with two metal rods charged by a 270-plate voltaic pile, contractions were caused in the torso and limbs:
The success was truly extraordinary. Full and labored breathing began at once; the chest was raised and lowered; the abdomen felt movements corresponding to those of the diaphragm […] Third experiment. The supraorbital nerve was exposed at the point on the forehead where it exits from the supraciliary hole above the eyebrow; one of the ends of the apparatus was brought into contact with this nerve, and the other with the heel. The strangest grimaces appeared on the face. […] Rage, horror, despair, anguish, atrocious smiles were painted in turn on the murderer’s face, with a hideous expression that no brush could render. Several of the curious ones ran away shivering, and one of them lost consciousness. [BAR 06, pp. 38–39, author’s translation]
It is said that the leg was thrown so violently that a helper was almost knocked over. Thus the corpse rose, seeming to look at the spectators and showing signs of breathing movements:
By placing the electrified corpse’s gesticulations in the context of the stylized gestures of Regency stage and art, Ure was also reminding his audience, as Aldini had done with his experiments, that electricity seemed to hold out the very real possibility of restoring the dead to life. [RHY 02, p. 98]
Figure 1.4. In this 1867 illustration, a crowd of scientists watch in horror as Andrew Ure shakes and shocks Matthew Clydesdale’s lifeless body with electricity
In 1819, Thomas Weem, executed for murder, was galvanized by James Cumming (1777–1861), a chemist at Cambridge and considered a pioneer of electrical instrumentation [STO 76, p. 29]:
The execution of Thomas Weems for murder on 6 August 1819 has become very famous in criminal histories. His condemned body was subjected to a number of quasi-scientific experiments to explore the nature of electricity, resuscitation and brain death, all associated with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). [HUR 16, p. 241]
Cumming tried to make the body breathe by exciting the vagus nerves from the brain to the heart, lung, and digestive organs. His idea, according to the identity of the nervous fluid with the electric fluid, was to revive the organism’s regulating nervous fluid by means of galvanization. From Aldini to Cumming the concept of “experimental resurrection of inanimate flesh” was developed [BAR 06, p. 38]. Between these galvanic experiments, from the beginning of the 19th Century, and contemporary reanimation, the potential of the control of life mechanisms by medicine was taking shape:
Friday 6 August 1819 – The body, after being suspended for an hour… was immediately conveyed in a cart to the Chemical Lecture of the Botanical Garden, where Professor Cumming had prepared a powerful galvanic battery (which formerly belonged to Professor Tennet) with the intention of repeating some of the experiments lately described by Dr. Ure of Glasgow in the Journal of the Royal Institution.9
The Cambridge Journal kept a full account of the experimental stages of this research and helped to disseminate it in society, where it asked a fundamental question: what is dying?:
The beheaded and hanged men of London and Glasgow were only the prelude to a medicine of reanimation, which throughout the 19th Century was concerned with the freshest cadavers, multiplying discussions on the definition of the thresholds of death and its reversibility. [BAR 06, p. 41, author’s translation]
Between the belief in the persistence of a consciousness that some believed they could see through the distortions of galvanized criminals’ features and the fact of managing death for a definitive and irremediable moment, the refusal of human finiteness emerged. These experiments were the culmination of medical utopias and the imagination of a potential victory over death. They tell the story of galvanism in terms of the connection between its applications and the mechanisms of life:
Sturgeon’s Lectures10 constructed a strikingly novel genealogy for galvanism. Rather than tracing the development of experiments and ideas from the Volta’s pile through Humphry Davy’s heroic experiences, he pointed to a different history. His heroes were Galvani and Aldini (….). The history of galvanism, on the one hand, was the history of the discovery and demonstration of electricity’s connections with and role in the animal economy. [RHY 98, p. 129]
In terms of physiology, knowledge acquired on an animated anatomy and for future resuscitation techniques, they were extremely heuristic:
If these (still?) fantastical practices seem anecdotal, they nevertheless reveal the preponderance of the utopia of victory over death and over the body corrupted by life, of which we have brought to light during a few moments. They also point out to us that under their strange, curious and disturbing aspect, the experiments of Andrew Ure or Giovanni Aldini are always on the horizon of the technical utopias of our time. [BAR 06, p. 43, author’s translation]
The idea of the reversibility of death referred to the notion of stages in this process on which medicine could still intervene. This idea was based on the fact that the vital principles present in the body do not stop working immediately. The heart plays an important role. Seen as a pump, a mechanical part, it is considered as being able to be re-launched and capable, by its action on the blood circulation, to start again to excite the centers of innervation, those of the general motricity, and thus to ensure the redistribution in all the points of the organism, of an always present energy:
However speculative such assumptions may be, they nonetheless provide a precise measure of what death means: they establish the exact meaning of this physiological transformation. Just as life as a whole was nothing but a result and harmony, its disappearance cannot be the ruin of any principle, and the death of this whole is reduced to an accident which restores to their freedom – a fatal freedom, since it must this time bring about a real annihilation – the partial energies whose association was necessary for the constitution of the individual. The death of the whole is thus only the breaking of the united pact that creates individuality: there is no life that perishes, for real life is concentrated entirely within the organic element. [BER 05, p. 18, author’s translation]
The spirit of the early 19th Century permeates the novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus [SHE 18], which Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) published in 1818; the book quickly became a classic in the field of Gothic horror literature:
Mary recalled that, after some days of ‘blank incapability’, the night of 16 June, she had a ‘waking dream’ that was at the origin of her own story: ‘I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out; and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy-half-vital motion.’ This description shares many similarities with what happened in London on January 17, 1803 when Aldini showed that Galvanic stimulation of the brain seemed able ‘to give an appearance of re-animation’. In the second chapter of Mary’s novel, the echo of the electrical experiments on dead bodies became even stronger, as Dr. Frankenstein specifically refers to electricity […]. [CAM 18, p. 28]
Mary Shelley was the daughter of the British philosopher, political theorist and novelist William Godwin (1756–1836) [GOD 20]. He was fascinated by the recent discoveries of galvanism, which he felt was an agent of materialism. These considerations led him to conclude the materiality of the soul and the non-necessity of a god. Moreover, inspired by the spirit of Enlightenment and the French Revolution, he proposed societal reforms designed according to the data of reason. His notoriety, as a defender of the most innovative ideas, failed to have him accused of materialism and
