Raising the Dead: the men who created Frankenstein
- added July 23, 2008
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In 1818, the year Mary Shelley's Victor Frankenstein was in the lab throwing switches and checking gauges amid the lightning flashes, similar actual experiments were underway in a Scottish university. Professor Andrew Ure connected a tube to a battery and shoved it up a corpse's nose. "The tongue moved out to his lips," it was reported. "His eyes opened widely. His head, arms and legs moved." Apparently the body stood up unaided, laborious breathing commenced, and the assembled students screamed out in horror, as well they might. Professor Ure had to stab the creature in the jugular vein to calm it down.
The idea behind Andy Dougan's pleasingly ghoulish Raising the Dead is that Mary Shelley's classic novel was barely fantastical. Eighteenth-century doctors and gentlemen-scholars really were setting corpses grinning, as they sought the origins of life and an understanding of disease.
Luigi Galvani was a physiologist from Bologna who noticed the muscular contractions in the legs of frogs when they were in contact with different metals. Franz Anton Mesmer also examined the nervous systems of dissected frogs - and by placing brass hooks in their spinal columns and leaving them outside in a storm, studied what he termed animal magnetism. From Galvani's thesis of 1791, entitled De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari Commentarius ("A Commentary on the Effects of Electricity on Muscular Motion"), it was a short step to experiment on human cadavers, to try to "reanimate vital forces". It was a grisly spectacle of spasms and convulsions. Metal rods were inserted into the bodies, electricity created by a friction machine passed through, and the hands of the dead would be raised and legs clenched.
Karl August Weinhold stuck with kittens. He'd decapitate a healthy kitten and, using electrical wires, get the body to twitch and hop.
Read more...
The idea behind Andy Dougan's pleasingly ghoulish Raising the Dead is that Mary Shelley's classic novel was barely fantastical. Eighteenth-century doctors and gentlemen-scholars really were setting corpses grinning, as they sought the origins of life and an understanding of disease.
Luigi Galvani was a physiologist from Bologna who noticed the muscular contractions in the legs of frogs when they were in contact with different metals. Franz Anton Mesmer also examined the nervous systems of dissected frogs - and by placing brass hooks in their spinal columns and leaving them outside in a storm, studied what he termed animal magnetism. From Galvani's thesis of 1791, entitled De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari Commentarius ("A Commentary on the Effects of Electricity on Muscular Motion"), it was a short step to experiment on human cadavers, to try to "reanimate vital forces". It was a grisly spectacle of spasms and convulsions. Metal rods were inserted into the bodies, electricity created by a friction machine passed through, and the hands of the dead would be raised and legs clenched.
Karl August Weinhold stuck with kittens. He'd decapitate a healthy kitten and, using electrical wires, get the body to twitch and hop.
Read more...
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