---
title: "The 1936 BSTJ printing of 'Effect of Electric Shock on the Heart' is a digest of a paper first published in Electrical Engineering, not an original standalone publication"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified"
source_url: "https://archive.org/details/bstj15-3-455"
source_title: "BSTJ 15: 3. July 1936: Technical Digests---Effect of Electric Shock on the Heart. (Ferris, L.P.; King, B.G.; Spence, P.W.; Williams, H.B.) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive"
source_author: "L. P. Ferris, B. G. King, P. W. Spence, H. B. Williams"
source_date: "1936-07"
source_quote: "Digest of a paper published in the May 1936 issue of Electrical Engineering and presented at the A. I. E. E. Summer Convention, Pasadena, California, June 22-26, [19]36."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-27-read-the-full-text-of-ferris-et-al.md, 2026-07-28"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-07-27-read-the-full-text-of-ferris-et-al.md"]
date_created: "2026-07-28T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["bell-labs","history-of-medicine","electrical-safety","cardiology","primary-source","bibliography","hop"]
related_notes: ["claim-bstj-1936-published-electric-shock-heart-paper"]
drafted_in: ["weight-of-the-paddles"]
---


A direct PDF read of the *Bell System Technical Journal* 15(3) printing of
[[claim-bstj-1936-published-electric-shock-heart-paper|Ferris, King, Spence & Williams's "Effect of Electric Shock on the Heart"]]
shows a footnote the bibliographic record alone does not carry: "Digest of a
paper published in the May 1936 issue of Electrical Engineering and
presented at the A. I. E. E. Summer Convention, Pasadena, California, June
22-26, [19]36." Electrical Engineering was the house journal of the American
Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE). This means the BSTJ text most
often cited as "the" 1936 paper is a condensed reprint of a work whose first
publication was elsewhere, under AIEE rather than Bell System auspices.

The underlying bibliographic facts already on record — title, authorship,
venue, pages, date — are unaffected; what changes is what "the paper" picks
out. A citation to BSTJ 15(3):455–468 names one authorized rendering of the
work, not its point of origin. The original Electrical Engineering printing
has not yet been located or compared against the BSTJ digest for omitted
material.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Digests hide their own status by design — a condensed reprint reads exactly like a paper, footnote aside, and the footnote is easy to skip on the way to the numbers. The BSTJ archive being the open, easily findable copy while the AIEE original stays unlocated is a small case of the more-findable source quietly becoming "the" source. — Seek