October 19, 2011 • 22 mins
It's no secret that Mary Shelley's infamous novel has influenced generations of writers, but is completely based on fiction, or was Shelley inspired by real-life events? Tune in to learn more about the real Dr. Frankenstein.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to bling a truck reboarding and I'm fair Dowdy
and we've covered a lot of spooky ground so far
this October, from serial killers to sorcerers, to spiritual mediums
(00:23):
and the ghosts they talked to, and so now it's
time for us to enter the world of the spooky
science Lab. You probably have some experience with this if
you've ever been to a haunted house and you've gone
into that section where they have like the bowls full
of grapes that are like well, yeah, they're like eyeballs
or something and you stick your hand in them, or
(00:44):
a mad scientists pulling out the sausage links out of
the You've never seen that. No, I've actually done haunted
hof kind of like that myself. We did that like
you created it. Yeah, in my friends basement we had
the great eyeballs and the sketty and everything impressive, the
best with the skeleton in the thump pump. So in
(01:04):
the spooky science Lab, that's where these so called mad
scientists types explore and push the very limits of what
it means to be human and sometimes end up playing
god in the process, so a little bit more serious
than your average haunted house scenario, of course. One of
the most famous stories that exemplifies this is Frankenstein, a
novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published in eighteen eighteen and
(01:28):
generally just basics here. It's about a scientist named Victor
Frankenstein who attempts to create artificial life by piecing together
dead body parts and administering some sort of life spark.
He ends up, though, creating a monster, and the story
has been adapted several times for film, stage, and TV productions.
(01:49):
I'm sure everyone's probably seen some sort of rendition of it. Well.
In just a couple of years ago, Katie and I
talked about Mary Shelley's experience and coming up with the story.
It involved a stay at Lord Byron's pill Law and Switzerland,
during which bad weather kept the small group of friends
and writers homebound, and Byron ended up issuing a ghost
(02:09):
story writing contest challenge, and the author, Mary Wilson Croft Shelley,
later said that the idea of for Frankenstein came to
her in a dream. Here specifically, what she said I
saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and
then on the working of some powerful engine, shows signs
of life and stir with an easy, half vital motion.
(02:33):
Frightful it must be, for supremely frightful would be the
effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism
of the creator of the world. Yeah, so, as you
guys pointed out, it's quite likely that the idea was
influenced not just by a dream but by actual talk
of scientific experiments that were going on in the early
(02:54):
late night talks. But whose experiments were they talking about. Well,
it turns out that there were many scientists during this
period whose work involved reanimating dead animals and even humans.
More than one of them has gotten credit for being
the inspiration for Shelley's Dr Frankenstein over the years. So
we're going to take a look at a couple, but
particularly Giovanni Aldini. Aldini started experimenting with human corpses in
(03:19):
the early eighteen hundreds, and his most famous experiment had
many people thinking, well, maybe you can actually bring someone
back to life. And his experiments became widely known and
they were almost like performances, really scary disturbing performance gory performances,
and he ultimately, however, made some concrete contributions to medical
(03:40):
science through these But before we get into all that,
we should talk about Aldini's inspiration his uncle Luigi Galvanni,
whose discovery kind of kicked off this whole Frankenstein era exactly. So.
Luigi Galvani was born in Bologna, Italy, in seventeen thirty
seven and studied medicine in the seventeen fifties according to
of his father's wishes, so he ended up becoming a
(04:02):
lecturer in anatomy at the University of Bologna and a
professor of obstetrics at the separate Institute of Arts and
Sciences by the early seventeen sixties, so a pretty good
solid career, and according to Encyclopedia Britannica, his early research
was in the area of comparative anatomy, so the structure
of the renal tubules, nasal mucosa in the middle ear,
(04:26):
stuff like that. Throughout the seventeen seventies, though, he started
to get more and more interested in physiology, specifically electro physiology,
or the study of the electrical aspects of physiological phenomena. Yes,
So he got an electrostatic machine and a Lindon jar,
which was a device used to storm static electricity, and
(04:48):
he started to dabble in muscular stimulation using electricity. In
seventeen eighty six, Galvani found that touching a frog's nerves
with a metal instrument during a thunderstore made the frog's
muscles contract, so it twitched. So he concluded that electricity
was the cause of the twitching, and he hypothesized, now
we know incorrectly, that it came from the frog's muscles
(05:10):
and nerve tissue. He did more experiments of this kind,
for example using an a scalpel touched to a nerve
while the electrostatic machine was activated, and he also got
the same result without the use of the machine. So
he hung a copper hook from an iron railing and
pressed the hook to the frog's spinal cord, and it
also moved because of that contact. So he published a
(05:31):
paper in sev called Commentary of the Effect of Electricity
on Muscular Motion, in which he concluded that animal tissue
contained this innate force called animal electricity, and in this
theory of his he thought that the brain secreted this
electric fluid which the nerves carried to the muscles, and
then that fluid acted as a stimulus for the muscles.
(05:52):
And Galvani's views were pretty accepted, generally accepted at least
by a lot of scientists, but physicist Alesandro vole To
did not accept these ideas. He rejected the idea of
animal electricity and said that the source of electricity or
stimulus in Galvani's experiments had been the use of two
(06:12):
dissimilar medals, and this caused a bit of controversy. But
Galvani didn't have much time to debate with Volta because
in the seventeen nineties Galvani refused to swear allegiance to
Napoleon's new Republic, so he lost his faculty position and
his salary, and he ended up moving into the old
Galvani home with his brother, and he died there at
(06:33):
the age of sixty one in sevent The debate was
not over, however, no Galvani's work and this idea of
animal electricity or Galvinism didn't just fade away. Volta used
concepts from Galvani's experiments, specifically the electricity created by two
dissimilar metals thing to create his electric pile or voltake pile,
(06:57):
basically a battery of sort of prim the battery that
could provide a source of constant current electricity. Volta however,
still fundamentally disagreed with the idea of animal electricity, and
as we mentioned, this kicked off a huge debate among
intellectuals at the time. Even in life. Galvani himself, though,
was too reserved to really get involved in all of
(07:18):
that exactly. He was a little more soft spoken than that,
but his somewhat spunk, your nephew, Giovanni Aldini stepped in
and kind of took up the torch for defending Galvinism. Now,
Aldini was born in Bologna on April sixteenth, seventeen sixty two,
and he had also chosen a scientific career path. He
studied physics at the University of Bologna, and after graduating
(07:40):
in seventeen eighty two, he became a research assistant for
his uncle and joined in on those frog experiments. When
what became known as the Galvani Volta controversy kicked off,
Aldini became really active in defense of his uncle's ideas.
So here's just a few examples of some of the
things that he did. He published responses to Volta's critics
sy isms, sometimes in the form of supplements to his
(08:02):
uncle's original commentary. He did experiments to demonstrate that some
muscular contraction and frogs can be obtained with one metal
only Volta just as an aside, he argued here that
the metal used, which was mercury, was probably contaminated and
actually did contain traces of another metal, and that's why
Aldni's experiment work. But the other thing that Aldini did
(08:23):
is that he worked with Galvani in a series of
experiments in which no metal was used at all, so
they just used nerves touched to muscle and achieved muscle
contraction that way. After Galvani died in sevente Aldini accepted
the Bologna University Chair in physics, which came complete with
a pretty hefty teaching load, but that didn't stop him
(08:43):
from pursuing his work in Galvinism, not at all. He
founded the first Galvanic society in Bologna, and then he
started experimenting on warm blooded animals, so really taken it
up a notch from frogs, worked on birds and calves
and oxen and according to a two thousand four article
goal by Andre Parlon in the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences.
(09:04):
In one notable experiment involving an ox, Aldini applied direct
electrical current to different parts of an ox brain to
determine different brain regions sensitivity to galvinism. And this really
sparked an interest in using galvinism as a therapeutic tool,
you know, something more than just a neat experiment with
(09:26):
twitching frog legs. However, to test this out, Aldini needed
to experiment with using electricity on human cadavers. But at
the time it was illegal to exhume bodies from graves,
so when he conducted these experiments in January February of
eighteen o two, he used the bodies of three criminals
who had been killed by decapitation. Ironically, he ended up
(09:48):
using a voltaic pile to create the electric current. Quirk
of history. Yeah. He did the experiment in a large
public area located near Bologna's Palace of Justice. This is
where the executions had taken place, and he applied the
electricity to different parts of the heads and the bodies
and was able to produce muscular contractions confirming the frog experiments.
(10:10):
After this, Aldini went on kind of a world tour
throughout Europe doing these sorts of experiments as demonstrations. They
were almost like shows, I mean, theatrical spectacles of a sort,
and Aldini became a really skilled performer in these. In
one before the Royal College of Surgeons in London, for example,
he cut the head off a dog and made the
current from a strong battery go through it. According to
(10:33):
an eyewitness account in the June July issue of History magazine,
this caused quote the dog's jaws to open, the teeth
to chatter, the eyes to roll in their sockets. One
would almost believe the dog's head was alive again. And
like he said, he really did go on a tour
of Europe. He went to several European universities. While in
Paris he also worked a little more on his electro
(10:54):
convulsive therapies. But in early eighteen o three Aldini returned
to London, where his ex perments were very well attended,
and not just by scientists and surgeons and curious people,
but by gentlemen. Dukes and even the Prince of Wales
came out to see one of these shows. That's interesting.
It almost became sort of a way to make this idea,
(11:16):
these scientific ideas more palatable to the general public, which
is kind of They sound so the opposite of palatable
to us now. But it is interesting to think of
the highest classes coming out to see a dog decapitated
and then these pretty horrific scientific experiments take place. But
Aldini's most famous demonstration took place on January eighteen oh
(11:40):
three at the Royal College of Surgeons and the subject
Aldini experimented on in this case was the twenty six
year old criminal George Foster, who had just been hanged
at Newgate Prison in London for murdering his wife and child.
And according to that History magazine articles Glenna just mentioned,
Aldini and his assistance actually handed out posters beforehand that
(12:03):
said he was going to attempt to quote reanimated corpse
in front of a live audience. If that didn't get
people in the door, I don't know what would. Before
starting the experiment, he asked for a physician to volunteer
to come up and confirm that the body was dead.
So it almost sounds it sounds very like a magic show,
like a magic show, very performance like, and to supply
(12:25):
the electric current. Aldini used what was essentially a very
large battery connected to conducting rods, and when the rods
were applied to Foster's mouth and ear, Aldini said that quote,
the job began to quiver. The adjoining muscles were horribly contorted,
and the left eye actually opened, So of course the
audience was pretty freaked out at this point. They gasped,
(12:48):
but they hadn't even reached the best part yet or
the worst, depending on your point of view. That came
when Aldini touched the rods to the criminals rectum, which
caused the whole body to fulse. The arms began to
punch the air as if in fury. The legs kicked,
and the back arch violently, almost as if it were
taking a deep breath. It's pretty creepy sounding, so Aldini said.
(13:15):
The movements were quote so much increased as almost to
give an appearance of reanimation, so almost like his promise
to reanimate a corpse was coming true. This was reported
in detail in The Times a few days later, and
it really made a big impression, as you can imagine,
on both scientists and regular people. According to parents article,
(13:36):
a lot of people really thought that electricity might be
that long sought vital force. Then maybe this guy had
finally figured it out. Aldini received the Royal Society's Copley Medal,
its highest honor, for his work. And just an interesting
side note here, apparently the London police had sort of
a plan in this for this event, they did plan
(13:57):
to re execute Foster if he was in fact back
to life, just in case, just in case he wasn't
going to get out of it. But Aldini said later
in a published account that his goal wasn't actually to
reanimate the corps. He was really trying to demonstrate how
galvanism might be useful in reviving drowning victims that suffered
from asphyxiation. He considered Foster, the hanged criminal, a classic
(14:18):
case of asphyxiation. So this makes me wonder a little
bit about that point before about Aldini and his assistance
handing out posters saying that they were going to attempt
to reanimate a corpse, because if that wasn't his intention,
then why would they hand him out. So maybe there's
some well, you have what you say before the show
and what you say after and after the show. Aldini
also as we alluded to before explored other medical applications
(14:40):
for galvinism, including treating mental disorders. One apparently successful test case,
according to that Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences article that
we mentioned, involved a twenty seven year old farmer named
Luigi Lonzarini who was suffering from melancholy madness, which was
basically major depression. So to treat him, Aldini delivered shocks
(15:01):
from a voltaic pile to Lazzarini's shaved head. He started
out with week a week voltaic pile and made it
increasingly stronger as the treatments progressed. And just as an aside,
he actually tried this out on himself first before we
tried it on his patient, so well, yeah. According to
Aldini's account of this experiment, Lazzarini's mood improved progressively until
(15:21):
he was supposedly cured after several weeks. Saldini's treatment of
Lazzarini inspired the electroc convulsive therapies that are still used today,
and now he's considered the father of electric shock therapy.
Although he was never able to restart a heart himself,
his work also seems to have had some kind of
(15:43):
direct inspiration for cardiac electrical stimulation. I mean, that was
sort of the first thing I thought of when I
was reading about these experiments with the dead criminals and
they're twitching and moving and um, the guy's back arching.
I mean, it seemed not too too far removed from
given a shock to a heart that's just stopped and
(16:04):
the person it's not completely out yet. Yeah, he was
never able to restart one, maybe because of the distance
or the amount of time that had lapsed between the
time that the criminal was executed in the time that
he was doing And if you're missing ahead, it's not
going to help ch That's very true, but it was
always a big disappointment of his During the latter part
of his career, though, Aldini really focused a lot less
(16:25):
on biology. He for example, tried to improve the construction
and illumination of lighthouses. He also explored the use of
asbestos fibers to improve firefighting. He developed new hydraulic lever systems,
and he invented new ways to light streets and buildings,
including lascalam Malan's opera house. And I have to wonder
if any inspiration from that came from his own experience,
(16:47):
essentially as a theatrical performer in the science realm. I
didn't think that that's a good point. So Aldini was
made a Night of the Napoleonic Order of the Iron
Crown for his scientific contributions, and in eighteen o seven
he became a counselor of the State of Milan. And
he died January eighteen thirty four, the age of seventy two,
(17:09):
and left behind money to found a school of physics
in chemistry for the artisans of Bologna. I think that's interesting.
It is physics and chemistry, biology not so much. Well,
physics was his major, I guess when he studied, so
maybe makes sense along those lines. But besides leading to
a couple of medical innovations, Aldini's experiments with Galvinism had
(17:31):
another effect. They started a kind of electro quackery. At
the time. Suddenly everybody wanted to reanimate the dead. And
that's probably why when you talk about inspirations for Frankenstein
a lot of names get thrown around. One, for example,
is Carl August Weinhold, and what he's known for is
these horrifying experiments in which he scooped out a cat's
(17:52):
brains and spinal cord and filled the cavities with silver
and zinc. He said that the cats would regain a
pulse become animated again for a short time. I think
his words were something like they bounded around for several
minutes or something like that. Another person who's often associated
with the Frankenstein myth is Andrew Ura, who was another
scientist who did experiments with the corpse of a hanged criminal.
(18:15):
But these occurred closer to the time that Shelley actually
published her novel, and a link between Shelley's husband, Percy
Bist Shelley, and Aldini's famous uncle suggests she may have
actually known of Aldini's experiments. Apparently, Percy Bis Shelley, when
he was a schoolboy, had been mentored by a retired
Scottish scientist named John Lynde. Lynde had a passionate interest
(18:35):
in Galvani's work, and in the seventeen nineties or so,
became the first British scientists to repeat the frog experiments,
So that's one link. Also, according to an article by
Charles J. Thompson in the Journal of Chemical Education, Scientists
or Humphrey Davy is the one who invited Aldini to
do his famous eighteen o three presentation. So Percy would
(18:56):
have only been eleven at that time and Mary Walstoncraft
would have only been six. But years later Davy did
become part of their literary and social circle, so they
may have heard of Aldini's experiments that way. It's not
definitive proof, of course, but it's something to ponder anyway. Well,
and I have to imagine that after a spectacle like
you would see at one of Aldini's shows, people would
(19:18):
talk about that for a long time. It wouldn't just
be news that was in and out of the headlines.
It seems like something that would come up, maybe not
around the dinner table, but just when you're having a chat,
especially with with somebody who would have known Albini. Well,
it was something that Percy Shelley was really interested in
throughout his lifetime too. I guess that Lynt had had
a pretty big influence on him. And I've even read
(19:40):
stories that say that when their family cat died, he
tried to reanimate it with electric jewelts. He wasn't successful,
of course, but there you have it. On the surface.
I have to say, this story is really endowing something
with life. Really seems like it should be a positive thing,
but it's so cre be, it's so scary. I wonder too,
(20:03):
I mean this, the details are horrifying on their own,
but I wonder how much of our repulsion from that
does come from Frankenstein. You know, we do know the
terrible things that can happen, and we have Mary Shelley's
depiction of reanimating life, which is terrible, you know, getting
old parts from dead people and stitching them together. Nothing
(20:24):
is appealing about it, and it's not at all like
like what you say. It does seem like reanimating life
should be something positive. Instead it's it's repulsive. Yeah, well,
I think even more than just the practice of doing it,
it's like that moral question out there of should we
be doing this that makes it really sinister. So so, yeah,
make yourself a cup of tea and break out Mary
(20:47):
Shelley's Frankenstein and maybe think these things over, especially if
it's a dark and stormy night. And if you finish
that great read and you have some more ideas for
spooky or scientific or both podcasts for us, please write us.
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dot Com home page
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to bling a truck reboarding and I'm fair Dowdy
and we've covered a lot of spooky ground so far
this October, from serial killers to sorcerers, to spiritual mediums
(00:23):
and the ghosts they talked to, and so now it's
time for us to enter the world of the spooky
science Lab. You probably have some experience with this if
you've ever been to a haunted house and you've gone
into that section where they have like the bowls full
of grapes that are like well, yeah, they're like eyeballs
or something and you stick your hand in them, or
(00:44):
a mad scientists pulling out the sausage links out of
the You've never seen that. No, I've actually done haunted
hof kind of like that myself. We did that like
you created it. Yeah, in my friends basement we had
the great eyeballs and the sketty and everything impressive, the
best with the skeleton in the thump pump. So in
(01:04):
the spooky science Lab, that's where these so called mad
scientists types explore and push the very limits of what
it means to be human and sometimes end up playing
god in the process, so a little bit more serious
than your average haunted house scenario, of course. One of
the most famous stories that exemplifies this is Frankenstein, a
novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published in eighteen eighteen and
(01:28):
generally just basics here. It's about a scientist named Victor
Frankenstein who attempts to create artificial life by piecing together
dead body parts and administering some sort of life spark.
He ends up, though, creating a monster, and the story
has been adapted several times for film, stage, and TV productions.
(01:49):
I'm sure everyone's probably seen some sort of rendition of it. Well.
In just a couple of years ago, Katie and I
talked about Mary Shelley's experience and coming up with the story.
It involved a stay at Lord Byron's pill Law and Switzerland,
during which bad weather kept the small group of friends
and writers homebound, and Byron ended up issuing a ghost
(02:09):
story writing contest challenge, and the author, Mary Wilson Croft Shelley,
later said that the idea of for Frankenstein came to
her in a dream. Here specifically, what she said I
saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and
then on the working of some powerful engine, shows signs
of life and stir with an easy, half vital motion.
(02:33):
Frightful it must be, for supremely frightful would be the
effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism
of the creator of the world. Yeah, so, as you
guys pointed out, it's quite likely that the idea was
influenced not just by a dream but by actual talk
of scientific experiments that were going on in the early
(02:54):
late night talks. But whose experiments were they talking about. Well,
it turns out that there were many scientists during this
period whose work involved reanimating dead animals and even humans.
More than one of them has gotten credit for being
the inspiration for Shelley's Dr Frankenstein over the years. So
we're going to take a look at a couple, but
particularly Giovanni Aldini. Aldini started experimenting with human corpses in
(03:19):
the early eighteen hundreds, and his most famous experiment had
many people thinking, well, maybe you can actually bring someone
back to life. And his experiments became widely known and
they were almost like performances, really scary disturbing performance gory performances,
and he ultimately, however, made some concrete contributions to medical
(03:40):
science through these But before we get into all that,
we should talk about Aldini's inspiration his uncle Luigi Galvanni,
whose discovery kind of kicked off this whole Frankenstein era exactly. So.
Luigi Galvani was born in Bologna, Italy, in seventeen thirty
seven and studied medicine in the seventeen fifties according to
of his father's wishes, so he ended up becoming a
(04:02):
lecturer in anatomy at the University of Bologna and a
professor of obstetrics at the separate Institute of Arts and
Sciences by the early seventeen sixties, so a pretty good
solid career, and according to Encyclopedia Britannica, his early research
was in the area of comparative anatomy, so the structure
of the renal tubules, nasal mucosa in the middle ear,
(04:26):
stuff like that. Throughout the seventeen seventies, though, he started
to get more and more interested in physiology, specifically electro physiology,
or the study of the electrical aspects of physiological phenomena. Yes,
So he got an electrostatic machine and a Lindon jar,
which was a device used to storm static electricity, and
(04:48):
he started to dabble in muscular stimulation using electricity. In
seventeen eighty six, Galvani found that touching a frog's nerves
with a metal instrument during a thunderstore made the frog's
muscles contract, so it twitched. So he concluded that electricity
was the cause of the twitching, and he hypothesized, now
we know incorrectly, that it came from the frog's muscles
(05:10):
and nerve tissue. He did more experiments of this kind,
for example using an a scalpel touched to a nerve
while the electrostatic machine was activated, and he also got
the same result without the use of the machine. So
he hung a copper hook from an iron railing and
pressed the hook to the frog's spinal cord, and it
also moved because of that contact. So he published a
(05:31):
paper in sev called Commentary of the Effect of Electricity
on Muscular Motion, in which he concluded that animal tissue
contained this innate force called animal electricity, and in this
theory of his he thought that the brain secreted this
electric fluid which the nerves carried to the muscles, and
then that fluid acted as a stimulus for the muscles.
(05:52):
And Galvani's views were pretty accepted, generally accepted at least
by a lot of scientists, but physicist Alesandro vole To
did not accept these ideas. He rejected the idea of
animal electricity and said that the source of electricity or
stimulus in Galvani's experiments had been the use of two
(06:12):
dissimilar medals, and this caused a bit of controversy. But
Galvani didn't have much time to debate with Volta because
in the seventeen nineties Galvani refused to swear allegiance to
Napoleon's new Republic, so he lost his faculty position and
his salary, and he ended up moving into the old
Galvani home with his brother, and he died there at
(06:33):
the age of sixty one in sevent The debate was
not over, however, no Galvani's work and this idea of
animal electricity or Galvinism didn't just fade away. Volta used
concepts from Galvani's experiments, specifically the electricity created by two
dissimilar metals thing to create his electric pile or voltake pile,
(06:57):
basically a battery of sort of prim the battery that
could provide a source of constant current electricity. Volta however,
still fundamentally disagreed with the idea of animal electricity, and
as we mentioned, this kicked off a huge debate among
intellectuals at the time. Even in life. Galvani himself, though,
was too reserved to really get involved in all of
(07:18):
that exactly. He was a little more soft spoken than that,
but his somewhat spunk, your nephew, Giovanni Aldini stepped in
and kind of took up the torch for defending Galvinism. Now,
Aldini was born in Bologna on April sixteenth, seventeen sixty two,
and he had also chosen a scientific career path. He
studied physics at the University of Bologna, and after graduating
(07:40):
in seventeen eighty two, he became a research assistant for
his uncle and joined in on those frog experiments. When
what became known as the Galvani Volta controversy kicked off,
Aldini became really active in defense of his uncle's ideas.
So here's just a few examples of some of the
things that he did. He published responses to Volta's critics
sy isms, sometimes in the form of supplements to his
(08:02):
uncle's original commentary. He did experiments to demonstrate that some
muscular contraction and frogs can be obtained with one metal
only Volta just as an aside, he argued here that
the metal used, which was mercury, was probably contaminated and
actually did contain traces of another metal, and that's why
Aldni's experiment work. But the other thing that Aldini did
(08:23):
is that he worked with Galvani in a series of
experiments in which no metal was used at all, so
they just used nerves touched to muscle and achieved muscle
contraction that way. After Galvani died in sevente Aldini accepted
the Bologna University Chair in physics, which came complete with
a pretty hefty teaching load, but that didn't stop him
(08:43):
from pursuing his work in Galvinism, not at all. He
founded the first Galvanic society in Bologna, and then he
started experimenting on warm blooded animals, so really taken it
up a notch from frogs, worked on birds and calves
and oxen and according to a two thousand four article
goal by Andre Parlon in the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences.
(09:04):
In one notable experiment involving an ox, Aldini applied direct
electrical current to different parts of an ox brain to
determine different brain regions sensitivity to galvinism. And this really
sparked an interest in using galvinism as a therapeutic tool,
you know, something more than just a neat experiment with
(09:26):
twitching frog legs. However, to test this out, Aldini needed
to experiment with using electricity on human cadavers. But at
the time it was illegal to exhume bodies from graves,
so when he conducted these experiments in January February of
eighteen o two, he used the bodies of three criminals
who had been killed by decapitation. Ironically, he ended up
(09:48):
using a voltaic pile to create the electric current. Quirk
of history. Yeah. He did the experiment in a large
public area located near Bologna's Palace of Justice. This is
where the executions had taken place, and he applied the
electricity to different parts of the heads and the bodies
and was able to produce muscular contractions confirming the frog experiments.
(10:10):
After this, Aldini went on kind of a world tour
throughout Europe doing these sorts of experiments as demonstrations. They
were almost like shows, I mean, theatrical spectacles of a sort,
and Aldini became a really skilled performer in these. In
one before the Royal College of Surgeons in London, for example,
he cut the head off a dog and made the
current from a strong battery go through it. According to
(10:33):
an eyewitness account in the June July issue of History magazine,
this caused quote the dog's jaws to open, the teeth
to chatter, the eyes to roll in their sockets. One
would almost believe the dog's head was alive again. And
like he said, he really did go on a tour
of Europe. He went to several European universities. While in
Paris he also worked a little more on his electro
(10:54):
convulsive therapies. But in early eighteen o three Aldini returned
to London, where his ex perments were very well attended,
and not just by scientists and surgeons and curious people,
but by gentlemen. Dukes and even the Prince of Wales
came out to see one of these shows. That's interesting.
It almost became sort of a way to make this idea,
(11:16):
these scientific ideas more palatable to the general public, which
is kind of They sound so the opposite of palatable
to us now. But it is interesting to think of
the highest classes coming out to see a dog decapitated
and then these pretty horrific scientific experiments take place. But
Aldini's most famous demonstration took place on January eighteen oh
(11:40):
three at the Royal College of Surgeons and the subject
Aldini experimented on in this case was the twenty six
year old criminal George Foster, who had just been hanged
at Newgate Prison in London for murdering his wife and child.
And according to that History magazine articles Glenna just mentioned,
Aldini and his assistance actually handed out posters beforehand that
(12:03):
said he was going to attempt to quote reanimated corpse
in front of a live audience. If that didn't get
people in the door, I don't know what would. Before
starting the experiment, he asked for a physician to volunteer
to come up and confirm that the body was dead.
So it almost sounds it sounds very like a magic show,
like a magic show, very performance like, and to supply
(12:25):
the electric current. Aldini used what was essentially a very
large battery connected to conducting rods, and when the rods
were applied to Foster's mouth and ear, Aldini said that quote,
the job began to quiver. The adjoining muscles were horribly contorted,
and the left eye actually opened, So of course the
audience was pretty freaked out at this point. They gasped,
(12:48):
but they hadn't even reached the best part yet or
the worst, depending on your point of view. That came
when Aldini touched the rods to the criminals rectum, which
caused the whole body to fulse. The arms began to
punch the air as if in fury. The legs kicked,
and the back arch violently, almost as if it were
taking a deep breath. It's pretty creepy sounding, so Aldini said.
(13:15):
The movements were quote so much increased as almost to
give an appearance of reanimation, so almost like his promise
to reanimate a corpse was coming true. This was reported
in detail in The Times a few days later, and
it really made a big impression, as you can imagine,
on both scientists and regular people. According to parents article,
(13:36):
a lot of people really thought that electricity might be
that long sought vital force. Then maybe this guy had
finally figured it out. Aldini received the Royal Society's Copley Medal,
its highest honor, for his work. And just an interesting
side note here, apparently the London police had sort of
a plan in this for this event, they did plan
(13:57):
to re execute Foster if he was in fact back
to life, just in case, just in case he wasn't
going to get out of it. But Aldini said later
in a published account that his goal wasn't actually to
reanimate the corps. He was really trying to demonstrate how
galvanism might be useful in reviving drowning victims that suffered
from asphyxiation. He considered Foster, the hanged criminal, a classic
(14:18):
case of asphyxiation. So this makes me wonder a little
bit about that point before about Aldini and his assistance
handing out posters saying that they were going to attempt
to reanimate a corpse, because if that wasn't his intention,
then why would they hand him out. So maybe there's
some well, you have what you say before the show
and what you say after and after the show. Aldini
also as we alluded to before explored other medical applications
(14:40):
for galvinism, including treating mental disorders. One apparently successful test case,
according to that Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences article that
we mentioned, involved a twenty seven year old farmer named
Luigi Lonzarini who was suffering from melancholy madness, which was
basically major depression. So to treat him, Aldini delivered shocks
(15:01):
from a voltaic pile to Lazzarini's shaved head. He started
out with week a week voltaic pile and made it
increasingly stronger as the treatments progressed. And just as an aside,
he actually tried this out on himself first before we
tried it on his patient, so well, yeah. According to
Aldini's account of this experiment, Lazzarini's mood improved progressively until
(15:21):
he was supposedly cured after several weeks. Saldini's treatment of
Lazzarini inspired the electroc convulsive therapies that are still used today,
and now he's considered the father of electric shock therapy.
Although he was never able to restart a heart himself,
his work also seems to have had some kind of
(15:43):
direct inspiration for cardiac electrical stimulation. I mean, that was
sort of the first thing I thought of when I
was reading about these experiments with the dead criminals and
they're twitching and moving and um, the guy's back arching.
I mean, it seemed not too too far removed from
given a shock to a heart that's just stopped and
(16:04):
the person it's not completely out yet. Yeah, he was
never able to restart one, maybe because of the distance
or the amount of time that had lapsed between the
time that the criminal was executed in the time that
he was doing And if you're missing ahead, it's not
going to help ch That's very true, but it was
always a big disappointment of his During the latter part
of his career, though, Aldini really focused a lot less
(16:25):
on biology. He for example, tried to improve the construction
and illumination of lighthouses. He also explored the use of
asbestos fibers to improve firefighting. He developed new hydraulic lever systems,
and he invented new ways to light streets and buildings,
including lascalam Malan's opera house. And I have to wonder
if any inspiration from that came from his own experience,
(16:47):
essentially as a theatrical performer in the science realm. I
didn't think that that's a good point. So Aldini was
made a Night of the Napoleonic Order of the Iron
Crown for his scientific contributions, and in eighteen o seven
he became a counselor of the State of Milan. And
he died January eighteen thirty four, the age of seventy two,
(17:09):
and left behind money to found a school of physics
in chemistry for the artisans of Bologna. I think that's interesting.
It is physics and chemistry, biology not so much. Well,
physics was his major, I guess when he studied, so
maybe makes sense along those lines. But besides leading to
a couple of medical innovations, Aldini's experiments with Galvinism had
(17:31):
another effect. They started a kind of electro quackery. At
the time. Suddenly everybody wanted to reanimate the dead. And
that's probably why when you talk about inspirations for Frankenstein
a lot of names get thrown around. One, for example,
is Carl August Weinhold, and what he's known for is
these horrifying experiments in which he scooped out a cat's
(17:52):
brains and spinal cord and filled the cavities with silver
and zinc. He said that the cats would regain a
pulse become animated again for a short time. I think
his words were something like they bounded around for several
minutes or something like that. Another person who's often associated
with the Frankenstein myth is Andrew Ura, who was another
scientist who did experiments with the corpse of a hanged criminal.
(18:15):
But these occurred closer to the time that Shelley actually
published her novel, and a link between Shelley's husband, Percy
Bist Shelley, and Aldini's famous uncle suggests she may have
actually known of Aldini's experiments. Apparently, Percy Bis Shelley, when
he was a schoolboy, had been mentored by a retired
Scottish scientist named John Lynde. Lynde had a passionate interest
(18:35):
in Galvani's work, and in the seventeen nineties or so,
became the first British scientists to repeat the frog experiments,
So that's one link. Also, according to an article by
Charles J. Thompson in the Journal of Chemical Education, Scientists
or Humphrey Davy is the one who invited Aldini to
do his famous eighteen o three presentation. So Percy would
(18:56):
have only been eleven at that time and Mary Walstoncraft
would have only been six. But years later Davy did
become part of their literary and social circle, so they
may have heard of Aldini's experiments that way. It's not
definitive proof, of course, but it's something to ponder anyway. Well,
and I have to imagine that after a spectacle like
you would see at one of Aldini's shows, people would
(19:18):
talk about that for a long time. It wouldn't just
be news that was in and out of the headlines.
It seems like something that would come up, maybe not
around the dinner table, but just when you're having a chat,
especially with with somebody who would have known Albini. Well,
it was something that Percy Shelley was really interested in
throughout his lifetime too. I guess that Lynt had had
a pretty big influence on him. And I've even read
(19:40):
stories that say that when their family cat died, he
tried to reanimate it with electric jewelts. He wasn't successful,
of course, but there you have it. On the surface.
I have to say, this story is really endowing something
with life. Really seems like it should be a positive thing,
but it's so cre be, it's so scary. I wonder too,
(20:03):
I mean this, the details are horrifying on their own,
but I wonder how much of our repulsion from that
does come from Frankenstein. You know, we do know the
terrible things that can happen, and we have Mary Shelley's
depiction of reanimating life, which is terrible, you know, getting
old parts from dead people and stitching them together. Nothing
(20:24):
is appealing about it, and it's not at all like
like what you say. It does seem like reanimating life
should be something positive. Instead it's it's repulsive. Yeah, well,
I think even more than just the practice of doing it,
it's like that moral question out there of should we
be doing this that makes it really sinister. So so, yeah,
make yourself a cup of tea and break out Mary
(20:47):
Shelley's Frankenstein and maybe think these things over, especially if
it's a dark and stormy night. And if you finish
that great read and you have some more ideas for
spooky or scientific or both podcasts for us, please write us.
We're a history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We love to do them, and even though October is
almost over. We will always have a place in our
(21:09):
hearts for scary podcast podcast. We have one more announcement.
We have been nominated by you guys for a Podcast
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(21:29):
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And if you want to find out a little bit
more about the topics discussed on this podcast, we actually
(21:51):
have a great new article by Robert Lamb called How
Frankenstein's Monster Works, and Science editor Alison louder Milk told
me she described this article as a very cerebral so
go check it out by visiting our homepage at www
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(22:13):
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