ABSTRACT
In “On the New Freezing Discovery,” republished in the London Magazine in August of 1781 under the pseudonym “The Hypochondriack,” James Boswell describes a machine that, if ever really invented by Dr. William Cullen, never made it to mass production. The machine, Boswell writes with excitement, would “congeal living animals in such a manner, that they shall remain exactly in the same state they were in when the frigorific operation is performed” (102). In the pages that follow, which Boswell states were first published in the Publick Advertiser on June 2, 1770, he describes the many employments for such a machine, imagining a husband who orders his wife frozen before he leaves town, thereby ensuring that she can “make no tender signs from her window” that would invite passing lovers (104). As a painless and temporary alternative to hanging and drowning, he speculates, the machine could also deter the melancholic from suicide. “Their senses being benumbed,” he explains, “the foulfiend of Hypochondria cannot hurt them; and when it is fine weather, up they will spring like swallows to the enjoyment of happiness” (107). 1 Boswell's suggestions vary from the military to the political, yet he is preoccupied with the machine's ability to suspend users at the edge of death and to catch unfaithful partners as they commit sexual crimes. The invention allows its users—whether they freeze themselves or others—a level of control never before possible. They can even become machinelike themselves as they turn one another on and off, suspending their own and others' behaviors. Self-correction and discipline, especially of sexual behavior, are easier once the body is frozen.
