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In 1816, ash clouds from Indonesia’s Mount Tambora caused the Year Without a Summer,
sending much of the northern hemisphere into a volcanic winter during normally pleasant
months.
Trapped inside and really, really bored, 18-year-old Mary Shelley accepted a challenge from Percy
Shelley and Lord Byron to write a ghost story. The tale that sprung to life from her hand
would become the first known work of science fiction.
Today we’re going to explore the monster mash that is Mary Shelley’s scientific influences,
the nuts and bolts of medicine during her time, and some shocking real-life experiments
that her story inspired. It’ll have you in stitches.
I'm sorry.
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There is a real Castle Frankenstein in Germany, and it was once inhabited by a doctor and
alchemist named Johann Dippel, who legend claims conducted experiments on immortality
using stolen cadavers. But although she later traveled in the region, there’s little evidence
that Mary Shelley used Doctor Johann as a model for Victor Frankenstein.
The most likely origin for Mary Shelley’s story is a prison in London
The science of medical dissection was still in its infancy during Mary’s day, mostly
due to a shortage of bodies. Pretty much the opposite of The Brain Scoop.
"I didn't think about that"
Many people viewed dissection as an immoral act, so much so in fact that the Murder Act
of 1752 added it to the punishment of convicted killers, because I guess being hung at the
gallows just wasn’t enough.
In 1803, the body of one George Foster was delivered intact to the Royal College of Surgeons
under control of an Italian physicist: Giovanni Aldini.
Aldini was the nephew of Luigi Galvani, one of the first scientists to study the phenomenon
then known as “animal electricity”. He noted that the legs of dead frogs would twitch
when they were shocked, and hypothesized that life itself was mediated by an electrical
fluid within our bodies.
Inspired by his uncle’s work, Aldini was a showman who frequently performed demonstrations
of animal electricity using dead creatures, but he wasn’t satisfied with cow heads and
little froggy legs. Little did George Foster know, he was the lucky guy chosen by Aldini
to demonstrate his ultimate theory: that given a large enough shock, an intact human corpse
could be brought back to life.
"It's alive, it's ALIVE, IT'S ALIVE!!"
Of course, when Aldini stood over the body and flipped the switch, Foster seized and
shook and convulsed as electricity coursed through his corpse … and he was still dead.
But according to legend, in the audience that day was a medic named Anthony Carlisle. Carlisle
frequently attended these smarty-pants cocktail parties at the home of one William Godwin…
who happened to be Mary Shelley’s father. We have no way of knowing this for sure, but
the story of George Foster, Aldini and galvinism may have been planted in the imagination of
an eavesdropping young girl in 1803.
In fact, the “Dr. Darwin” mentioned in the preface to Frankenstein is not Charles,
but his grandfather Erasmus, an English practitioner of galvanism. Mary’s husband Percy Shelley
had himself collected equipment for and experimented with animal electricity. Galvanism was the
vacuum-brewed coffee and Wes Anderson movies of its time. If you were cool, you were into
it.
Over the next 150 years, Frankenstein fascination grew, ultimately reimagined in legendary film
adaptations. Not that one. This one.
In the early 1900’s Soviet scientist Sergei Brukhonenko spent decades devising means to
keep dismembered body parts alive and revive the dead. I’m not going to show you any
more of that film, because it’s really gruesome stuff, but there’s a link down in the description
if you want to check out more.
But you’ve been warned.
In many ways, our obsession with Frankensteinian science continues today, from experiments
in cryopreservation, life extension, and even the successful creation of synthetic life.
But beyond just pointing to people and experiments that remind us of the book, we should ask
ask what Frankenstein really teaches us about life and science.
Frankenstein and the stories it has influenced are often used as warnings that when science
and technology reach beyond “what’s appropriate” it can only lead to Very Bad Things, like
man-eating blobs, killer tomatoes, or Jeff Goldblum turning into a fly.
"The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here, staggers me."
In his 1994 essay “The Monster’s Human Nature” Stephen Jay Gould argues that Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein, the book and not the movie adaptations, is not a cautionary tale
about offenses against a divine or natural order, or going beyond “what nature intended”
… because nature doesn’t intend to do anything.
Mary Shelley’s monster is not the caveman of the movies, he is well read, intelligent,
curious, but also like 8 feet tall and really really ugly. The creature is “born” innocent,
but with the potential to do monstrous things. That means he is, kind of like all of us…
an amalgamation of nature and nurture,
"From what was once an inarticulate mass of lifeless tissues, may I now present a cultured,
sophisticated, man about town."
Dr. Frankenstein’s moral failing is not against nature itself, it is in failing to
nurture a feeling being, and thereby exposing the darkest parts of its potential.
The monster becomes a monster because people sometimes act monstrously. That doesn’t
mean science is good, or bad, because science isn’t either of those things. We are.
I want to know what you think. What warnings or cautionary tales do you see in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein? Do any of the film or other adaptations get it right?
Let me know down in the comments, and while you're at it you should head over to PBS Digital
Studios' YouTube channel and check out the amazing "Frankenstein MD" a modern retelling
of the modern Prometheus from the folks who brought you the Lizzie Bennett Diaries. It
is awwwwwwesome.
Stay curious.
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