Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm to bling a truck reboarding and I'm fair Dowdy
Speaker 1: and we've covered a lot of spooky ground so far
Speaker 1: this October, from serial killers to sorcerers, to spiritual mediums
Speaker 1: and the ghosts they talked to, and so now it's
Speaker 1: time for us to enter the world of the spooky
Speaker 1: science Lab. You probably have some experience with this if
Speaker 1: you've ever been to a haunted house and you've gone
Speaker 1: into that section where they have like the bowls full
Speaker 1: of grapes that are like well, yeah, they're like eyeballs
Speaker 1: or something and you stick your hand in them, or
Speaker 1: a mad scientists pulling out the sausage links out of
Speaker 1: the You've never seen that. No, I've actually done haunted
Speaker 1: hof kind of like that myself. We did that like
Speaker 1: you created it. Yeah, in my friends basement we had
Speaker 1: the great eyeballs and the sketty and everything impressive, the
Speaker 1: best with the skeleton in the thump pump. So in
Speaker 1: the spooky science Lab, that's where these so called mad
Speaker 1: scientists types explore and push the very limits of what
Speaker 1: it means to be human and sometimes end up playing
Speaker 1: god in the process, so a little bit more serious
Speaker 1: than your average haunted house scenario, of course. One of
Speaker 1: the most famous stories that exemplifies this is Frankenstein, a
Speaker 1: novel by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published in eighteen eighteen and
Speaker 1: generally just basics here. It's about a scientist named Victor
Speaker 1: Frankenstein who attempts to create artificial life by piecing together
Speaker 1: dead body parts and administering some sort of life spark.
Speaker 1: He ends up, though, creating a monster, and the story
Speaker 1: has been adapted several times for film, stage, and TV productions.
Speaker 1: I'm sure everyone's probably seen some sort of rendition of it. Well.
Speaker 1: In just a couple of years ago, Katie and I
Speaker 1: talked about Mary Shelley's experience and coming up with the story.
Speaker 1: It involved a stay at Lord Byron's pill Law and Switzerland,
Speaker 1: during which bad weather kept the small group of friends
Speaker 1: and writers homebound, and Byron ended up issuing a ghost
Speaker 1: story writing contest challenge, and the author, Mary Wilson Croft Shelley,
Speaker 1: later said that the idea of for Frankenstein came to
Speaker 1: her in a dream. Here specifically, what she said I
Speaker 1: saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out and
Speaker 1: then on the working of some powerful engine, shows signs
Speaker 1: of life and stir with an easy, half vital motion.
Speaker 1: Frightful it must be, for supremely frightful would be the
Speaker 1: effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism
Speaker 1: of the creator of the world. Yeah, so, as you
Speaker 1: guys pointed out, it's quite likely that the idea was
Speaker 1: influenced not just by a dream but by actual talk
Speaker 1: of scientific experiments that were going on in the early
Speaker 1: late night talks. But whose experiments were they talking about. Well,
Speaker 1: it turns out that there were many scientists during this
Speaker 1: period whose work involved reanimating dead animals and even humans.
Speaker 1: More than one of them has gotten credit for being
Speaker 1: the inspiration for Shelley's Dr Frankenstein over the years. So
Speaker 1: we're going to take a look at a couple, but
Speaker 1: particularly Giovanni Aldini. Aldini started experimenting with human corpses in
Speaker 1: the early eighteen hundreds, and his most famous experiment had
Speaker 1: many people thinking, well, maybe you can actually bring someone
Speaker 1: back to life. And his experiments became widely known and
Speaker 1: they were almost like performances, really scary disturbing performance gory performances,
Speaker 1: and he ultimately, however, made some concrete contributions to medical
Speaker 1: science through these But before we get into all that,
Speaker 1: we should talk about Aldini's inspiration his uncle Luigi Galvanni,
Speaker 1: whose discovery kind of kicked off this whole Frankenstein era exactly. So.
Speaker 1: Luigi Galvani was born in Bologna, Italy, in seventeen thirty
Speaker 1: seven and studied medicine in the seventeen fifties according to
Speaker 1: of his father's wishes, so he ended up becoming a
Speaker 1: lecturer in anatomy at the University of Bologna and a
Speaker 1: professor of obstetrics at the separate Institute of Arts and
Speaker 1: Sciences by the early seventeen sixties, so a pretty good
Speaker 1: solid career, and according to Encyclopedia Britannica, his early research
Speaker 1: was in the area of comparative anatomy, so the structure
Speaker 1: of the renal tubules, nasal mucosa in the middle ear,
Speaker 1: stuff like that. Throughout the seventeen seventies, though, he started
Speaker 1: to get more and more interested in physiology, specifically electro physiology,
Speaker 1: or the study of the electrical aspects of physiological phenomena. Yes,
Speaker 1: So he got an electrostatic machine and a Lindon jar,
Speaker 1: which was a device used to storm static electricity, and
Speaker 1: he started to dabble in muscular stimulation using electricity. In
Speaker 1: seventeen eighty six, Galvani found that touching a frog's nerves
Speaker 1: with a metal instrument during a thunderstore made the frog's
Speaker 1: muscles contract, so it twitched. So he concluded that electricity
Speaker 1: was the cause of the twitching, and he hypothesized, now
Speaker 1: we know incorrectly, that it came from the frog's muscles
Speaker 1: and nerve tissue. He did more experiments of this kind,
Speaker 1: for example using an a scalpel touched to a nerve
Speaker 1: while the electrostatic machine was activated, and he also got
Speaker 1: the same result without the use of the machine. So
Speaker 1: he hung a copper hook from an iron railing and
Speaker 1: pressed the hook to the frog's spinal cord, and it
Speaker 1: also moved because of that contact. So he published a
Speaker 1: paper in sev called Commentary of the Effect of Electricity
Speaker 1: on Muscular Motion, in which he concluded that animal tissue
Speaker 1: contained this innate force called animal electricity, and in this
Speaker 1: theory of his he thought that the brain secreted this
Speaker 1: electric fluid which the nerves carried to the muscles, and
Speaker 1: then that fluid acted as a stimulus for the muscles.
Speaker 1: And Galvani's views were pretty accepted, generally accepted at least
Speaker 1: by a lot of scientists, but physicist Alesandro vole To
Speaker 1: did not accept these ideas. He rejected the idea of
Speaker 1: animal electricity and said that the source of electricity or
Speaker 1: stimulus in Galvani's experiments had been the use of two
Speaker 1: dissimilar medals, and this caused a bit of controversy. But
Speaker 1: Galvani didn't have much time to debate with Volta because
Speaker 1: in the seventeen nineties Galvani refused to swear allegiance to
Speaker 1: Napoleon's new Republic, so he lost his faculty position and
Speaker 1: his salary, and he ended up moving into the old
Speaker 1: Galvani home with his brother, and he died there at
Speaker 1: the age of sixty one in sevent The debate was
Speaker 1: not over, however, no Galvani's work and this idea of
Speaker 1: animal electricity or Galvinism didn't just fade away. Volta used
Speaker 1: concepts from Galvani's experiments, specifically the electricity created by two
Speaker 1: dissimilar metals thing to create his electric pile or voltake pile,
Speaker 1: basically a battery of sort of prim the battery that
Speaker 1: could provide a source of constant current electricity. Volta however,
Speaker 1: still fundamentally disagreed with the idea of animal electricity, and
Speaker 1: as we mentioned, this kicked off a huge debate among
Speaker 1: intellectuals at the time. Even in life. Galvani himself, though,
Speaker 1: was too reserved to really get involved in all of
Speaker 1: that exactly. He was a little more soft spoken than that,
Speaker 1: but his somewhat spunk, your nephew, Giovanni Aldini stepped in
Speaker 1: and kind of took up the torch for defending Galvinism. Now,
Speaker 1: Aldini was born in Bologna on April sixteenth, seventeen sixty two,
Speaker 1: and he had also chosen a scientific career path. He
Speaker 1: studied physics at the University of Bologna, and after graduating
Speaker 1: in seventeen eighty two, he became a research assistant for
Speaker 1: his uncle and joined in on those frog experiments. When
Speaker 1: what became known as the Galvani Volta controversy kicked off,
Speaker 1: Aldini became really active in defense of his uncle's ideas.
Speaker 1: So here's just a few examples of some of the
Speaker 1: things that he did. He published responses to Volta's critics
Speaker 1: sy isms, sometimes in the form of supplements to his
Speaker 1: uncle's original commentary. He did experiments to demonstrate that some
Speaker 1: muscular contraction and frogs can be obtained with one metal
Speaker 1: only Volta just as an aside, he argued here that
Speaker 1: the metal used, which was mercury, was probably contaminated and
Speaker 1: actually did contain traces of another metal, and that's why
Speaker 1: Aldni's experiment work. But the other thing that Aldini did
Speaker 1: is that he worked with Galvani in a series of
Speaker 1: experiments in which no metal was used at all, so
Speaker 1: they just used nerves touched to muscle and achieved muscle
Speaker 1: contraction that way. After Galvani died in sevente Aldini accepted
Speaker 1: the Bologna University Chair in physics, which came complete with
Speaker 1: a pretty hefty teaching load, but that didn't stop him
Speaker 1: from pursuing his work in Galvinism, not at all. He
Speaker 1: founded the first Galvanic society in Bologna, and then he
Speaker 1: started experimenting on warm blooded animals, so really taken it
Speaker 1: up a notch from frogs, worked on birds and calves
Speaker 1: and oxen and according to a two thousand four article
Speaker 1: goal by Andre Parlon in the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences.
Speaker 1: In one notable experiment involving an ox, Aldini applied direct
Speaker 1: electrical current to different parts of an ox brain to
Speaker 1: determine different brain regions sensitivity to galvinism. And this really
Speaker 1: sparked an interest in using galvinism as a therapeutic tool,
Speaker 1: you know, something more than just a neat experiment with
Speaker 1: twitching frog legs. However, to test this out, Aldini needed
Speaker 1: to experiment with using electricity on human cadavers. But at
Speaker 1: the time it was illegal to exhume bodies from graves,
Speaker 1: so when he conducted these experiments in January February of
Speaker 1: eighteen o two, he used the bodies of three criminals
Speaker 1: who had been killed by decapitation. Ironically, he ended up
Speaker 1: using a voltaic pile to create the electric current. Quirk
Speaker 1: of history. Yeah. He did the experiment in a large
Speaker 1: public area located near Bologna's Palace of Justice. This is
Speaker 1: where the executions had taken place, and he applied the
Speaker 1: electricity to different parts of the heads and the bodies
Speaker 1: and was able to produce muscular contractions confirming the frog experiments.
Speaker 1: After this, Aldini went on kind of a world tour
Speaker 1: throughout Europe doing these sorts of experiments as demonstrations. They
Speaker 1: were almost like shows, I mean, theatrical spectacles of a sort,
Speaker 1: and Aldini became a really skilled performer in these. In
Speaker 1: one before the Royal College of Surgeons in London, for example,
Speaker 1: he cut the head off a dog and made the
Speaker 1: current from a strong battery go through it. According to
Speaker 1: an eyewitness account in the June July issue of History magazine,
Speaker 1: this caused quote the dog's jaws to open, the teeth
Speaker 1: to chatter, the eyes to roll in their sockets. One
Speaker 1: would almost believe the dog's head was alive again. And
Speaker 1: like he said, he really did go on a tour
Speaker 1: of Europe. He went to several European universities. While in
Speaker 1: Paris he also worked a little more on his electro
Speaker 1: convulsive therapies. But in early eighteen o three Aldini returned
Speaker 1: to London, where his ex perments were very well attended,
Speaker 1: and not just by scientists and surgeons and curious people,
Speaker 1: but by gentlemen. Dukes and even the Prince of Wales
Speaker 1: came out to see one of these shows. That's interesting.
Speaker 1: It almost became sort of a way to make this idea,
Speaker 1: these scientific ideas more palatable to the general public, which
Speaker 1: is kind of They sound so the opposite of palatable
Speaker 1: to us now. But it is interesting to think of
Speaker 1: the highest classes coming out to see a dog decapitated
Speaker 1: and then these pretty horrific scientific experiments take place. But
Speaker 1: Aldini's most famous demonstration took place on January eighteen oh
Speaker 1: three at the Royal College of Surgeons and the subject
Speaker 1: Aldini experimented on in this case was the twenty six
Speaker 1: year old criminal George Foster, who had just been hanged
Speaker 1: at Newgate Prison in London for murdering his wife and child.
Speaker 1: And according to that History magazine articles Glenna just mentioned,
Speaker 1: Aldini and his assistance actually handed out posters beforehand that
Speaker 1: said he was going to attempt to quote reanimated corpse
Speaker 1: in front of a live audience. If that didn't get
Speaker 1: people in the door, I don't know what would. Before
Speaker 1: starting the experiment, he asked for a physician to volunteer
Speaker 1: to come up and confirm that the body was dead.
Speaker 1: So it almost sounds it sounds very like a magic show,
Speaker 1: like a magic show, very performance like, and to supply
Speaker 1: the electric current. Aldini used what was essentially a very
Speaker 1: large battery connected to conducting rods, and when the rods
Speaker 1: were applied to Foster's mouth and ear, Aldini said that quote,
Speaker 1: the job began to quiver. The adjoining muscles were horribly contorted,
Speaker 1: and the left eye actually opened, So of course the
Speaker 1: audience was pretty freaked out at this point. They gasped,
Speaker 1: but they hadn't even reached the best part yet or
Speaker 1: the worst, depending on your point of view. That came
Speaker 1: when Aldini touched the rods to the criminals rectum, which
Speaker 1: caused the whole body to fulse. The arms began to
Speaker 1: punch the air as if in fury. The legs kicked,
Speaker 1: and the back arch violently, almost as if it were
Speaker 1: taking a deep breath. It's pretty creepy sounding, so Aldini said.
Speaker 1: The movements were quote so much increased as almost to
Speaker 1: give an appearance of reanimation, so almost like his promise
Speaker 1: to reanimate a corpse was coming true. This was reported
Speaker 1: in detail in The Times a few days later, and
Speaker 1: it really made a big impression, as you can imagine,
Speaker 1: on both scientists and regular people. According to parents article,
Speaker 1: a lot of people really thought that electricity might be
Speaker 1: that long sought vital force. Then maybe this guy had
Speaker 1: finally figured it out. Aldini received the Royal Society's Copley Medal,
Speaker 1: its highest honor, for his work. And just an interesting
Speaker 1: side note here, apparently the London police had sort of
Speaker 1: a plan in this for this event, they did plan
Speaker 1: to re execute Foster if he was in fact back
Speaker 1: to life, just in case, just in case he wasn't
Speaker 1: going to get out of it. But Aldini said later
Speaker 1: in a published account that his goal wasn't actually to
Speaker 1: reanimate the corps. He was really trying to demonstrate how
Speaker 1: galvanism might be useful in reviving drowning victims that suffered
Speaker 1: from asphyxiation. He considered Foster, the hanged criminal, a classic
Speaker 1: case of asphyxiation. So this makes me wonder a little
Speaker 1: bit about that point before about Aldini and his assistance
Speaker 1: handing out posters saying that they were going to attempt
Speaker 1: to reanimate a corpse, because if that wasn't his intention,
Speaker 1: then why would they hand him out. So maybe there's
Speaker 1: some well, you have what you say before the show
Speaker 1: and what you say after and after the show. Aldini
Speaker 1: also as we alluded to before explored other medical applications
Speaker 1: for galvinism, including treating mental disorders. One apparently successful test case,
Speaker 1: according to that Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences article that
Speaker 1: we mentioned, involved a twenty seven year old farmer named
Speaker 1: Luigi Lonzarini who was suffering from melancholy madness, which was
Speaker 1: basically major depression. So to treat him, Aldini delivered shocks
Speaker 1: from a voltaic pile to Lazzarini's shaved head. He started
Speaker 1: out with week a week voltaic pile and made it
Speaker 1: increasingly stronger as the treatments progressed. And just as an aside,
Speaker 1: he actually tried this out on himself first before we
Speaker 1: tried it on his patient, so well, yeah. According to
Speaker 1: Aldini's account of this experiment, Lazzarini's mood improved progressively until
Speaker 1: he was supposedly cured after several weeks. Saldini's treatment of
Speaker 1: Lazzarini inspired the electroc convulsive therapies that are still used today,
Speaker 1: and now he's considered the father of electric shock therapy.
Speaker 1: Although he was never able to restart a heart himself,
Speaker 1: his work also seems to have had some kind of
Speaker 1: direct inspiration for cardiac electrical stimulation. I mean, that was
Speaker 1: sort of the first thing I thought of when I
Speaker 1: was reading about these experiments with the dead criminals and
Speaker 1: they're twitching and moving and um, the guy's back arching.
Speaker 1: I mean, it seemed not too too far removed from
Speaker 1: given a shock to a heart that's just stopped and
Speaker 1: the person it's not completely out yet. Yeah, he was
Speaker 1: never able to restart one, maybe because of the distance
Speaker 1: or the amount of time that had lapsed between the
Speaker 1: time that the criminal was executed in the time that
Speaker 1: he was doing And if you're missing ahead, it's not
Speaker 1: going to help ch That's very true, but it was
Speaker 1: always a big disappointment of his During the latter part
Speaker 1: of his career, though, Aldini really focused a lot less
Speaker 1: on biology. He for example, tried to improve the construction
Speaker 1: and illumination of lighthouses. He also explored the use of
Speaker 1: asbestos fibers to improve firefighting. He developed new hydraulic lever systems,
Speaker 1: and he invented new ways to light streets and buildings,
Speaker 1: including lascalam Malan's opera house. And I have to wonder
Speaker 1: if any inspiration from that came from his own experience,
Speaker 1: essentially as a theatrical performer in the science realm. I
Speaker 1: didn't think that that's a good point. So Aldini was
Speaker 1: made a Night of the Napoleonic Order of the Iron
Speaker 1: Crown for his scientific contributions, and in eighteen o seven
Speaker 1: he became a counselor of the State of Milan. And
Speaker 1: he died January eighteen thirty four, the age of seventy two,
Speaker 1: and left behind money to found a school of physics
Speaker 1: in chemistry for the artisans of Bologna. I think that's interesting.
Speaker 1: It is physics and chemistry, biology not so much. Well,
Speaker 1: physics was his major, I guess when he studied, so
Speaker 1: maybe makes sense along those lines. But besides leading to
Speaker 1: a couple of medical innovations, Aldini's experiments with Galvinism had
Speaker 1: another effect. They started a kind of electro quackery. At
Speaker 1: the time. Suddenly everybody wanted to reanimate the dead. And
Speaker 1: that's probably why when you talk about inspirations for Frankenstein
Speaker 1: a lot of names get thrown around. One, for example,
Speaker 1: is Carl August Weinhold, and what he's known for is
Speaker 1: these horrifying experiments in which he scooped out a cat's
Speaker 1: brains and spinal cord and filled the cavities with silver
Speaker 1: and zinc. He said that the cats would regain a
Speaker 1: pulse become animated again for a short time. I think
Speaker 1: his words were something like they bounded around for several
Speaker 1: minutes or something like that. Another person who's often associated
Speaker 1: with the Frankenstein myth is Andrew Ura, who was another
Speaker 1: scientist who did experiments with the corpse of a hanged criminal.
Speaker 1: But these occurred closer to the time that Shelley actually
Speaker 1: published her novel, and a link between Shelley's husband, Percy
Speaker 1: Bist Shelley, and Aldini's famous uncle suggests she may have
Speaker 1: actually known of Aldini's experiments. Apparently, Percy Bis Shelley, when
Speaker 1: he was a schoolboy, had been mentored by a retired
Speaker 1: Scottish scientist named John Lynde. Lynde had a passionate interest
Speaker 1: in Galvani's work, and in the seventeen nineties or so,
Speaker 1: became the first British scientists to repeat the frog experiments,
Speaker 1: So that's one link. Also, according to an article by
Speaker 1: Charles J. Thompson in the Journal of Chemical Education, Scientists
Speaker 1: or Humphrey Davy is the one who invited Aldini to
Speaker 1: do his famous eighteen o three presentation. So Percy would
Speaker 1: have only been eleven at that time and Mary Walstoncraft
Speaker 1: would have only been six. But years later Davy did
Speaker 1: become part of their literary and social circle, so they
Speaker 1: may have heard of Aldini's experiments that way. It's not
Speaker 1: definitive proof, of course, but it's something to ponder anyway. Well,
Speaker 1: and I have to imagine that after a spectacle like
Speaker 1: you would see at one of Aldini's shows, people would
Speaker 1: talk about that for a long time. It wouldn't just
Speaker 1: be news that was in and out of the headlines.
Speaker 1: It seems like something that would come up, maybe not
Speaker 1: around the dinner table, but just when you're having a chat,
Speaker 1: especially with with somebody who would have known Albini. Well,
Speaker 1: it was something that Percy Shelley was really interested in
Speaker 1: throughout his lifetime too. I guess that Lynt had had
Speaker 1: a pretty big influence on him. And I've even read
Speaker 1: stories that say that when their family cat died, he
Speaker 1: tried to reanimate it with electric jewelts. He wasn't successful,
Speaker 1: of course, but there you have it. On the surface.
Speaker 1: I have to say, this story is really endowing something
Speaker 1: with life. Really seems like it should be a positive thing,
Speaker 1: but it's so cre be, it's so scary. I wonder too,
Speaker 1: I mean this, the details are horrifying on their own,
Speaker 1: but I wonder how much of our repulsion from that
Speaker 1: does come from Frankenstein. You know, we do know the
Speaker 1: terrible things that can happen, and we have Mary Shelley's
Speaker 1: depiction of reanimating life, which is terrible, you know, getting
Speaker 1: old parts from dead people and stitching them together. Nothing
Speaker 1: is appealing about it, and it's not at all like
Speaker 1: like what you say. It does seem like reanimating life
Speaker 1: should be something positive. Instead it's it's repulsive. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I think even more than just the practice of doing it,
Speaker 1: it's like that moral question out there of should we
Speaker 1: be doing this that makes it really sinister. So so, yeah,
Speaker 1: make yourself a cup of tea and break out Mary
Speaker 1: Shelley's Frankenstein and maybe think these things over, especially if
Speaker 1: it's a dark and stormy night. And if you finish
Speaker 1: that great read and you have some more ideas for
Speaker 1: spooky or scientific or both podcasts for us, please write us.
Speaker 1: We're a history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
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Speaker 1: Frankenstein's Monster Works, and Science editor Alison louder Milk told
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