to their graves before death struck them irrevocably. [ALD 04, p. 143, author’s translation]
It was thus conceived as a diagnostic tool to make visible the conditions conducive to life:
Before we finish talking about the useful applications of Galvanism, we must indicate it as a means that could be used to prevent the premature burial of people who had fallen into lethargy. To judge whether death was real or apparent, it was sufficient to insert the tips of a Galvanic exciter into the muscle parts. [CAS 03, p. 38, author’s translation]
While Bichat positioned himself to provide a physiological description of the process of dying7, Aldini placed his studies in a societal perspective by linking them to the development of a resuscitation medicine8. The demonstration made in London on Forster is detailed in the newspaper The Times from January 22, 1803. It made a strong and lasting impression on the minds of scientists but also on all those present. As we have seen, Aldini did not seek immortality or miraculous resurrections. This discrepancy, between the imaginary linked to the representations given of his research and the scientific aspects, was the catalyst for Mary Shelley’s novel featuring a scientist facing his contradictions. Indeed, the idea that electricity can be the source of a resurrection is more a cultural representation than a medical theory:
If, after the extinction of general life, a remnant of life remains in the corpse, this remnant still shows electrical phenomena: once the nerves and muscles are dead, the electrification no longer produces any movement in them, and there is no electrical discharge that is able to revive a corpse. Electricity is therefore not the principle of life; it is only a form in which the principle manifests itself, a form of activity which the organism possesses in common with inorganic bodies, but to which it nevertheless imprints a particular modification. [PAL 47, p. 60, author’s translation]
Aldini had a much more humble goal: to demonstrate that galvanism could be a useful tool in a variety of resuscitation procedures for people who had died from asphyxiation or drowning. His stay in London was financed by the Royal Humane Society, for which it had been a concern for several decades. Thus, his work is considered on the borderline of the transition from resurrection to resuscitation:
I invite them today to employ in similar cases the action of galvanism in the manner I have proposed. It is good to multiply the means to relieve our fellow human beings, especially in circumstances where old medicine offers us very few resources. In the meantime, I think it would be useful to do some tests on asphyxiated animals in different ways. These tests could be valuable, and provide a lot of perspective to saving the lives of men. [ALD 04, p. 98, author’s translation]
The fact that the experiments were practiced on individuals who had died without having suffered from illness brings to light the process described by Aldini for returning consciousness and movement. This process, far from being imbued with magic, required an organism whose unaltered organization could make a return to functionality:
Galvanism must not be placed among these chimerical agents; its action is real and well observed, its devices and their construction are not hidden, their strength is known and felt by everyone. [ALD 04, p. 139, author’s translation]
While it was possible to bring subjects back to life, it was not in any biological condition, which already underlined a demarcation between the theme of resurrection and that of reanimation. Indeed, only subjects who were not dead could be brought back:
I think, therefore, that the application of this highly-active stimulus should be limited to cases where the animal suspension is affected at a single point, which still gives hope for the recovery of life. If the heart, if the circulation, if the lungs, if the nervous system is inactive, provided that the organism still exists, and that the vital functions are not suspended for long, galvanism can be administered. [ALD 04, p. 141, author’s translation]
Following this, the idea of the profound connection between galvanism and vital phenomena traveled beyond the spheres of physics and medicine. His experiments in reviving the hearts of bodies marked human power over life itself. This spectacular and public dimension played a decisive role in the fact that electricity could impress society and be seen as the cure for all ills. A visible sign of this was the high presence of electroshocked bodies in dissecting rooms or anatomical theaters. This development placed the electric body in its singularity among bodies and technical tools:
Making the electric body a viable cultural construct was to make it blend into its environment. The body gained its significance in the same way as any other technological artefacts that inhabited the same space. It mattered therefore for the sense of Aldini’s or Ure’s versions of the electrical body that they were articulated in a dissecting room. [RHY 02, p. 114]
The human body, by becoming an electric body, became the post-mortem electro-experimental field of invisible energy. It represented the possibility for galvanists to experiment on the body as if it were alive. While the animal model could be experimented with in vivo, the human body was reified as a scientific object when it was inert. Galvanism opened up the possibility of experimenting on a body that had been temporarily and mechanically put back into motion. Electricity made it possible to make the link between the dissected body and the animated body and was part of the fantasized vision that society had of science and its actors. In a reprint from 1839, Bichat related an experiment on the setting in motion of pieces of human bodies and how they regained mobility and precision of movement:
The last galvanic experiment was made by transmitting the electric fluid from the spinal marrow to the cubital nerve near the elbow; the fingers moved quickly like those of a performer on a violin; one of the assistants who endeavored to keep the hand shut, found that it opened in spite of his efforts. A wire was applied to a slight incision made at the end of the first finger; the hand had been previously shut; the finger was instantly extended, and, after a convulsive agitation of the arm, the dead man seemed to point his finger at the spectators, some of whom thought that he had come to life. [BIC 39]
The imaginary supernatural powers attributed to galvanism transcended public boundaries and were recounted even in certain scientific treatises. Thus, in the early 19th Century, Petetin described it as follows:
The recent discovery of a new fluid is occupying all the savants. Its appearance has been accompanied by prodigies. It was not far from resurrecting the dead; at least it has the well-established property of reproducing movement in them: it is already considered to be the precious fluid which animates all parts of the human body; and this insight gives hope of giving man long youth and prolonging his life. [PET 02–03, pp. 2–3, author’s translation]
Experiments on human automatons continued during the 19th Century, with some paradigmatic cases of fascination with the vital spark returned to these bodies. The soul of the criminals who inhabited them was often perceived as the soul of life. Expressions such as “demonic smile” and “crazy eyes” flourished in the accounts of these demonstrations. The experiment by Scottish chemist Andrew Ure (1778–1857), carried out on November 4, 1818 [URE 19], on the corpse of a torture victim, which he subjected to a voltaic pile 10 minutes after he had been taken down from the gallows, is a significant episode in this story. He performed this demonstration in an anatomy theater at the University of Glasgow where students mingled with curious anatomists and doctors. From vesalian dissection to the galvanization of lifeless bodies, there was an epistemological separation between an inert, resolutely post-mortem anatomy and an animated electrical anatomy. The obstacle that was overcome between the 16th and the 19th Centuries was that of animating human bodies. This moment when the body started moving again corresponded to a technical feat of the galvanist who, by combining the new technologies of his time, became a symbol of the almighty scientist. Ure exposed the spinal cord by ablation and made incisions to uncover the
