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Shocking Waves at the Museum: The Bini–Cerletti Electro-shock Apparatus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Alessandro Aruta
Alessandro Aruta
Affiliation:
Alessandro Aruta, Museo di Storia della Medicina, Sapienza Università di Roma, Viale dell’Università, 34/A – 00185, Rome, Italy. Email: alessandro. aruta@uniroma1.it
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The historian of science, Lorraine Daston, has written about things that talk. But how much can an artefact in a museum communicate its history to the public? Artefacts in museums speak, but it is not necessarily, or even at all, in the language of their original time and place. Cultural baggage, memories, and imagination all come into play, including those held by museum curators, and not least those contained within the operational and historical frameworks of such institutions. At the Museo di Storia della Medicina della Sapienza at the University of Rome we are organising an exhibition around an artefact that more than any other elicits emotive reactions – the Bini–Cerletti apparatus for the administration of electro-shock. This prototype of the first ECT machine, along with various historical documents, manuals, and textbooks relating to it, is a valued part of the Museo's collection. We are proud of it, yet as a display item, it is also something of golden chalice. Leaving aside the ethical question of whether we can (or should) convey to visitors the anxiety and pain of the patients who once submitted to the device, and leaving aside the different loads of historical and contemporary baggage that visitors will bring to it, how can such an object be represented in an historically honest way? This is the problem, for while we might be true to the context of its emergence, within that context (of Fascist Italy) the Bini–Cerletti apparatus was at one and the same time a blessing, a hope, a lie, and a profitable commercial product.

Keywords

Electroshock ApparatusElectroconvulsive TherapyExhibitionScientific MuseologyLucio BiniUgo Cerletti
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 407 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 Lorraine Daston, Things that Talk: Object Lesson from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books/MIT Press, 2004). For new and interesting ways to stimulate the interest of the visitors to scientific museums see Jorge Wagensberg Lubinski, The Intellectual Joy in Science Museums, presentation at the IX Antonio Ruberti Lecture, Conference Room, CNR Headquarters, Rome, 8 November 2010. For many of the problems, see Bettina Messias Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), especially Part IV: ‘Locating History in the Museum’.

2 This point has been well made in Claudia Stein and Roger Cooter, ‘Visual Objects and Universal Meanings: AIDS Posters and the Politics of Globalisation and History’, Medical History, 55 (2011), 85–115.

3 The Bini–Cerletti electro-shock apparatus is one of the best examples of a museum object understood as semioforo, that is, a vehicle of meanings, histories, scientific controversies, but, even before, of doubts and emotions. In fact, as Ulrich Tröhler has remarked with regard to the collection of gynaecological instruments in Göttingen, it gives us no information about what was thought, what was felt, what was done: Ulrich Tröhler, ‘Tracing Emotions, Concepts and Realities in History: The Göttingen Collection of Perinatal Medicine’, in Non-Verbal Communication in Science Prior to 1900 (Firenze: Olschki, 1993).

4 See Riassunto di una Comunicazione del prof. U. Cerletti e del dott. L. Bini alla R. Accademia Medica di Roma il 28 maggio 1938 – XVI); Ferdinando Accornero, ‘Testimonianza oculare sulla scoperta dell’elettroshock’, in Pagine di storia della medicina, 14, 2 (1970), 39–49; Gilberto Corbellini, ‘L’epilessia nella neurologia clinica e sperimentale del Novecento’, in Experimentum Naturae: Saggi sull’Epilessia (Udine: Casamassima, 1992), 138–3; Roberta Passione, Il Romanzo dell’elettroshock (Reggio Emilia: Aliberti, 2007), 68–9.

5 Roberta Passione, ‘Non solo l’elettroshock: Ugo Cerletti e il rinnovamento della Psichiatria italiana’, in Marco Piccolino (ed.), Neuroscienze Controverse: Da Aristotele alla moderna scienza del linguaggio (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008), 258. The changes that took place in Italian psychiatry in the first half of the twentieth century relied on developments of the late nineteenth century, especially at the centres in Reggio Emilia, Naples and Rome, where the key figures were, respectively, Augusto Tamburini (1848–1919), Leonardo Bianchi (1848–1927) and Ezio Sciamanna (1850–1905).

6 Ibid., 258.

7 Luciano Mecacci and Alberto Zani, Teorie del cervello: Dall’Ottocento a oggi (Torino: Loescher, 1982); Carmela Morabito, La mente nel cervello: Un’introduzione storica alla neuropsicologia cognitiva (Rome: Laterza, 2004).

8 Passione, op. cit. (note 5), 270.

9 Accornero, op. cit. (note 4), author’s translation.

10 Ibid., 45.

11 Passione, op. cit. (note 4), 76.

12 Accornero, op. cit. (note 4), 48. author’s translation. The new therapy was officially introduced to the scientific community on 28 May 1938, at the R. Accademia Medica in Rome. See Riassunto, op. cit. (note 4).

13 All the patents and franchises for the sale of the apparatus can be viewed at the archive of the Museo di Storia della Medicina [Museum of History of Medicine], Sapienza University of Rome.

14 See Stefano Canali, ‘Il Comitato Nazionale di Consulenza per la Biologia e la Medicina’, in Per una storia del CNR, Vol. II (Bari: Laterza, 2001), 17–18.

15 Passione, op. cit. (note 5), 274–7.