Creating Frankenstein Jeremy Kessler - The New Atlantis

Jeremy Kesslercharge, causing “disembodied frogleg muscles to move.” Galvani’snephew Giovanni Aldini—a strikinglymodern combination of magician,camp evangelist, and buzzworthyrock star—toured Europe, animatingthe tongues and eyes of ox-heads.Aldini’s most memorable trick wasthe pseudo-resurrection of a killer—asort of reverse execution. A Londonjury had found George Forster (orFoster) guilty of drowning his wifeand son in Paddington Canal, andhe was hanged on January 18, 1803.A few days later, Forster’s body wastaken to a nearby house, where Aldini“connected wires from a massive batteryof copper and zinc to the corpse’shead and anus.” An eyewitness to theexperiment recounted:On the first application of the processto the face, the jaws of thedeceased criminal began to quiver,the adjoining muscles were horriblycontorted, and one eye wasactually opened. In the subsequentpart of the process, the right handwas raised and clenched, and thelegs and thighs were set in motion.It appeared to the un informedpart of the by-standers as if thewretched man was on the eve ofbeing restored to life.A contemporaneous record of executionsreported that “Mr. Pass, thebeadle of the Surgeons’ Company,having been officially present duringthis experiment, was so alarmed, thathe died soon after his return homeof the fright.” Though the periodicalassured readers that in this particularcase full revivification was impossible,it did note that in “cases of drowningor suffocation” Aldini’s method“promises to be of the utmost use,by reviving the action of the lungs,and thereby rekindling the expiringspark of vitality.”At eighteen, Mary Godwin’svision was already darkenedby the inconstant light of life. Hermother had died in giving birth toher, and the year before her trip toGeneva, Mary described her ownprematurely-born daughter as “unexpectedlyalive, but still not expected tolive.” “Animal electricity” or “galvanicfluid,” the vital substance posited asthe source of organic movement andupon which experiments like Aldini’swere said to act, spurred her imagination:“Perhaps the component partsof a creature,” she mused, “might bemanufactured, brought together, andendued with vital warmth.” If modernmedicine had not yet resolvedthe indeterminacy of a child’s birth,modern physics offered to unfangthe frailty of life. Man might masterdeath not through the preservationof life but through its re-creation.The new science that drove Mary’smusings surely attracted the sensibilitiesof the group of young fantasistsat Geneva as much for its aestheticpossibilities as its biological ones.Experiments such as Aldini’s hadthe same jagged contours that the84 ~ The New AtlantisCopyright 2009. All rights reserved. See www.TheNewAtlantis.com for more information.