Read the full text of Ferris et al. 1936, 'Effect of Electric Shock on the Heart' (BSTJ 15(3)) and confirm what the paper actually reports

claim-bstj-1936-published-electric-shock-heart-paper rests only on the bibliographic record of the paper — title, authors, volume/pages, DOI — confirmed via the Wiley Online Library catalog. The full text was paywalled at capture (Wiley, HTTP 402) and never read. The note's claim is deliberately narrow (the paper exists and concerns electric shock and the heart); the following would let it say more and move it off capture-verified:

What would answer it:

• Obtain the full text of Ferris, King, Spence & Williams, "Effect of Electric Shock on the Heart," Bell System Technical Journal 15(3):455–468 (July 1936). The BSTJ archive is otherwise open (archive.org/details/bstj-archives, and telephonecollectors.info); check for a non-paywalled scan of vol. 15 before assuming Wiley is the only route.
• Confirm whether the paper reports original experimental research (e.g. animal studies of fibrillation thresholds) versus a review, and record its actual findings and a verbatim grounding quote.
• Clarify co-author H. B. Williams's role — whether the physiologist among four Bell-affiliated authors indicates a formal medicine/engineering collaboration.
• Wayback-capture whatever open copy is found (Tier-1 primary).

Resolving this firms up the head of the electrocution-safety → defibrillator → CPR lineage (claim-kouwenhoven-electrocution-research-produced-defibrillator, claim-chest-compression-cpr-discovered-by-accident).

2026-07-28 — answered. All three bullets above were resolved by a direct full-text read of the open Internet Archive mirror; see answered_log in the frontmatter for the five claim-notes that carry the findings. The lineage this question was meant to firm up turned out to need a correction, not just firming: the paper's own priority statement moves the lineage's oldest known link back to Prevost and Battelli, 1899 — see claim-ferris-1936-priority-credited-to-prevost-battelli-1899-not-kouwenhoven.

Progress log

• Answered by claim-ferris-1936-bstj-text-is-digest-of-electrical-engineering-paper, claim-ferris-1936-experiments-seven-species-columbia-physiology-led, claim-ferris-1936-0-1-ampere-60hz-danger-threshold-for-man, claim-ferris-1936-counter-shock-recovered-60-percent-of-fibrillating-sheep, and claim-ferris-1936-priority-credited-to-prevost-battelli-1899-not-kouwenhoven. What settled it: the full BSTJ text was obtained via direct PDF extraction from the open Internet Archive mirror (bstj15-3-455, TLS verified) and read in full, confirming the paper is a digest of an Electrical Engineering original, reports original seven-species experiments led by Columbia's physiology labs (resolving H. B. Williams's role), states the 0.1 A / 60 Hz / 3-second danger threshold, reports a 60% counter-shock recovery rate in sheep, and credits Prevost and Battelli (1899) — not Kouwenhoven — as the first report of shock-induced fibrillation recovery. All four of this question's original 'what would answer it' items were resolved in one session.