“This storm will be magnificent.”
“It may shock you.”
I guess we should tell everyone what we’re doing here again, right?
Yes, do you want to explain what the premise of this is?
Yeah, I’m Coleman Lowndes.
I’m Phil Edwards.
This is History Club, where either Phil tells me a story or I tell Phil a story.
So last time I told you this story, and now I have no idea what’s going on.
Right.
Okay, I want to start with a question.
Okay.
Calvinism?
Galvanism.
With a G.
No.
I haven’t heard of that.
You’ve definitely seen it.
Is this Frankenstein?
Mhm.
You know this isn’t real, right?
Well that’s what we’re going to talk about today, actually.
FRANKENSTEIN: It’s alive, it's moving.
It's alive!
It’s alive!
That is an iconic scene from Frankenstein, the 1931 movie.
Okay.
Basically the one that every screen adaptation afterward is based on.
Like you’ve seen that scene before, right?
Yeah!
Yeah.
Or you’re familiar with it.
Or I’ve seen the Young Frankenstein version of it.
Also.
Classic, yup.
YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN: It’s alive!
This scene is meant to recreate the moment that Victor Frankenstein’s creature comes
to life in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein.
But it’s not exactly right.
Because of like the Young Frankenstein stuff and scenes like this, we remember Frankenstein
as this a sort of unimaginable tale of science fiction.
But 1818 readers wouldn’t have seen it that way.
It was actually pretty reflective of contemporary medical experiments, and it’s going to take
us on a morbid journey through science!
Woah! Wow!
FRANKENSTEIN: It is one of the strangest tales ever told.
It deals with the two great mysteries of creation: life and death.
The 18th century in Europe, as you probably know, is known as the “Age of Enlightenment.”
Up until this point, scientific study wasn’t really thought of as a useful endeavor, and
it was sort of likened to amusing magic tricks.
But sort of all at once, there were these unimaginable breakthroughs in chemistry, and
physics, and philosophy.
People began to see the universe as an organized system rather than sort of this, like, mystery
guided by the Heavens.
And they wanted to understand more about how it all worked – and what humans could take
control of.
I’m sorry can you just remind me again, when was Frankenstein written?
It came out in 1818, just on the heels of the “long 18th century,” the long century
of progress.
Yeah, I mean, they’ve been swimming in this for 150 years, or something like that.
Yeah.
Around the same time, dissection and studying anatomy was huge, and the human body was starting
to be thought of as a sentient machine made up of complementary parts.
The heart, for example, was equated to a pump, because it circulated blood throughout the
body and maintained our innate lifeforce.
And that actually brings us to the subject of drowning.
Wait, to the topic of what?
Um, drowning.
Oh, the drowning!
Okay.
And diagnosing death, in general.
Because diagnosing death, even to this day, is pretty tricky.
And even like, diagnosing life, like there’s obviously a huge debate over when life begins.
But also when life ends.
This debate was really fired up in the late 18th century, because there were a bunch of
recorded instances of people who seemed to be dead suddenly waking up.
Sometimes after human intervention.
Are we going to get into bells on coffins?
We are!
I have a spot in here for this, yes.
Most of these “resurrections” were victims of drowning, and that motivated the founding
of England’s Royal Humane Society in 1774.
And I’m going to send you a picture of that.
The Royal Humane Society was originally called, a very catchy name, “The Society for the
Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned.”
And they offered lessons in, and rewards for, reviving people who seemed to have died from
drowning.
Woah, really?
They didn’t have the benefit of the tools that we have now to detect faint vital signs,
so the society was basically saying that it’s hard to know for sure if someone is truly
dead.
And their motto, to this day actually, is, and I’m going to butcher this, lateat scintillula
forsan, which means “a small spark may perhaps be hid.”
Oh, wow.
In turn, the idea that you could be misdiagnosed as dead contributed to a growing fear of mistakenly
being buried alive, which you’ve written about.
Yeah, I did a whole slideshow of different coffins that have bells attached at the top.
So the idea there was that if you were stuck inside this coffin, you could pull on the
bell, it would ring above ground, and then people would know that you weren’t actually
dead.
It’s persuasive, I mean I would take a beeper in there with me.
There were people too who were so afraid of being misdiagnosed as dead that they said
like “when I die, cut my heart out.”
Just to be sure.
And actually I want to show you this pamphlet, “The Danger of Premature Interment.”
Wow.
Oh, in 1816, so that’s…
Right around the corner.
Yeah.
So previously-held notions of death at this time were becoming a bit more fluid.
And with the whirlwind of scientific progress, people began to reevaluate how firm that border
between life and death really was.
And if drowning victims can come back, why not that next step?
One of the most talked about and promising scientific phenomena of the Enlightenment
was electricity.
And this is where the work that would later influence Mary Shelley really starts coming
into play.
Galvanism.
There we go, yeah.
So, in the 1780s, this Italian physicist, Luigi Galvani, experimented with applying
electric shocks to the legs of dead frogs, and found that he could get their muscles
to contract for a limited time after the frog had died.
And I’m going to send you something else.
In 1791 he published “The motion of electricity in muscular strength,” where he proposed
his idea of “animal electricity,” which is the innate life force that animates living
things.
So he thought that we all basically – like if you chopped off my fingers there’d be
like cool electric beams radiating out?
Like SHHHHH you know, like that kind of thing?
Not quite like a Robo Cop-type situation.
It was more of like a very subtle amount of electric fluid that is the spark of life.
Like, is the innate lifeforce.
Okay.
Later, Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, brought the experiments to a whole new level.
He named the practice “galvanism” after his late uncle, and began experimenting with
severed cow and sheep’s heads.
He could get these heads to open their eyes and move their mouths as if they were alive.
Which begged the question: could the recently dead be revived using electricity?
The logic was: if the body is a machine, and its innate animating energy is electric in
nature, then it wasn’t really out of the realm of possibility that a fully-assembled
corpse could be revived.
You know as long as all the pieces are correctly assembled.
And that’s exactly what Aldini set out to do in his most high profile experiment.
So this is a really gruesome picture you got coming your way.
Woah.
An additional punishment for murderers, after being hanged, was that their bodies were immediately
dissected for science.
And in 1803, George Foster, a man convicted of murdering his wife and child, was hanged
in London.
His body was brought straight to Aldini, who, before an audience, attempted to revive his
corpse.
Wow.
Yeah.
Foster’s face muscles twisted into a grimace and his eyes actually opened.
But Aldini couldn’t restart the heart, which was attached to a battery, and the experiment
ultimately failed.
But it was pretty sensational.
And Mary Shelley would have heard about this.
It was just a jolt of power, it wasn’t any actual biological process going on, right?
No, nothing biological.
Some people were kind of convinced, but most of the people there were like, “the heart
didn’t start and no blood was circulating.”
So, he failed.
Let’s bring this back to Frankenstein.
Okay.
FRANKENSTEIN: You’re crazy!
FRANKENSTEIN: Crazy am I?
We’ll see whether I’m crazy or not.
Shelley never characterized her protagonist as crazy, or even a scientist.
In fact, the word “scientist” hadn’t even been coined at the time her book was
published.
And the idea of this experiment being unthinkable is just an interpretation of the story borne
out of hindsight.
In the introduction to the 1831 edition of the book, Shelley made her real-life inspiration
crystal clear, writing, “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated: galvanism had given
token of such things.”
I think when this came out it was much more terrifying than we think of it today.
Because we think of it as a silly monster tale.
But this is just the next step in what was already happening in science.
It’s the near-future.
I had one other thing I wanted to do.
Yeah.
I was thinking it might be fun if the show had a catchphrase.
We can think of some catchphrases now, and for the next one that we can do, we can pick
a catchphrase from the comments.
So it would be “History Club,” and then we’ll say the catchphrase and credit whoever
did it.
I want to say I’m ripping this off from the podcast Comedy Bang Bang.
They do user-generated catchphrases every single episode.
I think it’s a good idea, I want to steal it.
So do you have any idea for a catchphrase?
How is it used?
How do we use it?
We just say it together at the end?
“Welcome to History Club –”
“History Club, not your grandmother’s history…
club.”
Oh I like that, that’s good.
It’s fun you know, like, “we’re hip.”
“History Club, where dusty books are sweeter than sugar.”
We’ll workshop it.
So give us a catchphrase in the comments for our next episode.
And thanks for watching this one.
Cool.
Yeah.
Should we… high five.
High five.