Description
Book SynopsisBetween the years 1850 and 1950, Americans became the leading energy consumers on the planet, expending tremendous physical resources on energy exploration, mental resources on energy exploitation, and monetary resources on energy acquisition. This book includes changing ideas about fitness and gender in dialogue with the culture of technology.
Trade ReviewThe Body Electric is the so-far missing puzzle piece in our nineteenth-twentieth century knowledge of the social history of the human body and technologya richly illustrated study showing two centuries of technologizing the human body against fears of weakness, enervation, sexual depletion. -- Cecelia Tichi,author of Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America
This provocative exploration of the concept of energy in American medicine deftly ranges across medical theories, exercise machines and their inventors, early human potential movements, popular fads of electricity and radiation, and the national mood at the turn of the twentieth century. The author writes with wit and sympathy about medical theories and devices that may now seem like outright quackery but that formerly appealed to the educated as well as the gullible in their elusive search for good health. Building upon on a vast and vastly entertaining literature of medical pamphlets and ephemera, Carolyn Thomas de la Peña brings a discerning intelligence and an energetic analytic style to the cultural history of medicine, faith, science, and technology. -- Jeffrey L. Meikle,University of Texas, Austin
Transforming archival research into sparkling prose, The Body Electric explains how Americans learned to use machines to seek health, sexual rejuvenation, and physical transformation. This innovative book is both an entertaining history of fads and foibles and a groundbreaking cultural critique of the continuing obsession with achieving physical perfection. -- David E. Nye,author of Electrifying America and America as Second Creation
Covers its subject well, provides useful context, and makes lively reading for anyone interested in the history of technology, the social context of electricity and radioactive materials, or the history of alternative medicine. * Technology and Culture *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Preface Introduction1 The Machine-Built Body2 Measuring Mechanical Strength 3 Exploring Electric Limits 4 Powering the Intimate Body 5 "Radiomania" Limits the Energy Dream Conclusion: The End of an Era? NotesBibliographyIndex About the Author
