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Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, and Isaac Pulvermacher’s “Magic Band”

2013; Elsevier BV; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/b978-0-444-63273-9.00018-6

1875-7855

Robert K. Waits,

Musicology and Musical Analysis

Around 1850, Isaac L. Pulvermacher (1815–1884) joined the ranks of so-called “galvanists” who had, for nearly a century, been touting the shocks and sparks of electricity as a miracle cure for all ills, including neurological complaints such as palsy and hemiplegia. The famed authors, Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), in France, and Charles Dickens (1812–1870), in England, although contemporaries, apparently never met or corresponded. But during their lives, they both became aware of Pulvermacher and his patented Hydro-Electric Chains, claimed to impart vigor and cure nearly every complaint. Pulvermacher’s chains made a cameo appearance in Madame Bovary (1857), Flaubert’s controversial (and most successful) novel. Among Dickens’s last letters (1870) was an order for I. L. Pulvermacher and Company’s “magic band.” Since the Victorian age, electrical and magnetic cures, for better or worse, continue to be products of both the medical profession and quackery.