Antique Medical Equipment

Static Electricity Machines

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    Volumes

    1. Vol 1 The Machines That Made the Charge From the hand-turned glass globe to the twin-disc Wimshurst: how the electrostatic generators of medical electricity were built, and how they wrung tens of kilovolts from nothing but friction and induction.
    2. Vol 2 Franklinization: The Breeze, the Bath, and the Spark How physicians actually applied the static machine to a patient — the insulated bath, the electric breeze, sparks drawn from the spine, and the Morton wave — and the honest, superficial physiology beneath a century of overclaim.
    3. Vol 3 The Honest Ledger and the X-Ray Second Life What static-electric treatment could genuinely do versus what it was sold to cure — and the consequential second career the powerful Wimshurst found after 1895, when the same machine that had shocked patients for their nerves became a high-voltage source for the newly discovered Röntgen ray.
    4. Vol 4 The Cased Machine and the Trade The medical influence machine as a clinic object — its dry cabinet, Leyden jars, electrodes, and insulated platform — the American makers who sold it, and how static therapy earned a seat, for a while, in respectable medicine.
    5. Vol 5 Collecting the Static Machine How to tell a Wimshurst from a Holtz or a Toepler, how to date and grade a surviving influence machine by its discs, sectors, Leyden jars, and drive, and why a high-voltage antique is displayed with care even though it never touches the mains.