- Was there a real life Dr. Frankenstein?
Yes, there was, and his name was Giovanni Aldini.
And he actually made corpses move with electricity.
However, the gruesome nature of his experiments
obscured the fact that he was an excellent scientist
who actually revolutionized the studies of biology
and medicine, all in the name of familial love.
Ready for both a ghoulish and an inspirational story?
Let's go
♪ Electricity, electricity ♪
On January 18th, 1803, a man named George Forster
was put to death for drowning his estranged wife
and one of their children.
At the time, dissection and other manipulations of a corpse
was considered sacrilege.
So as further punishment, after Forster had been hung
for his crimes, his lifeless body was taken
to a public operating theater
where an Italian physicist named Giovanni Aldini
experimented with it.
Aldini was a galvanist, or person who believed
that animal electricity is what makes animals alive.
And that certain procedures could release this electricity
even when the animal or the person was dead.
Aldini proceeded to use a battery
to get the dead man's jaw to shake
and even opened his left eye.
The highlight, so to speak,
was when Aldini struck one electrified probe
in the corpses ear and another one in his rectum,
which made Forster's leg kick
and his right hand to clench and pump in the air.
The warden of Newgate prison said it looked like Forster
was about to come back to life.
He said the demonstrations were so disturbing and upsetting
that they caused the church usher to die of fright.
You can take that with a grain of salt.
Now, why was Aldini electrifying corpses
in the first place?
It had to do with his family.
See Aldini's uncle was a doctor and anatomy professor
named Luigi Galvani
who was assisted in his work by his wife, Lucia.
When Aldini was in college
his aunt and uncle accidentally discovered
that if a decapitated skin frog was touched
with an electrified probe, it would jump like it was alive.
Aldini was fascinated.
And as soon as he graduated from college he joined them
and electrocuted every animal in sight.
They discovered that all animals would respond physically
to electricity, or the frog leg seemed
to have the most dramatic effect.
They weren't the first to notice
that electricity makes animals jump,
but they were the first to theorize
that electricity is how muscles
and nerves normally function.
While playing with dead frogs,
they also found that putting both copper and iron
into a frog's body produces electricity
with no static electricity machines
or thunderstorms in sight.
Crazy, huh?
In the middle of all this exciting research,
Lucia Galvani fell very ill.
And despite Luigi's devoted care,
she died from complications from her asthma in 1788.
As a result,
Luigi Galvani did not publish his work until 1791.
In this paper, Galvani postulated that all animals had
what he called animal electricity inside them,
which is what makes them and us alive.
Galvani had made the spark of life literal.
Imagine their dismay when the very next year
Alessandro Volta, Europe's premier electrical science,
published a paper that claimed
that animal electricity was bunk.
See, Volta had found the two different metals
were worked to electrify alive frog.
And he decided that the electricity came
from the dissimilar metals, not the frog itself.
Galvani didn't want to respond.
He was quiet.
Soft-spoken religious man who did not like conflict.
And he was also still mourning his wife's passing.
Aldini, however, was raring for a fight,
especially after Galvani had just nursed him
through an illness.
This is how Aldini described it in 1794,
"my Uncle Galvani was treating me for a deadly fever.
After having escaped, thank to his generous care.
and efforts, a nearly unavoidable death,
I started to work zealously to bring support
to a doctrine that I trusted
despite the attacks under which it came.
I felt at ease to be able to pay a tribute to the truth.
And at the same time to provide Galvani
with a public account of my gratitude".
From this time on Aldini was the face of galvanism.
It became a big debate between the Voltist led by Volta,
and the Galvanist led by Aldini.
That was the frog jumping
because it possessed an electrical life force,
or was the frog jumping
because two different metals created electricity.
By the way, both sides ideas were partially correct,
and partially incorrect.
The Galvanist were correct that all living things use
and produce electricity to make their muscles move
and their nerves transmit signals.
So if you artificially at electricity
even a dead animal will react.
However they were wrong in thinking
that the dead animal will produce its own electricity.
Volta was correct that the two different metals
were creating electricity in this experiment.
However, Volta missed
that he was actually studying a chemical reaction.
It needed a chemical, an acid, or a base
with the two metals to create the electricity.
In 1800, Volta struck a blow against Galvanism.
He created advice out of metals that would produce a shock
without the different metals touching anything alive
or formerly alive.
Volta had taken discs of silver and zink
and piled them up with cardboard,
soaked in saltwater between them.
If you touch both ends with your wet hands,
you could get a shock out of this pile
in a continuous current.
In fact, Volta had invented the battery.
Volta wrote that his research was motivated
because he quote, "found myself obliged
to combat the pretended animal electricity of Galvani".
Although Volta's battery seemed
to invalidate the Galvanist theory,
an ironic twist,
the battery ended up being invaluable
for studying electricity in organic systems.
Aldini began to use Volta's battery
with astonishing results.
He electrocuted the brain of a decapitated ox
and made the ox's facial muscles move.
In 1802, Aldini turned to the decapitated heads
of criminals.
And just like the ox managed
to manipulate their facial expressions
by electrifying parts of their brains.
This was the first real glimpse
of how the brain works.
In this way, Aldini was the first to realized
that one hemisphere of the brain
controls the opposite side of the body.
Aldini also created electric shock therapy for depression.
First, he conducted a quote
"long series of painful disagreeable experiments"
on his own head with a voltaic battery
to try to get a gauge of how powerful
and useful electric shocks could be.
He then gave shocks
to a 27 year old farmer named Luigi Lanzarini,
who was suffering from debilitating depression
and was being housed in an insane asylum.
According to Aldini, Lanzarini
immediately began feeling better and started smiling.
And after several days of shocks, Lanzarini
was considered cured and was released from the asylum.
Although electric shock therapy was abused and misused,
especially in the 1950s and 60s
it is still considered one of the most effective treatments
for severe depression today.
Sometimes doctors even electrically stimulate
the brain directly.
In something called deep brain stimulation.
In a manner that Aldine would have found fascinating.
In addition, Aldini correctly predicted
that electricity could force a damaged heart to beat
although he was never successful
with his primitive batteries.
In this way, Aldini is the father of the defibrillator
and the pacemaker.
Finally, Aldini's gruesome experiments
grabbed the public's attention.
So much so that Galvanism became synonymous
with using electricity to reanimate a corpse.
This is why 13 years
after Aldini electrified Forster's dead corpse,
an 18 year old woman named Mary had heard of Galvanism.
Then when Mary and her friends were trying
to entertain each other,
by writing scary stories during a cold vacation,
they had a discussion about galvanism
and reanimating corpses.
Mary Shelley said that it was this discussion
that inspired her
to write a horror story called "Frankenstein".
However, unlike the Dr. Frankenstein
in Mary Shelley's famous book,
Dr. Aldini was never trying to reanimate anyone.
He merely wanted to quote, "obtain a practical knowledge
of how far galvanism might be employed to revive a person".
If you think of the pacemaker and the defibrillator
it turned out Aldini's ghoulish demonstrations
did save many people's lives.
As well as inspiring the first
and one of the best science fiction novels of all time.
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If you want to know more about Galvani,
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If you want to know more about Volta,
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(gentle music)