A colonial doctor re-explained the evil eye as electric magnetism within modern science.

Evidence

In other cases he admitted that the local remedy was scientifically correct, but attacked the local understanding of how it worked upon the body, replacing this with ‘the true explanation’ which accounted for its working in an alternative idiom drawn from late nineteenth-century medical science. The power of the evil eye, for example, he explained in terms of ‘electric magnetism’. ‘The evil magnetic electricity, which we name envy, directs itself by way of man’s senses.’ He cited as an illustration the case of a healer in a certain village who was ‘envying’ children and other objects by staring at them. ‘Whenever the envier directed his gaze upon the envied one, in the moment of excitement his poison affected that current and weakened the life movement in animals and plants, and they were wasted and lost. And in proportion to the power of the envier in overcoming the power of the envied, so is the strength or weakness of the danger, and there results a slight or severe illness, or death, or the snapping of trees, or the destruction of lofty palaces.’ — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 329