| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.2 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American. By Carolyn Thomas de la Peña (New York: NYU Press, 2003. xi plus 328 pp. $35.00).

Readers of Carolyn Thomas de la Peña's engaging study of bodies and machines in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America will find a keen attention to the "physical experience of laypersons" (p. 13). This is no predictable top-down description of expert discourse—although some of the usual suspects, such as George Beard and Thomas Edison, make brief appearances. Rather, de la Peña admirably focuses on those everyday people who might, through their use of new electrical and mechanical devices, come to develop an "odd kinship with the telephone, telegraph, and streetcar" (p. 99). A valuable contribution to the social histories of medicine and technology, The Body Electric seeks to understand how and why users voluntarily "connected their bodies to machines" (p. 43), eventually normalizing understandings of the body as a tractable energetic system. In so doing, she not only helps us to understand the diffusion of contemporary analogs such as Viagra and StairMasters, but also to appreciate the long, complex histories of our "cyborg" selves.

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