BAD MEDICINE
An Electrifying Experience
One day in the late 1700s, an Italian physician, physicist, biologist, and philosopher named Luigi Galvani was in one of those weird moods where you’re just determined to do some sort of science. Anything will do when you’re in a mood like that. Galvani had been stroking a piece of frog skin to generate static electricity, as ya do. When he picked up a scalpel to keep dissecting that frog, it delivered a shock to the dead frog’s leg. The leg kicked, and Galvani realized at once that he had unlocked the secret to reanimating the dead.
The Innovator
Well, okay, Galvani didn’t think that exactly. In fact, the reportedly very modest and pious Galvani had his head screwed on pretty straight for a late 1700s scientist. An anatomy teacher and researcher with degrees in medicine and philosophy, Galvani was fascinated by the recently-discovered connection between life and electricity. Hence the frog experiments, which led to his discovery that muscles contract when stimulated by electricity, which we now call galvanism. Galvani thought this was caused by what he called “animal electricity.” Before Galvani, scientists had believed that muscles operated via movements of fluid and air.
The Treatment
A couple of decades later, Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini decided to take up the family business with a cool new spin—reanimating human corpses. He gave a number of public demonstrations on heads and corpses, most notably in 1803 on the corpse of murderer George Forster, which Aldini purchased shortly Forster’s hanging. Through the careful application of electricity, Aldini was able to make the body contort its facial muscles, and even raise a hand eight inches off the table. According to one account, the display was so ghoulish that a surgeon named Mr. Pass who witnessed it died of fright shortly after returning home.
How’d That Work Out?
Perhaps the best way of answering that is to reveal that this entire section has been written by me, George Forster. I’m 240 years old now and—no, no, it’s still Justin and Sydnee. George Forster and every other corpse subjected to galvanic reanimation is still deader than disco. By the 1940s, we’d learned we could fix an irregular heart rhythm using the electrical charge from defibrillator paddles—but contrary to popular belief, they can’t restart a totally stopped heart.
FUN FACT: Some thirteen years after Aldini’s exhibitions, a writer named Mary Shelley and her friends, the poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, spent an evening discussing the possibility that galvanism could be the key to reanimating the dead, and what the moral implications would be. As you might have guessed, this inspired her to write her classic novel, Frankenstein. That said, Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein doesn’t actually use electricity that much in the book. The unforgettable image of shooting sparks reanimating Boris Karloff in the 1931 film was the brainchild of set designer Kenneth Strickfaden, who got his start as a carnival electrician.