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Read the Preface.
"Covers its subject well, provides useful context, and makes
lively reading for anyone interested in the history of technology,
the social context of electricity and radioactive materials, or the
history of alernative medicine."--"Technology and Culture"
"Not only provides a richly detailed and suprising account of
long-forgotten artifacts, but also fleshes out the longer history
of some still-familiar attitudes toward health and vitality."
--"Journal of Social History"
"De la Pena's fascinating study melds social history with
material culture and the history of science and technology to
explain Americans' enthusiastic embrace of modern mechanization and
emergent industrial culture."
--"CHOICE"
"In this engaging and well-written study Carolyn Thomas de la
Pena offers a detailed cultural history of the
medical-technological interface in the period 1850-1940, and in so
doing tells us a great deal about how the body and its relation to
modernity were conceived."
--"American Historical Review"
"Exellent. Carolyn de la Pena's superbly researched project
examines how Americans in the period between 1870 and 1935 sought
to supplement their physical energy through engagement with a
variety of popular health technologies, including muscle-building
machines: electrical invigorators, such as belts and collars: and
radioactive elixirs."
--"American Quarterly"
"It's an irresistible account of fads and fascinating foibles,
including electric belts and radioactive tonics."
--"Christian Science Monitor"
"Transforming archival research into sparkling prose, "The Body
Electric" explains how Americans learned to usemachines to seek
health, sexual rejuvenation, and physical transformation. This
innovative book is both an entertaining history of fads and foibles
and a groundbreaking cultural critique of the continuing obsession
with achieving physical perfection."
--David E. Nye, author of "Electrifying America and America as
Second Creation"
""The Body Electric" is the so-far missing puzzle piece in our
nineteenth-twentieth century knowledge of the social history of the
human body and technology a richly illustrated study showing two
centuries of technologizing the human body against fears of
weakness, enervation, sexual depletion."
--Cecelia Tichi, author of "Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature,
Culture in Modernist America"
Between the years 1850 and 1950, Americans became the leading
energy consumers on the planet, expending tremendous physical
resources on energy exploration, mental resources on energy
exploitation, and monetary resources on energy acquisition. A
unique combination of pseudoscientific theories of health and the
public's rudimentary understanding of energy created an age in
which sources of industrial power seemed capable of curing the
physical limitations and ill health that plagued Victorian bodies.
Licensed and "quack" physicians alike promoted machines,
electricity, and radium as invigorating cures, veritable "fountains
of youth" that would infuse the body with energy and push out
disease and death.
The Body Electric is the first book to place changing ideas
about fitness and gender in dialogue with the popular culture of
technology. Whether through wearing electric belts, drinking radium
water, or lifting mechanized weights, many Americans came to
believethat by embracing the nation's rapid march to
industrialization, electrification, and "radiomania," their bodies
would emerge fully powered. Only by uncovering this belief's
passions and products, Thomas de la PeAa argues, can we fully
understand our culture's twentieth-century energy enthusiasm.
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