[MUSIC]
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.
[MUSIC]
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.
[TALKING]
