“Nerve-Vibration”: Therapeutic Technologies in the 1880s and 1890s

Abstract

Vibratory movements — shakes, quakes, tremors and convulsions — are often used to describe the impact of modernity in the nineteenth century. Vibration in this context is evocative and productive of massive change, of transformation, destruction and “dire disorder” (Dickens 68). In Dombey and Son, Dickens’s choice of the most naturally destructive, shattering phenomenon of a ‘great earthquake’ as a metaphor for the construction of the railway — which was for so many the leading symbol of modernity — challenges any straightforward notion of the railway as the embodiment of progress, the very tracks of progress. While the railway trails “smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilization and improvement”, the “shaking” buildings it leaves behind move only back and forth, to and fro, on the spot (68). Vibration, here, doesn’t really get us anywhere. But as a returning motion, a repetitive, rapid motion in one place, it nevertheless brings about collapse.

The first shock of a great earthquake had, just at that period, rent the whole neighbourhood to its centre. Traces of its course were visible on every side. Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood… In short, the yet unfinished and unopened Railroad was in progress; and, from the very core of all this dire disorder, trailed smoothly away, upon its mighty course of civilisation and improvement.

Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, 1846–8, 68