In 1923, Henry Gaylord Wilshire, well-known California socialist, socialite, and real estate tycoon, left sunny Los Angeles in search of renewed energy, eternal youth, and a second fortune. It was a risky venture but not his first; Wilshire loved to take chances. Land speculation, one of his most profitable ventures, had already paid off big, as evidenced by Wilshire Boulevard, Southern California’s “miracle mile” of high-priced leases and elegant shopping. To the surprise of many, Wilshire left it behind to pursue the path of technological “invigoration.” He moved to Oregon, putting his fortune, his reputation, and his remaining years into...

In 1871, Henry Ward Beecher wrote a letter to the editor about a recent cure he had found for nervous exhaustion. Beecher was not only a well-known preacher, considered by many “the great popular phenomena of the era,” he was also widely praised for his athleticism, a trait that made him a prime example of what is typically called “Muscular Christianity.”¹ Among his contemporaries, Beecher was often cited as a figure worth emulating, a man of education, religion, and morality who had not fallen victim to what seemed a nearly ubiquitous physical decline among the middle and upper classes.² Along...

In 1869, Dudley Allen Sargent laced up his boxing gloves, climbed into the ring, and set out to prove his manhood. He had already been hired by the president of Bowdoin College to be its new gymnasium director. The president, however, was not the one whom Sargent needed to impress. Although, at only nineteen, he may have proven himself intelligent and experienced enough to win over the school’s head administrator, it was the students who would have the final say. They had selected the strongest and quickest of their peers to put Sargent to the ultimate test: ten rounds of...

In 1887, theElectric Reviewreported to an emerging professional class of American electricians that something new was powering the bodies of the nation’s congressmen. Those who found themselves lethargic after “receptions and suppers all night” or who had “exhausted their brain power by speechmaking,” were retiring to the basement to be “filled quietly with electricity.” Someone had rigged a primitive electrical device in the capitol’s engine room that allowed lawmakers a direct, invigorating connection to the power behind the building’s lights, heat, and machines. A serial electric jolt was transferred to any who held the wire that emerged from...

For many American men early in the twentieth century, their most intimate moment with technology came while wearing an electric belt. This is not to say that electric belts were the only products to necessitate close contact between technological materials and human bodies; I-ON-A-CO collars embraced their users; Oxygenators slid under women’s clothing, clamped around skin, and pressed metal to flesh. The experience of contact, however, was not the same. Whereas collars and oxygenators “held” body parts one might share publicly, belts, as well as electric prostate massagers, treated private body parts. By surrounding the penis and scrotum with low-level...

In 1903, dozens of African Americans entered the offices of white scientists, subjected their bodies to radium “therapies,” and waited to see their black skin turn white. Over the course of the year, in separate experiments undertaken in Philadelphia and Berkeley, three scientists used African-American bodies as testing grounds to determine the newly discovered element’s physical properties. All records indicate that the primarily male subjects came forward willingly for daily “treatment” sessions over a one-month period. One at a time and part by part they exposed their bodies to a scientist whom they did not know and to a substance...

Just at the time that I was finishing my first draft of this book, a book caught my attention as I was browsing the supermarket aisles. It was a guide to Pilates, the exercise system of stretching and balance founded almost a century ago by Joseph Pilates. I had heard about Pilates from friends who had urged me to come with them to their classes. Up to that point, I had avoided the sessions that had sounded to me like a cross between elementary ballet and medieval torture. Yet I could not help flipping through the book after reading a...