Since Galvani and his experiments on the legs of frogs or the heads of torture victims, doctors and other demonstrators at fairs have played a lot with electricity.
A little too much, to the point that the professor of medicine Alfred Becquerel, brother of the physicist, was moved in 1860 to see electricity applied
"to everything"
, in uses
"as often useless as harmful to the sick"
, reports Christine Blondel in the
Historical Annals of Electricity
.
Five years before Becquerel, the neurologist Guillaume Duchenne of Boulogne said the same thing: medical electricity, he exclaims in
De l'électrisation locale,
must belong to doctors and not to
"acrobats authorized to electrify in public squares".
To discover
New rules for the health pass from January 15: all the answers to your questions
A acrobat, Duchenne is nevertheless a little himself: in Paris, the doctor is not attached to any hospital and goes from one to another to offer his services as a therapist-electrician.
He then passes
“for an original, even a charlatan, mocked by doctors”
, writes…
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