“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!
It's alive!
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.
