| This dissertation pursues recent themes from the historiography of early modern science in early North American history to explore the ways in which North Americans sought enlightenment through electrical experiment between roughly 1745 and 1810. Including, but moving beyond the figure of Benjamin Franklin, it examines interactions between electricity and the human body in the construction of natural philosophy, the presentation of electrical knowledge through public demonstrations, the development of the lightning rod, political discourse during the era of the American Revolution, and a variety of programmes for manipulating electricity as a resource for medical therapy. It describes a North American Enlightenment made through material-cultural practice, and the interaction of bodies and artificial machines, as described by a variety of eighteenth-century discourses: technical (principally natural philosophy, physiology and therapeutics), social (from polite self-improvement to revolutionary republicanism and the humanitarian dissemination of useful knowledge), and religious (from physico-theology to Providentialism and Protestant millenarianism). The dissertation thus addresses not only the question of how North Americans understood the relationship between electricity and the body, but also why they believed this relationship to be important. In addition, it elucidates the ways in which electrical knowledge and practice functioned across the ostensibly distinct realms of science, medicine and technology, by attending to the reciprocities between heterogeneous fields and practices and their common dependence on philosophical apparatus (scientific instruments). |
