Death by electric currents and by lightning : the Goulstonian lectures for 1913 delivered before the Royal College of Physicians of London / by A.J. Jex-Blake.

  • Jex-Blake, Arthur John, 1873-1957.
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Death by electric currents and by lightning : the Goulstonian lectures for 1913 delivered before the Royal College of Physicians of London / by A.J. Jex-Blake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    DEATH BY ELECTRIC CURRENTS AND BY LIGHTNING. Lecture I. DEATH BY ELECTRIC CURRENTS. In these lectures I propose to consider, first, the subject of death by electric currents, and next, death by lightning. I do this because a good deal is known for certain as to the way in which industrial and domestic electric currents bring about death in man, and much valuable experimental work has been done illustrating the effects of such currents upon the lower animals. In the case of lightning, however, although plenty of obser- vations upon its victims have been made, the nature of lightning itself has always prevented the making of experimental observations of its effects upon living creatures. It is true that in the middle of the eighteenth century a few desultory experiments were made with the electric discharges brought dowrn from heaven during thunderstorms by kites and lightning conductors of various kinds. But all experimentation of this kind came to an abrupt end when, in 1763, Professor Richmann of St. Petersbui-g was killed outright in his own laboratory by a miniature lightning stroke a foot long, while investigating the nature of the dis- charges collected by a lightning-rod set up on his roof above and brought down into his room (Arago). Death by Electric Currents. I believe that no loss of human life from industrial currents of electricity occurred before 1879, though currents strong enough to have caused death were employed in lighting the operatic stage in Paris (at the first performance of Meyerbeer’s Le Prophete) as long ago as 1849, and in lighthouses on and off the coast of England in 1857. In 1879 a stage carpenter was killed at Lyon by the alternating current of a Siemens dynamo that was giving a voltage of about 250 volts at the time. The man became insensible at once and died in twenty minutes; artificial respiration was not applied. The first death in this country took place at a theatre in Aston, outside Birmingham, in 1880, where a bandsman short-circuited a powerful electric battery, became insensible, and died [165/13]