The real electric frankenstein experiments of the 1800s answers

Documents #1 and #2

Reading Directions: Read document #1 first. Document #2 is an example of a newspaper article that the author of document #1 uses as evidence. You should have documents #1 and #2 in mind when considering the guiding questions below.

Guiding Questions: 1. What are galvanic experiments? What exactly does reanimation in this context? 2. Why do you think newspapers often referred to these galvanic experiments as

“miracles”?

A G

EN C

Y I

N M

O V

EM EN

T

276 LEONARDO, Vol. 48, No. 3, pp. 276–277, 2015 doi:10.1162/LEON_a_01031 ©2015 ISAST

Fig. 1. Giovanni Aldini. From Essai theoretique experimental sur le Galvanisme. Paris: Fournier, 1804. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

“DEAD EYES OPEN”: THE ROLE OF EXPERIMENTS IN GALVANIC REANIMATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY POPULAR CULTURE Elizabeth Stephens, Southern Cross University, Australia. Email: . See for supplemental files associated with this issue. Abstract During the first decades of the 19th century, a number of prominent scientists conducted experiments in the revival of dead organisms using new galvanic technologies. In several cases, these experiments were conducted on human bodies, using the corpses of executed crim- inals. Such experiments captured the cultural imaginary of the day, posing new questions about the relationship between emergent tech- nologies, automated movement, and human agency. This article exam- ines the role played by spectacle, aesthetics, and new practices and technologies of visualization in these scientific experiments. Keywords: galvanic reanimation, popular science, reflex action

On January 18, 1803, Giovanni Aldini, Professor of Physics at the University of Bologna, conducted a series of galvanic ex- periments on the body of George Forster at the Royal College of Surgeons in London (Fig. 1). Aldini was in England to fur- ther the work of his uncle, Luigi Galvani. In the 1780s, Galva- ni, also working at the University of Bologna, had attached a metal rod to the legs of a dissected frog during a thunderstorm; with every flash of lightning he saw its muscles quiver and twitch, as though it were alive. In De viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari (1791), Galvani proposed that the movement of these muscles was evidence of “animal electricity,” or a naturally occurring bio-electricity. After Galvani’s death in 1798, Aldini started travelling across Europe, electrifying the bodies of dead animals in public demonstrations staged as the- atrical spectacles [1]. After he conducted one such experiment before members of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, involving the galvanic reanimation of the decapitated head of a dog, Aldini received several professional requests to reproduce this experiment, this time using a human body.

Experiments in the galvanic reanimation of human bodies were obviously much more difficult to stage, as human corpses were much harder to procure. Only the bodies of executed criminals were legally permitted to be dissected and subject to scientific experimentation. For this reason, Aldini’s attempt to reanimate the body of George Forster was the most dramatic and high profile of his career.

Forster had been hung an hour previously at Newgate Pris- on, for drowning his wife and youngest child in the Paddington Canal. Before an audience that included members of the Royal College of Surgeons and other eminent scientific figures, Aldini attached conducting rods to Forster’s face, torso and rectum. An account of what happened next was published in The London Review, a popular journal that featured reports on notable events around town:

On the first application of the process to the face, the jaw of the deceased criminal began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye actually opened. In the subse- quent part of the process, the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion. It ap- peared to many of the bye-standers [sic] as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to life [2].

This grim spectacle, in which a dead body was jerked around like a puppet by a new scientific technology before the horri- fied and astonished eyes of an audience, captured the popular imaginary in the 19th century [3]. While the immediate audi- ence for Aldini’s attempt to reanimate Forster’s body was a small one made up of medical and scientific men, the sensa- tional reporting of the case in the popular press meant that news of the event also achieved broad circulation.

As the historian of popular science Iwan Rhys Morus has shown, such public spectacles staged by “showmen scientists” constituted a significant site of scientific experimentation in the early 19th century and served to encourage rapid techno- logical development [4]. While the impact of scientific exper- iments on the rise of popular and spectacular cultures has been well recognized, the extent to which such spectacles contribut- ed to the development of scientific cultures remains relatively under-examined. By contextualizing these experiments in gal- vanic reanimation within the visual and popular culture of their time, we can fully appreciate their wider cultural significance. Although attempts to reanimate the dead are not now accorded a place in mainstream histories of science, the popular and professional fascination they generated at the time,and their strategic use of dramatic visual displays, is nonetheless histori- cally important: It is indicative of a reliance on visual evidence as a proof of scientific claims, and it helps us understand the wider cultural impact of such research.

Galvanic reanimation never became a mainstream area of scientific investigation. But neither were Aldini’s experiments an isolated incident. Fifteen years later, chemist Andrew Ure attempted to use an electric current to “allay morbid activity” in the body of “the murderer Clydesdale” [5]. Ure was a mem- ber of the Royal Society of London and well known as a schol- ar of chemistry and physics. He was interested, like many scientific researchers of the day, in exploring the medical and therapeutic possibilities of galvanism.

Like Aldini, then, Ure was not a marginal or eccentric figure within his scientific community, but rather highly esteemed and respected. His experiment was conducted on November 4, 1818. He delivered a report of this to the Glasgow Literary Society on December 10, 1818, which was published in The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature and the Arts the fol- lowing month. Like Aldini, Ure used a combination of public spectacles, professional lectures, and press reports to maximise the impact of, and recognition for, his work.

Ure’s experiments on Clydesdale’s body were conducted before a large group of “scientific gentlemen.” [6]. He began by attaching the poles of a large battery to the spinal marrow and sciatic nerve, causing the body to violently convulse. He then applied the rods to the diaphragm and phrenic nerve in the neck, after which: the body immediately began, “wondrously,” to “laboriously breathe,” and continued to do so as long as the current was applied [7]. The final experiment, which involved attaching the conducting rods to the dead man’s face, was the most astonishing: “every muscle in his countenance was sim- ultaneously thrown into fearful action,” wrote Ure; rage, hor- ror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles, united their hideous expression in the murderer’s face. Seeing this, several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness, and one gentleman fainted [8].

That Ure’s experiments were conducted the same year that Mary Shelley published Frankenstein is no coincidence: In the cultural imaginary of the early 19th century, electricity was a source of widespread public fascination precisely because it was popularly imagined to be a potential source of artificial

Document #1 of 3--Read first!

A G

EN C

Y I

N M

O V

EM EN

T

Transactions 277

Fig. 2. Guillaume Ben- jamin Amand Duchenne de Boulogne. From Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou, Analyse électro- physiologique de l'expression des pas- sions. Paris: Renouard, 1862. Image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

life [9]. Ure’s experiments reinforced this association of elec- tricity with artificial life in two key ways: Whereas Aldini’s demonstrations on Forster’s body had merely moved the man’s body, Ure caused Clydesdale’s body to breathe and to exhibit emotion. Not only had mechanical motion been achieved, but an actual resuscitation of body and mind, or even soul.

This part of Ure’s experiment stands as a little-known pre- cursor to the much more famous and influential work of Duchenne du Boulogne. Duchenne, like Galvani, focused his research on the field of electrophysiology [10]. Much more deliberately and systematically than Ure, and using living sub- jects, Duchenne was concerned to show that electrically charged rods could be used to mechanically produce the physi- cal signs of emotions on the face (Fig. 2). Like Ure, Duchenne believed that emotions could be made visible independent of the conscious feeling of the subject. And like both Ure and Aldini before him, Duchenne relied on spectacular visual dis- plays as proof of his claims. His research made use of what was, in the mid-1800s, a new and experimental visual technol- ogy: photography. His Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou Analyse électro-physiologique de l'expression des passions applicable à la pratique des arts plastiques (1862) included some of the earliest photographs published in book form [11].

This idea, that new technologies could be used to material- ize on the surface of the skin, and at the behest of the scientist, whatever emotions s/he is interested in studying, independent of the will of the subject or what s/he might actually be feeling, is a manifestation of the same set of scientific preoccupations that drove Aldini’s and Ure’s work [12]. In each case, these galvanic experimenters treated the human body like a puppet or automaton, relocating the agent of that body’s movements from its inside (the intention or consciousness of the subject being moved) to its outside (machines, or the will and techno- logical prowess of the scientist doing the moving).

Such attempts to stimulate mechanical movement in bodies found important parallels in more mainstream areas of scien- tific research—most significantly, in contemporaneous re- search on the reflex action. Foundational to this field were Marshall Hall’s experiments with the severed tails of newts in the 1820s, which in many ways represent a continuation of Galvani’s research on muscle contractions in the legs of dead frogs. Hall, too, found that a muscle could be made to contract even after dissection or death.

While experiments in galvanic reanimation were, even in the early 19th century, on the extreme edge of scientific re- search, they were nonetheless part of larger developments in this field. It is in the 19th century that earlier Vitalist under- standings of the body—which saw its movement and anima- tion as a product of “animal or vital spirits” [13]—were definitively superseded by a view of biology as a series of me- chanical processes.

Even in the early 19th century, such developments in medi- cal and scientific research were widely recognised as repre- sentative of, and a driving force behind, the wider cultural transformations then taking place. For Thomas Carlyle— writing at the same time Hall was undertaking his experiments with newts’ tails and Ure was attempting to reanimate the body of Clydesdale—the early 19th century was witnessing the start of the “Mechanical Age”:

“It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word,” he wrote: “Let us observe how the mechanical genius of our time has diffused itself into quite other provinces. Not the external and physical alone is now managed by machin- ery, but the internal and spiritual also. . . . Men are grown me- chanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand” [14].

For Carlyle, the human and the technological had become completely enmeshed, and machines themselves were no long- er seen simply as objects, but as a particular mode of thinking and perceiving.

Experiments in galvanic reanimation were a particularly at- tention-grabbing instance of the wider cultural transformations produced by mechanization taking place in the early 19th cen- tury. They fascinated popular and professional audiences alike because they made so strikingly visible the process of mecha- nization—of automated movement independent of the agency of the individual subject—that was in the process transforming life and experience in every cultural domain.

The experiments in galvanic reanimation by Aldini and Ure, like the later experiments in the electrophysiology of the emo- tions by Duchenne, relied on visual evidence to prove the suc- cess of their experiments: The proof of (re)animation was in the eye of the beholder, who could see a dead body made to move, to breathe, to express emotions by new technologies and machines, and independent of the life or will of the subject. The mingled fascination and fear about such developments is what gave them such a prominent position in the cultural imag- inary of the day. These dramatic displays made strikingly visi- ble the new 19th-century spectacle of the human body moved involuntarily like, and by, a machine. References and Notes *This article is based on a paper presented at the "Agency in Movement" sym- posium held by SymbioticA on 21 June 2013 at the University of Western Australia, Perth. 1. These spectacles were, in part, a response to the critique of Galvani’s theory of animal electricity by Alessandro Volta, who argued that the source of animal electricity was not intrinsic (or biological in origin) but extrinsic, caused by the two different metals used to conduct the current. 2. “Galvanism.” The European Magazine, and The London Review, Volume 43 (1803): p. 74. 3. Aldini’s experiment is often said to have been in the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. 4. Morus, Iwan Rhys. Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-19th-Century London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 5. Ure, Andrew. “Dr Ure’s Account of Experiments Made on the Body of an Executed Criminal,” The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature and the Arts. Volume 6 (1818-1819): p. 286. 6. Ibid. p. 289. 7. Ibid. p. 290. 8. Ibid. p. 290. 9. Morus, Iwan Rhys. Shocking Bodies: Life, Death and Electricity in Victorian England (Stroud: The History Press, 2011). 10. Duchenne’s interest in electrophysiology focused on the conductivity of neural pathways, which was foundational to the emergent field of neurology. 11. For an account of Duchenne’s contribution to the history of photography, see Josh Ellenbogen’s Reasoned and Unreasoned Images: The Photography of Bertillon, Galton, and Marey (Penn State University Press, 2012). 12. Aldini’s own experiments with medical electricity were not restricted to attempts to reanimate corpses: He had previously treated hospital patients suf- fering from “melancholia” by giving them an electric shock—an early form of electro-convulsive therapy. 13. Whytt, Robert. An Essay on the Vital and Other Involuntary Motions of Animals (Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour, and Neill, 1751), p. 9. 14. Thomas Carlyle, “A Mechanical Age.” (Edinburgh Review, 1829). Ac- cessed online, 16/12/2013: .

Dr. A Lo 1 � 1, now in London, latelv exhibited a: the hous� of Mr. llu�TER, some cu�ious expe­nm.ents on the body of a dog ne\\1 1y killed, by wh1c� the company then present were e�ceedingl r :astonished by the powcr5 of G:dvanism. 1�r:e headof the ani1nal. ,va., cut oft. The he:id and boJ y ,vere put _beside eac? other, on a tabl 0 previouslr rubbL,J "_Vlt� a 5o]��,on of am1noni:-,. 1\vo 'Ni rc- ·, co1nmu!HC�t1ng , \V 1th t�e Gal\" a!1ic trough, \�· ·rethen applied, t tlc one 1n the ear-, the other at ·the anus of the �··atl animal. No �ooner had those ap­ plicat�ons be�n m,��e, tl1an b?th head and body ,vere thrown into tnc n1ost animated muscular mo­ ticr?· . rfhe body started �P witb a 1novement by which Jt passed over the s1·ie of the t:1ble. The head equally n1ovcd; its Eps and tc.-e[h grinning v iolclt l y. A curio)� t y has Lec:1 <:->:pr(!SSL'.d to have d1c5e experiments tri;·d. on .:1 crin1inal newly exe­ cuted. Dr. r\ in I� 1 has con1n1tmiLat�d his disco­ v�ries, in an ing\·.1;ous pap�·r, to the Royal So­ ciety. l{e is tiGon tc; puLli�h an Englis.h \.\-·ork on this �ubje�t.

· 1 Document #2 of 3

Doc 1 and 2_Reanimation Questions
StephensE_Dead Eyes Open