Mary Shelley’s fictional doctor who screamed “It’s alive, it’s alive!” wasn’t purely an imaginary figure. Lots of scientists over the years have attempted to bring the dead back to life.
JOHANN DIPPEL (1673–1734)
This theologian, alchemist, and natural-born troublemaker was born in the real Castle Frankenstein in Germany, and may have served as the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein. He dabbled in many disciplines—and his religious views got him imprisoned for heresy. Why was he so controversial? Working in his lab, Dippel whipped up a concoction of human bones, blood, and bodily fluids that he called the “Elixir of Life”—the drinker, he claimed, would live forever. (He also discovered that his elixir, when combined with potassium carbonate, made a useful dye known today as Prussian blue.) There’s no evidence that Dippel tried to stitch body parts together, but he was fond of putting legs, arms, heads, and torsos—both animal and human—into huge vats and boiling them down in the hope of, as he called it, “engendering life in the dead.” According to some accounts, the resulting stench caused the townspeople to demand that he end the grotesque experiments or risk being expelled from the country. Dippel wouldn’t give in, so he was exiled. He was rumored to have been later poisoned in Sweden.
Another possible inspiration for Shelley’s mad doctor was this well-respected 18th-century Italian scientist, who decapitated snails to see if their heads would grow back and blinded bats to prove that they navigated by echolocation. While a professor at Pavia University, Spallanzani reported to the Royal Society in London that he had attained “resurrection after death” by sprinkling water on seemingly dead microbes. One of his contemporaries, the writer Voltaire, wrote, “When a man like him announces that he has brought the dead back to life, we have to believe him.” But Voltaire was wrong—Spallanzani later realized the organisms were merely dehydrated, which led him to conduct further experiments proving that microbes could be killed by boiling (information that Louis Pasteur later put to great use). Italian researcher Paolo Mazzarello claims that Spallanzani was the inspiration for “Der Sandmann,” a short story written in 1815 by E.T.A. Hoffman about a scientist who builds an artificial human. Written a year before Mary Shelley started Frankenstein, the story was a huge success in Europe and could well have planted the seed for Shelley’s book.
Highest rate of homosexuality of any mammal: male bats.
At the turn of the 19th century, scientists first experimented with galvanism—using electrical currents to stimulate nerves and muscles. The pioneer was Luigi Galvani, who discovered that a dead frog’s legs would kick when zapped with electricity. His nephew, Giovanni Aldini, took that work to a new level by galvanizing larger creatures. Huge crowds turned out to see the mad puppeteer manipulate the dead. According to a witness account:
Aldini, after having cut off the head of a dog, makes the current of a strong battery go through it: the mere contact triggers terrible convulsions. The jaws open, the teeth chatter, the eyes roll in their sockets; and if reason did not stop the fired imagination, one would almost believe that the animal is suffering and alive again!
In 1803 Aldini released the book An Account of the Late Improvements in Galvanism, full of illustrations showing the results of his experiments in graphic detail. He was also the first person to apply the use of electrical impulses to treat the mentally ill—a procedure later known as electroshock therapy.
This Scottish scientist was convinced that electrical stimulation of the phrenic nerve, a nerve that runs between the neck and the abdomen, could restore the dead to life. In 1818 he caused a sensation in Glasgow when he attempted to prove his theory by zapping the body of murderer John Clydesdale shortly after he was hanged. Although Ure was able to make the dead man appear to breathe and kick his legs, as well as open his eyes and make horrific faces, he was unable to resuscitate the corpse. However, the event is notable for what Ure suggested afterward: Successful resuscitation might have been achieved, he said, if the body had been shocked by two “moistened brass knobs” placed over the phrenic nerve and diaphragm—an early description of what we now know as a defibrillator.
In 2003 a British fan who claimed Paul McCartney gave him the flu tried to sell his germs on eBay.
In 1932 this scientific wunderkind (he graduated from the University of California at age 18 and earned his Ph.D. by 22) became obsessed with the idea that he could bring the dead back to life, not be electricity but through the use of a teeter-totter, or seesaw. Inspired by the work of George Washington Crile on blood transfusion, Cornish believed that placing a recently deceased patient on a seesaw and moving him or her up and down rapidly, combined with an injection of epinephrine and oxygen, would get the blood circulating again. For over a year, he tried to revive victims of heart attack, drowning, and other sudden deaths with his seesaw therapy but had no success. Then, in 1934, Cornish was able to resurrect two dogs, Lazarus IV and V, for a short time (no word on the fates of Lazauruses I through III). He later played himself in the 1935 movie Life Returns, about a doctor who attempts to revive the dead.
Russian physician Demikhov is credited with groundbreaking work in organ transplant surgery. However, his notoriety stems from some grotesque experiments with dogs. A surgeon in the Red Army in World War II, Demikhov honed his surgical technique while amputating the shattered limbs of wounded soldiers, skills he put to use later when he grafted the head of one dog onto the body of another. Demikhov made 20 of these two-headed creatures, none of which survived more than a month after surgery. His work was reported by National Geographic and Time magazine in the 1950s as part of a bizarre Cold War race between the United States and the U.S.S.R. to be the first to successfully transplant a human brain. So far, no one has been able to accomplish that feat.
But all of these men were nothing more than mad scientists from a bygone area. Right? Surely modern scientists don’t try the same kinds of experiments…like creating part-human, part-animal creatures. Actually, they do. Turn to page 376 for “Manimals.”
On a roll: Americans use five times more paper for wiping body parts than for writing.