In 1818, Mary Shelley published her classic novel about Dr. Frankenstein and his disturbing experiments with reanimation — but the stories of these seven scientists from history prove that reality can sometimes be stranger than fiction.
Wikimedia CommonsDr. Frankenstein at work in his lab, from the seventh page of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
In 1818, a 20-year-old woman named Mary Shelley anonymously published her first novel. Titled Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the book told the story of the proverbial mad scientist who reanimated a corpse and created a now-famous monster.
Though Shelley carefully omitted any exposition in her book of how, exactly, Dr. Frankenstein brought his cadaver back to life, modern interpretations of the novel almost always have a lightning bolt zapping the creature into existence. This now-cliché tableau may not be exactly what Shelley had in mind when she wrote the story, but surprisingly, it was not far off from how contemporary scientists had been attempting similar experiments.
For decades before and after the book’s publication, several prominent scientists were putting serious brainpower into the job of reanimating corpses in their own real Frankenstein experiments.
Luigi Galvani, The Italian Biologist Interested In ‘Medical Electricity’
Wikimedia CommonsItalian physicist and biologist Luigi Galvani developed an interest in “medical electricity” and how it could be used on animals.
Bringing dead things to life with the power of electricity was an old idea even when Shelley started writing in 1818. Decades before, in 1780, Italian scientist Luigi Galvani noticed an effect that would set him on the path to performing the sort of grisly experiments that could have inspired Frankenstein.
Galvani was a lecturer at the University of Bologna. Scientists of the late 18th century weren’t necessarily specialists, and so Galvani was interested in everything. He was a chemist, physicist, anatomist, physician, and philosopher — and he seemingly excelled in each field.
In the late 1770s, after nearly 20 years of studying obstetrics, comparative anatomy, and physiology, Galvani turned his attention to frogs’ legs. According to the legend that later developed around his work, Galvani was skinning the severed lower half of a frog when his assistant’s scalpel touched a bronze hook in the animal’s flesh. All at once, the leg twitched as if it were trying to hop away.
The incident gave Galvani an idea — and he started experimenting.
He published his results in 1780. Galvani hypothesized that the muscles of dead frogs contained some vital fluid he called “animal electricity.” This, he argued, was related to — but fundamentally distinct from — the kind of electricity in lightning or the static shock that can come after walking across carpet.
He believed the electrical contact animated whatever residual animal-electric fluid remained in the frogs’ legs. This sparked a respectful argument with Alessandro Volta, who confirmed Galvani’s experimental results but disagreed that there was anything special about animals and their electricity.
A shock was a shock, he argued — and then he invented an electric battery to prove it. By 1782, Volta was shocking all sorts of dead things himself to prove any old electricity could do the trick.
Meanwhile, Galvani’s name was cemented in scientific history as the inspiration for the term “galvanism,” or electricity produced by a chemical
Giovanni Aldini, Luigi Galvani’s Nephew And Protégé
Wikimedia CommonsGiovanni Aldini, the nephew of Luigi Galvani.
By the time Volta was building his first voltaic piles, Galvani was too old to start a verbal war over his theory. Instead, the task of defending his ideas fell to his nephew, Giovanni Aldini.
On Jan. 18, 1803, a criminal named George Forster was hanged at Newgate in London. The court had found him guilty of drowning his wife and child in a canal. After his death, Forster’s body was delivered to the workshop of Giovanni Aldini, who had allegedly moved to the Newgate neighborhood specifically to be close to the executions that took place there. Quickly, Aldini summoned an audience of medical students and curious onlookers and began to experiment on the corpse.
Wikimedia CommonsA depiction of Giovanni Aldini’s experiments.
First, he moved Forster’s limbs to demonstrate that he was truly deceased. Then, he applied electrodes to each of Forster’s ears and passed a current through the dead man’s head.
In the words of a horrified reporter who witnessed the demonstration:
“On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.”
To anybody watching, it must have seemed that Aldini was raising the murderer from the dead. This was, predictably, a disturbing thought for many people. Questions were even asked in government circles about what the law would require if Forster had actually come back to life. The consensus was that he’d have to hang a second time.
Aldini’s real Frankenstein experiments became the talk of London, and his uncle’s ideas about animal electricity started to seem credible after all.
Real Frankenstein Experiments: Andrew Ure, The Scottish Genius Who Electrified Dead Bodies Before A Crowd
Wikimedia CommonsAndrew Ure, the Scottish scientist who publicly experimented on dead bodies.
Around the time Aldini was experimenting with his executed criminals in London, a young Scottish scientist and “scriptural geologist” named Andrew Ure was pursuing his degree in Glasgow. Ure was another one of those generalized geniuses interested in everything.
Fresh out of university and looking for something to study, Ure found Aldini’s work fascinating and decided to try it out for himself.
By 1818, Ure had his own steady supply of freshly-hanged criminals to play around with. There was no shortage of executions in Britain at the time, since around 300 crimes carried the death penalty, so Ure kept busy.
Wikimedia CommonsAn 1867 engraving of Andrew Ure’s galvanic experiments on a corpse.
Unlike medical researchers of today, Ure liked to have a crowd watching his procedures, which were not experiments so much as they were public freak shows that helped Ure build a reputation as a scientific wizard. Like Aldini, he specialized in shocking various parts of the body to make them move. The scientific validity of this was questionable, as Ure didn’t seem to be answering any specific questions with his work. It apparently looked cool, though.
On Nov. 4, 1818, Ure carried out an electrical experiment on the body of an executed murderer named Matthew Clydesdale with James Jeffray, an anatomy professor at the University of Glasgow. As reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, Ure wrote of the experiment:
“Every muscle of the body was immediately agitated with convulsive movements resembling a violent shuddering from cold. On moving the second rod from hip to heel… the leg was thrown out with such violence as nearly to overturn one of the assistants, who in vain tried to prevent its extension.”
The scientists also electrically stimulated Clydesdale’s diaphragm and phrenic nerve to make it appear as if he were breathing. And when they applied the electricity to the supraorbital nerve on his face, “every muscle of his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, anguish, horror, despair, and ghastly smiles united their hideous expression.”
“At this period,” Ure noted, “several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness, and one gentleman fainted.”
Ure eventually ran out of steam with his real Frankenstein experiments, as local churches were threatening to shut him down by force if he didn’t stop summoning devils in his lab. He soon gave up the reanimation efforts, correctly concluding they were a waste of his time. He then turned his attention to more productive pursuits, such as revolutionizing the way volumes are measured and developing a working thermostat.
He also spent the years between 1829 and his death in 1857 arguing passionately that the Earth was 6,000 years old and that “true science” always agrees with the Bible.
Johann Ritter, The Man Who Conducted Electrical Experiments On Himself
Wikimedia CommonsJohann Wilhelm Ritter famously discovered the process of electroplating.
While some scientists and philosophers vehemently disagreed with the ideas put forth by Galvani and Aldini, there were those such as Johann Ritter who readily embraced their theories with open arms.
Johann Ritter was a German physicist most famous for having discovered the ultraviolet region of the light spectrum. This was, of course, a massive breakthrough that helped humanity understand the world beyond what the naked eye could see.
And, according to a report published in the Review of Polarography, Ritter was also known for his own experiments with electricity. Namely, the ones he conducted on himself.
Ritter was actually a huge proponent of galvanism. He was a private scholar, meaning he didn’t have regular wages, so in order to make a living he often presented his ideas in the form of lectures. Among these were lectures presented to the Duke of Gotha on the subject of galvanism.
His fascination with the powers of electricity would ultimately lead to his discovery of electroplating. However, along the way, he also endured a fair amount of pain.
Using a voltaic pile — a battery made by placing pieces of cloth soaked in salt water between metal discs — Ritter touched electrically charged poles to various body parts, including his eyes, ears, tongue, nose, and hand. Ritter would endure the pain of the shock up to his absolute limit before recording his results.
In the end, Ritter concluded that electrochemistry (galvanism) is a permanent process that all living beings are in a constant state of undergoing. From this, he coined the term bioelectrochemistry.
Alexander Von Humboldt, The Man Who Made Batteries From Animal Tissue
Wikimedia CommonsAlexander von Humboldt wrote more than 36 books and 25,000 letters in his 89 years of life.
Like many others on this list, Alexander von Humboldt was an eccentric man. According to Smithsonian Magazine, von Humboldt’s ultimate goal was to understand “everything about everything.”
He was an avid traveler who visited four continents, and he was nothing shy of prolific when it came to writing. He also claimed that he only slept four hours a night and referred to coffee as “concentrated sunbeams.”
Some of his notable scientific achievements include theorizing that the continents spread through plate tectonics, mapping the distribution of plants on three continents, charting the movements of air and water at different latitudes and altitudes to create climate bands, and locating the magnetic equator, among others.
Needless to say, he was quite the accomplished fellow.
As a study published in Trends in Neurosciences reveals, however, von Humboldt also subscribed to the ideas of galvanism. To put these ideas to the test, he created batteries out of nothing but animal tissue.
He experimented with a large variety of substances in an attempt to determine their ability to effectively serve as electrodes. He ultimately came to the conclusion that blood was far more effective at transmitting electricity than milk, wine, beer, or even plain water. He also discovered that nerves tend to work better if they are covered in a salt solution or muscle tissue, as opposed to dry air.
In all, von Humboldt tested the conductive prowess of up to 300 plant and animal species in his attempt to uncover life’s mysteries.
Sergei Brukhonenko, The Russian Scientist Who Decapitated A Dog
Wikimedia CommonsBrukhonenko’s bizarre and twisted experiments led to the first autojektor, an early heart and lung machine.
The work of the early galvanists was largely set aside after the 1820s. Even Ure seems to have abandoned his work in favor of temperature regulation and Bible prophecy. The Soviet Union, however, evidently didn’t feel the same constraints when it came to the subject of mad science.
By the early 1920s, even before the Russian Civil War had ended with a Bolshevik victory, one Russian scientist was back at it. Except this time, he was getting results.
Sergei Brukhonenko was a physician living in Russia during the Revolution who invented what he called an “autojektor,” or a heart and lung machine. While Brukhonenko’s design was fundamentally sound, the way he tested it raised ethical questions.
During his early experiments, Brukhonenko decapitated a dog and immediately connected it to his machine, which drew out blood from the creature’s veins and circulated it through a filter for oxygenation. According to his notes, Brukhonenko kept the dog’s severed head alive and responsive for over an hour and a half before blood clots built up and killed the animal on the table. These experiments were documented in the 1940 film Experiments in the Revival of Organisms and showcase many of Brukhonenko’s tests.
This wasn’t strictly reanimation — but it was Brukhonenko’s stated purpose to eventually learn how to revive fallen Soviet men on behalf of the state.
According to the Soviet Congress of Science, Brukhonenko actually managed this feat in 1930. Brukhonenko’s team connected the corpse of a man who had died by suicide several hours earlier to the autojektor and pushed a witches’ brew of odd chemicals into his bloodstream.
The man’s chest cavity was open, and the team allegedly got his heart beating again. The story goes that the scientists had just developed a steady heart rhythm when the dead man started groaning like a real Frankenstein. At that point, everybody panicked and shut down the experiment, letting the man die for good.
All things considered, it was probably for the best.
Vladimir Demikhov, The Soviet Scientist Who Pioneered Organ Transplantation
Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty ImagesVladimir Demikhov made international headlines when he successfully created a two-headed dog.
Vladimir Demikhov was a Soviet doctor who pioneered medical research — particularly in the field of transplantology, a term which he himself coined.
Demikhov conducted many of his early experiments in organ transplants on dogs to resounding success — but he wanted to take his research a step further.
Not content with successfully transplanting the creatures’ vital organs, Demikhov had the notion to graft the head of one dog onto another living dog.
His first attempt came in 1954, and from there he and his associates would try the procedure another 23 times over the course of five years. In 1959, he garnered the attention of LIFE magazine, which photographed the two-headed dog Demikhov had created.
The unnatural creature was formed by grafting a small dog named Shavka onto a larger stray German Shepherd named Brodyaga. Brodyaga was to be the host; Shavka would become its secondary head and neck.
Demikhov amputated Shavka’s body below her forelegs, keeping her heart and lungs connected until the moment just before the transplant. He attached Shavka to Brodyaga through an incision in the latter’s neck, then linked their vertebrae and vascular systems.
The surgery took Demikhov and his team just three-and-a-half hours to complete, and once the two-headed animal was resuscitated, both heads could see, smell, hear, and swallow. For all intents and purposes, the operation was a success. Unfortunately, the dog only lived for four days. Demikhov’s longest-living two-headed dog, however, managed to survive for a staggering 29 days.