Category: Victorian Modernity

• The "Telegraphic" Disease

  This theory held that the spread of telegraph wires and their constant humming damaged the nervous system, causing insanity, exhaustion, hallucination, or a literal “leakage” of mental force among people living near the lines. In its strongest form, the telegraph was not merely a machine but an invisible extractor of human vitality. The documented record clearly shows that nineteenth-century culture repeatedly linked modern technology with nervous illness and that electricity and telegraphy were sometimes invoked in patient accounts and medical thought about mental disturbance. What remains unproven is the literal claim that telegraph wires caused a distinct disease through “nerve leakage.”