The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American.

The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American. By Carolyn Thomas de la Pena (New York: NYU Press, 2003. xi plus 328 pp. $35.00).

Readers of Carolyn Thomas de la Pena's engaging study of bodies and machines in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America will find a keen attention to the "physical experience of laypersons" (p. 13). This is no predictable top-down description of expert discourse--although some of the usual suspects, such as George Beard and Thomas Edison, make brief appearances. Rather, de la Pena admirably focuses on those everyday people who might, through their use of new electrical and mechanical devices, come to develop an "odd kinship with the telephone, telegraph, and streetcar" (p. 99). A valuable contribution to the social histories of medicine and technology, The Body Electric seeks to understand how and why users voluntarily "connected their bodies to machines" (p. 43), eventually normalizing understandings of the body as a tractable energetic system. In so doing, she not only helps us to understand the diffusion of contemporary analogs such as Viagra and StairMasters, but also to appreciate the long, complex histories of our "cyborg" selves.

Tracing a broad range of devices over the years 1850-1950 (the period in which Americans became leading energy consumers on the planet), de la Pena detects a emerging fascination with the connections between power, force, health, and strength in American culture. She shows how various energy-enhancing artifacts, such as the I-ON-A-CO magnetic collar or the radium-infused beverage Radithor, "physically carried the body into the modern era" (3)--enabling average men and women to remake themselves as part of the modern project on the most intimate, visceral levels. De la Pena juggles these ambitious themes gracefully, weaving subtle discussions of changing social, religious, and sexual mores into lively descriptions of the particular devices used on, around, and even inside the body. She begins by explicating the rise of weightlifting machines and weight-training programs developed by Dudley Allen Sargent and Gustav Zander, designed to "balance" the body through uniform and symmetrical muscular development and to "unblock" energy trapped within the body. She then explores how, in the years between 1880 and 1930, technologies such as electric belts, vibration devices, and magnetic collars came to be seen as capable of injecting energy directly into the body, providing it with even greater reserve force. Finally, she recounts the stunning popularity of radium waters in the early decades of the twentieth century, following consumers' uses of radium tonics and baths through to their horrifically lethal ends.

Throughout, de la Pena attends to diverse groups of actors, not simply the quirky promoters and designers of these tools. The use of these objects and regimens varied not only by gender but also by class: upper-class consumers tended to have access to expensive health machines and the elite institutions which purchased them; middle-class consumers explored a wide-range of devices, both through catalogue sales and through urban public gymnasia; working-class consumers were more likely to purchase radium water dispensers or electric belts than to visit a commercial spa. Drawing on novels, cartoons, trade magazines, health fraud investigation records, newspapers, and manuals as well as close readings of print advertisements, de la Pena argues that mechanization and industrialization not only generated new modes of production, but also new experiences of the human body.

De la Pena crafts a complex and sophisticated narrative about the relationship between experiences of technology (defined here as "materials or substances created or discovered through modern innovations" [p. xiii]) and class stratification. She deftly notes the ambivalence with which the citified middle- and upper-classes of the late nineteenth-century regarded manual labor: at once lauding images of Jeffersonian yeoman farmers or sculpted Greek athletes, and disparaging the vision of menial and inferior physicality allegedly transcended with elite training and expensive gym equipment. De la Pena ties the marketing of energy-enhancing devices to the broader popularity of Spencerian theories of "force" in the Gilded Age, and highlights the exclusionary nature of several new practices of the body. De la Pena also nicely extends the kinds of gender analysis found in other recent social histories of the late nineteenth-century U.S. to include unusually sympathetic and fine-grained descriptions of men's uses of technology. In one of the book's strongest chapters, for example, de la Pena discusses the numerous electrical belts, probes, and prosthetic devices employed by men to address concerns with sexual function and performance.

The matter of race is handled with somewhat less sophistication; critical attention to the racialization of technology and of the American body wavers across the study's five chapters. The book notes the "fears of decreasing 'potency' and 'power' in white males" effected by "turn-of-the-century immigration and African-American emancipation" (p. 12), relations between neurasthenia and concerns about race suicide (pp. 28-29), as well as several other connections among race, energy, and the body. Many of these topics, however, present opportunity for additional exploration. For instance, a chapter titled "Measuring Mechanical Strength," which opens with two epigraphs about "developed" and "undeveloped" manhood, would surely benefit from further attention to the racial tropes of barbarity and civilization which upheld late nineteenth-century understandings of development. Such attention would allow comment on the racial overtones of the exercise equipment referred to as "Indian clubs" (p. 52, 55), or to the tension between "brute strength" and "scientific erudition" embodied by Eugen Sandow (p. 68). Similarly, when an 1886 remark by Bishop Turner of the African Methodist Church of Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee about "the white man ... controlling electricity" is cited as evidence of a clerical fear of "deviation from their perceived natural order," one wonders whether Turner might have been expressing concern with post-Reconstruction race relations as much as with the spread of electricity (p. 113).

While further attention to the contingencies of race might have helped to deepen the study's assessment of technologies "that people voluntarily put in contact with their bodies" (p. xiii), The Body Electric will prove gripping to readers with interests in late nineteenth-century U.S. social history and in the history and cultural study of the body. It not only provides a richly detailed and surprising account of long-forgotten artifacts, but also fleshes out the longer history of some still-familiar attitudes toward health and vitality.

Rebecca M. Herzig

Bates College