A history focused on the medics and scientists who tried to reanimate dead people using electricity, both before and after the publication of Frankenstein. This book focuses particularly on the work of Andrew Ure, a Glaswegian anatomist, who experimented on the newly-hanged cadaver of condemned murdered Matthew Clydesdale in November 1819, months after the publication of Mary Shelley's novel, but it also looks at previous work, for example by Galvani and his nephew Aldini, both of whom believed in 'animal electricity', and by Mary Shelley's husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was an amateur electrical experimenter and a believer in Paracelsus and a follower of the work of Humphrey Davy, who invented electrolysis. Gruesome as it was, this work has led to the invention of the defibrillator.
For me there was too much emphasis on the Ure-Clydesdale experiment (we have a full description of the murder and the trial) and not enough on the science, but the later chapters contained plenty of interest.
Selected quotes:
- “Graham would deliver lectures on sexual satisfaction as his Goddesses of Youth and Health, a succession of barely-clad, nubile young things, worked the crowd encouraging them to part with their cash.” (Ch 7)
- “Shelley continued to read Humphrey Davy and ... remained convinced that ‘electrical fluid’ was the all-animating force of life and could hold all of its secrets. He referred to the human body as a lump of electrified clay.” (Ch 7)
- “Positive electricity made vision sharper and red-hued while negative electricity made it blurred and bluish.” (Ch 9)
August 2022; 201 pages
The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes also considers the scientists who might have inspired Frankenstein but he settles for Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776 - 1810)
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