Practical Electricity in Medicine and Surgery.
Philadelphia: F.A. Davis, 1890 (c.1889). viii, 383, 32 pp. Illus. with 252 in-text b/w drawings and 6 photos. Sm. 4to. Cloth. First edition. A very good copy, wear at spine ends and joints, rear endpapers split at hinge, binding tight and leaves clean. Cordesco 00-2170. Item #35220
"In its heyday in the late Victorian era, electrotherapy was utilized for a myriad of neurological and psychiatric disorders. By exploiting the prestige of science and the numinous quality of technology, medical electricians translated the protean forces of nature into an emblem of medical modernity. Later on, however, the spread of urban networks of power and the introduction of electrical appliances into the home had lent an aura of mundanity to the speciality. The discovery of radiation and X-rays towards the turn of the century was a watershed in electrotherapy’s disaggregation as other modalities of the electromagnetic spectrum began to be deployed in the physician’s armentarium and electrotherapy began to be challenged by psychoanalysis in the treatment of shell shock in WW1," (John Senior, Electrotherapy – a case study in nineteenth- and twentieth-century science, technology and medicine, Oxford Univ. Course Notes). Cordesco claims the publication date was really 1900, not 1890 as stated on the title page.
Price: $150.00