ELECTR OMANIA. 65 1 



obtained, or imagined, " when a nail or a piece of brass wire is put 

 into a small apothecary's phial and electrified." He says that " if, 

 while it is electrifying, I put my finger or a piece of gold which I hold 

 in my hand to the nail, I receive a shock which stuns my arms and 

 shoulders." At about the same date (the middle of the last century), 

 Muschenbroek stated, in a letter to Reaumur, that, on taking a shock 

 from a thin glass bowl, " he felt himself struck in his arms, shoulders, 

 and breast, so that he lost his breath, and was two days before he re- 

 covered from the effects of the blow and the terror " ; and that he 

 " would not take a second shock for the kingdom of France." From 

 the description of the apparatus, it is evident that this dreadful shock 

 was no stronger than many of us have taken scores of times for fun, 

 and have given to our school-fellows when we became the proud pos- 

 sessors of our first electrical machine. 



Conjurers, mountebanks, itinerant quacks, and other adventurers 

 operated throughout Europe, and were found at every country fair 

 and/e^e displaying the wonders of the invisible agent by giving shocks 

 and professing to cure all imaginable ailments. Then came the dis- 

 coveries of Galvani and Volta, followed by the demonstrations of 

 Galvani's nephew Aldini, whereby dead animals were made to display 

 the movements of life, not only by the electricity of the voltaic pile, 

 but, as Aldini especially showed, by a transfer of the mysterious 

 agency from one animal to another. According to his experiments 

 (that seem to be forgotten by modern electricians), the galvanometer 

 of the period, a prepared frog, could be made to kick by connecting 

 its nerve and muscle with muscle and nerve of a recently killed ox, 

 with or without metallic intervention. 



Thus arose the dogma which still survives in the advertisements of 

 electrical quacks, that " electricity is life," and the possibility of re- 

 viving the dead was believed by many. Executed criminals were in 

 active demand ; their bodies were expeditiously transferred from the 

 gallows or scaffold to the operating-table, and their dead limbs were 

 made to struggle and plunge, their eyeballs to roll, and their features 

 to perpetrate the most horrible contortions by connecting nerves with 

 one pole, and muscles with the opposite pole of a battery. 



The heart was made to beat, and many men of eminence supposed 

 that if this could be combined with artificial respiration, and kept up 

 for a while, the victim of the hangman might be restored, provided 

 the neck was not broken. Curious tales were loudly whispered con- 

 cerning gentle hangings and strange doings at Dr. Brookes's, in Lei- 

 cester Square, and at the Hunterian Museum, in Windmill Street, now 

 flourishing as " The Cafe de 1'lStoile." When a child, I lived about 

 midway between these celebrated schools of practical anatomy, and 

 well remember the tales of horror that were recounted concerning 

 them. When Bishop and Williams (no relation to the writer) were 

 hanged for burking, i. e., murdering people in order to provide " sub- 



