From Clouds to the Brain. Celine Cherici

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      Foreword

      Céline Cherici’s book explores the place of electricity in the history of medical science over a period ranging from the 18th to the 21st Centuries, from its discovery to the recent use of deep brain stimulation. Some contextual data helps us to grasp the full importance and scope of this undertaking.

      The current importance of chemical and molecular representations, which have become consubstantial with biology, means it is easy that we forget that, from a historical point of view, it is physics that has constantly provided neurophysiology with explanatory models.

Galvani’s use of artificial electricity as a stimulant led him, by analogy, to conceive of muscle fibers as small Leyden jars. Thus, the mysterious nature of nervous fluid, which was therefore electric, a model which was vary different from the humoral model described by the Encyclopedists, was unraveled. The fruitfulness of the polemic between the proponents of metallic and animal electrics is well known in the history of physics, since the voltaic pile battery triggered the development of electrophysics, electromagnetism and electrochemistry, the development of which, in turn, went hand in hand with the invention of two instruments of considerable heuristic value in 19th Century Life Sciences: the galvanometer and the impolarizable electrode. These instruments led to the development of the great German electrophysiology, that is to say, the classical works of du Bois-Reymond, Helmholtz, Hermann, Bernstein, etc., which made it possible to propose various hypotheses on the nature of the action and rest currents. These currents were often considered to be the result of purely physical phenomena occurring in living tissue. In accordance with the dominant physical and technical models, nerve fiber was likened to a metal wire, a circuit, a magnet and, finally, a battery – a living battery the functioning of which physicists sought to understand by taking inspiration from the model of the electric battery. The origin of the battery’s electromotive force, how the nerve impulse was conducted and the changes produced in the fibers by this impulse were also investigated, leading to imported notions such as “polarized structures” or “local circuits”. In France, it was this tradition, that of the physical explanation of the functioning СКАЧАТЬ