The years from 2011 to 2015 mark the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War. In 2013, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia opens a permanent exhibit on the war’s medical dimension, Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits: Injury, Death, and Healing in Civil War Philadelphia. Unlike most exhibits of Civil War medicine that explore the industrial scale of warfare and the heroic treatments afforded mass casualties of disease and wounds, Broken Bodies presents a history of the body. The most sophisticated and unpredictable technology applied to the soldier’s body was electrotherapy at America’s first neurological hospital, Turner’s Lane in Philadelphia. The pioneering work at Turner’s Lane conducted by physicians S. Weir Mitchell, William W. Keen, and George R. Morehouse in studying diseases and wounds of the nerves will receive particular emphasis in the exhibit. The regimen for treatment of nerve injuries was comprehensive and employed the first machines for diagnosis and therapy in American medicine, “Faradisation” and “Galvanisation” devices. Mitchell published two treatises on his wartime treatments in which electrical devices feature in case histories as innovative and indispensable devices. They were necessary in treating severe and unprecedented nerve injuries caused by war wounds, devices he described as “the most overrated and underrated of all the medical armamenta.” The bodily reactions obtained through the application of electricity necessitated the articulation of electrical qualities of the human body—“electro-muscular sensibility” and “electric contractility.” This presentation explores the links between experimental electrical technology, unprecedented therapeutic intervention in bodily functions, and the production of physiological knowledge. These domains are discussed with a view of their interpretation in a museum exhibit.