ABSTRACT
The hallmarks of second industrial revolution were a new generation of machines and devices, incandescent lighting, telephones, internal combustion engines, whose diffusion over succeeding decades dramatically altered the urban and industrial landscape. Central to this second wave of industrialization was the emergence of new constellation of energy sources as well as systems of production, transportation, consumption, and communication. Embraced by conservatives and socialists alike, the thermodynamic principle seemed to promise a scientific solution to the bitter labor conflicts that had plagued the early decades of industrialization. One important implication of the body's emergence as object of materialist science, its new identity as "machine," was the loss of its status as site of epistemic certainty. The emergence of the model of "man as machine" coincided with significant changes in the nature and organization of work in the late nineteenth century. Neurasthenia emerged as the master-pathology of the second industrial revolution, a chronically renewed sacrifice exacted by the Edisonian gods of progress.
