The story of Frankenstein was truly a masterpiece of fiction for its time, which is especially impressive considering Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, wrote the first draft of her novel at only 18 years old. It makes you question what she was so deeply inspired by to think about bringing life from the dead, and whether there could be any truth to that happening outside of stories. That concept not only inspired Mary Shelley to research medical science to write the story of Frankenstein, but also was my inspiration for deep searching what could have been going through her mind, and the science behind it.
Mary Shelley was most likely inspired by the science research at the time that dealt with resuscitation through means of electricity. Electric shock occurs when the body becomes a part of an electric circuit, which is a concept discovered by an Italian Scientist of the name, Luigi Galvani. Galvani found that by passing an electric current through the nerves of a dead frog, the limbs of that frog would kick and twitch. Through many experiments, Galvani was able to prove that the movement and twitching of the frog’s limbs were correlated with electrical action. But how does that make sense? Since electric currents at the time were known to only be able to run through metals. After hearing the controversy, Galvani was able to prove that muscular contractions/twitches can happen without the need of conductors, by causing a muscle to contract by touching an exposed muscle of one frog with a nerve of another, and for the first time, confirmed the existence of bioelectric forces that exist in living tissue.
Several years later, his nephew, physicist Giovanni Aldini, used his uncle’s discoveries with other discoveries at the time, to perform some experiments of his own. He started experimenting with animals, and eventually got to humans. In his most famous showcasing, Aldini was able to make the corpse’s eyes open using electricity, which made it look like the corpse had come back to life.
This demonstration had led into a long series of somewhat scary scientific experiments, all under the one major question: Could the dead be brought back to life? Real life Frankenstein experiments started to unfold, where real corpses were being used to see if they could be resurrected. Andrew Ure, a scientist at the University of Glasgow, is known in the field of science for his one experiment, where he tried to see if he could make life from the dead. Ure used the corpse of a recently hanged convict to send high electric surges through his body, which made the chest rise and fall. Ure wrote in his book how the corpse had a sudden shiver from the cold, and how his fingers moved minimally, mimicking live movements. The body didn’t actually come back to life, but Ure had concluded that maybe if the experiment was done again under different conditions, they could have resuscitated him.
Is there any proof that this works… not yet. But, this experimentation may have led to modern day defibrillators. A defibrillator’s main purpose is to detect irregular heart patterns, and from the detections, send an electric charge to the heart to restore it to a normal heart beat rhythm. Why this works is due to the heart’s main system of communication. Since the heart is controlled by electrical impulses that are regulated by a natural pacemaker, also known as the sinus node, when this system stops working normally, an eclectic shock can be a method to restart normal electrical function within the heart. With this being said though, a defibrillator can only work on a heart that is working abnormally, not one that has already flatlined and has no electrical activity.
So, how long after a heart stops beating normally can we proclaim a person dead? A lot of the research being done around the time of Frankenstein being written has led to a lot of these questions that are still extremely prominent in the medical field. But, there is one thing for certain, and that is maybe Shelley was not too far off in her thinking that maybe a body could be brought back to life– Maybe we could invent something that would be able to kick start the heart from a flatline– But for now, it is all just fictional, spooky stories. Happy Halloween!
