial on the subject. He claimed that electrotherapy was by then a well-attested form of medical treatment and singled out Dr Golding Bird as one of those "eminent Physicians" who had been responsible for establishing electricity as a viable therapy during the 1830s and 1840s.1 He was referring to the work carried out by Bird at Guy's Hospital in London during the 1 830s and 1840s. Similarly, a correspondent in the Lancet, writing in 1859 and quoting with approval a recent report from the French military authorities, draw attention to electrotherapeutics' new respectability. He cited two main reasons: the improved electrical technology which made the treatment easy to apply and the progress of knowledge of the nature and functions of the nervous system.2 Colwell in his idiosyncratic history of electrotherapeutics also cited Golding Bird's work at Guy's as a key moment in the emergence of electrotherapeutics.3 In these three texts, the early Victorian period is presented as the time when electrotherapeutics in England was transformed into viable medicine. Previous practice is represented as empiric-ridden and unsystematic. Such a representation was also a key feature in the writings of those during the period who presented themselves as engaged in a new and different kind of electrotherapeutics. The aim of this paper is to deconstruct this history and to uncover the strategies adopted by men such as