There must have been gasps of astonishment – and possibly of well-justified terror – in Georgian Lancashire when John Fell sent a charge through his frame of mahogany, glass, black silk and tin foil, and the word “electricity” lit up in letters of fire.
“This Experiment, when performed in the dark, which it always should be, presents a pleasing spectacle,” he wrote.
Fell was a surgeon in Ulverston (now part of Cumbria), inspired in the 1780s by reading of the latest experiments in electricity. He wrote off to scientists and instrument makers in London, and had soon acquired his own electrical laboratory in which to merrily shock his patients for conditions including lame legs, gout, irregular menstrual periods and depression.
A leatherbound notebook recording the money he spent – and the handsome payments he soon acquired from awed and tingling patients – has recently been rediscovered in the archives of the Wellcome Collection, and will be displayed for the first time in an exhibition opening later this month, Electricity: The Spark of Life.
The notebook records his claims of remarkable cures, often of patients given up on by less enterprising physicians.
One was a Cambridge student, 19-year-old Arthur Benson, normally of a cheerful disposition, who had fallen “into a deep Depression of Spirit bordering on Melancholy from intense application to his studies”, Fell wrote.
“I found him gloomy, timid, and so inattentive that it was sometimes necessary to ask him a question 3 or even 4 times before an answer could be extorted.”
All previous attempts at a cure had failed, even packing poor Benson back to his native Lancashire for a change of air. However, 11 days of electric shocks morning and evening had a remarkable effect, “restoring him completely to his usual state of Health & Spirits … The electric fluid, when properly applied, is certainly the best & most powerful Deobstrucuent in morbid affections of the nervous systems, from its Subtilty & Activity it can act upon, penetrate, & remove those Obstructions that interrupt the Influx of the nervous Power into the affected Muscles, & which are not to be resolved by any other Means of Treatment.”
The book will be displayed open at Fell’s beautiful diagrams of his “box for my own luminous words”, presumably inspired by reading of the demonstrations of electricity which were the height of fashion in London society.
The exhibition will show how electricity has fascinated inventors, scientists and artists for centuries, inspiring creations including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which she wrote after reading of the experiments by Luigi Galvani on using electricity to produce movement in dead creatures including frogs.
Electricity: the Spark of Life is at the Wellcome Collection, February 23 - June 25 2017
