Elephants on Acid (2 page)

Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, took the initiative and pioneered the art of corpse reanimation. He promoted his publicity-shy uncle’s work by embarking on a tour of Europe in which he offered audiences the greatest (or, at least, most stomach-wrenching) show they’d ever seen—the electrification of a human body.

Aldini’s most celebrated demonstration occurred in London on January 17, 1803, before an audience of the Royal College of Surgeons. The body of twenty-six-year-old George Forster, executed for the murder of his wife and child, was whisked straight from the gallows to Aldini and his waiting crowd. Aldini then attached parts of Forster’s body to the poles of a 120-plate copper-and-zinc battery.

First the face. Aldini placed wires on the mouth and ear. The jaw muscles quivered, and the murderer’s features twisted in a rictus of pain. The left eye opened as if to gaze upon his torturer. Aldini played the body like a marionette, moving wires from one body part to another, making the back arch, the arms beat the table, and the lungs breathe in and out. For the grand finale he hooked one wire to the ear and plunged the other up the rectum. Forster’s corpse broke into a hideous dance. The
London Times
wrote of the scene: “The right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion. It appeared to the uninformed part of the bystanders as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to life.”

A few days later Aldini continued his London tour with a show at a Dr. Pearson’s lecture room. There he unveiled the decapitated head of an ox and extended its tongue out of its mouth by means of a hook. Then he turned on the current. The tongue retracted so rapidly that it tore itself off the hook, while simultaneously “a loud noise issued from the mouth by the absorption of air, attended by violent contortions of the whole head and eyes.” Science had at last created an electric belching ox head.

An even more spectacular demonstration occurred on November 4, 1818, in Glasgow, when Scottish chemist (and later industrial capitalist) Andrew Ure connected the corpse of the executed murderer Matthew Clydesdale to a massive 270-plate battery.
Twice the power, twice the fun.
When he linked the spinal marrow to the sciatic nerve, “every muscle in the body was immediately agitated with convulsive movements, resembling a violent shuddering from cold.” Connecting the phrenic nerve to the diaphragm provoked “full, nay, laborious breathing . . . The chest heaved, and fell; the belly was protruded, and again collapsed, with the relaxing and retiring diaphragm.” Finally Ure joined the poles of the battery to an exposed nerve in the forehead and to the heel: “Every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair, anguish, and ghastly smiles, united their hideous expression in the murderer’s face, surpassing far the wildest representations of a Fuseli or a Kean.” Some spectators fainted, and others fled the lecture hall in terror.

Men of science such as Aldini and Ure were confident galvanic electricity could do far more than provide a macabre puppet show. They promised that, under the right circumstances, it could restore life itself. Ure wrote of his experiment on the murderer Clydesdale, “There is a probability that life might have been restored. This event, however little desirable with a murderer, and perhaps contrary to law, would yet have been pardonable in one instance, as it would have been highly honourable and useful to science.”

As late as the 1840s, English physicist William Sturgeon (inventor of the first electromagnets) described electrifying the bodies of four drowned young men in an attempt to bring them back to life. He failed but felt sure he would have succeeded had he only reached the scene sooner.

Mary Shelley never indicated on whom she had based her character of Victor Frankenstein, but the experimental electri- fication of corpses was undeniably a source of inspiration for her. In the introduction to the 1831 edition of
Frankenstein
, she wrote that the idea for the novel came to her in June 1816, after she overheard Lord Byron and Percy Shelley discussing recent galvanic experiments and speculating about the possibility that electricity could restore life to inanimate matter. That night she had a nightmare about a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. 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.” And
¹
so, from a journey of discovery that began with a twitching frog, Victor Frankenstein and his monster were born.

During the early nineteenth century many researchers repeated the galvanic experiment of electrifying a corpse. But only one man claimed to have used the technique to restore life to the dead. His name was Karl August Weinhold.

Weinhold published a work,
Experiments on Life and its Primary Forces through the Use of Experimental Physiology
, in which he detailed an experiment that, supposedly, succeeded in revivifying a decapitated kitten.

The procedure went as follows. First, he took a three-week-old kitten and removed its head. Next, he extracted the spinal cord and completely emptied the hollow of the spinal column with a sponge attached to a screw probe. Finally, he filled the hollow with an amalgam of silver and zinc. The metals acted as a battery, generating an electric current that immediately brought the kitten to life—so he said. Its heart revived, and for a few minutes it pranced and hopped around the room. Weinhold wrote, “Hopping around was once again stimulated after the opening in the spinal column was closed. The animal jumped strongly before it completely wore down.” To modern readers, his creation may sound disturbingly like a mutant version of the Energizer Bunny.

Historians believe that Weinhold performed this experiment, but the consensus is that he lied about the results. After all, a kitten lacking a brain and spinal column is not going to dance around a room, no matter how much electricity you pump into it. As medical historian Max Neuburger delicately put it, “His experiments illustrate the fantasy of his thinking and observations.”

Weinhold probably would have preferred to use a human corpse instead of a kitten, but in 1804 German authorities had banned the further use of human bodies in galvanic experiments. The public, it seemed, had lost its stomach for such postmortem grotesqueries. Thus restricted, Weinhold focused his efforts on animals. He was willing to break the laws of nature, but not of the German state.

Weinhold’s personal life matched the strangeness of his experiment. His contemporaries described him as peculiarly unattractive. His long arms and legs contrasted with his small head, and his voice sounded feminine. He had no beard. He made many enemies on account of his campaign to eliminate poverty by forcibly infibulating indigent men—
infibulate
meaning to sew the foreskin shut. Whether this crusade was in any way inspired by the deformity of his own genitals, a condition discovered by a medical examiner after his death, is not known. A modern biographer of his noted, “Weinhold seems to have cared little for what others thought about him, and he was not afraid to propose ideas that would cause large segments of the population to despise or detest him.”

If ever there was a real-life Dr. Frankenstein, it was Weinhold. But did he actually serve as a model for Shelley’s character? Historians have speculated about this possibility, but it is unlikely. For one thing,Weinhold published his work in 1817, a year after Shelley began work on her novel.

Perhaps horror fans should be thankful that Shelley wasn’t
²
aware of Weinhold. Otherwise she might have been tempted to change her novel to fit his story. Imagine a mob of villagers armed with pitchforks and torches chasing after a headless zombie kitten. It just wouldn’t have been the same.

“Life! I have created life!” Andrew Crosse gazed down at the small white insects crawling in the liquid-filled basin. Then he threw back his head and laughed maniacally.

In a Hollywood version of history, that would have been Crosse’s reaction to the unusual discovery he made in 1836. But in real life his reaction was probably more along the lines of, “I say, how astonishing.”

Crosse was a Victorian gentleman who lived in a secluded mansion in rural Somerset, England. From an early age he had been fascinated by electrical phenomena, an interest his family fortune allowed him to indulge. He filled his home with all manner of electrical experiments, including more than a mile of copper wire strung between the trees on his estate to capture the power of lightning. His superstitious neighbors, seeing the lightning crackle around the wires and hearing the sharp snap and bang of electric batteries discharging, suspected he was completely mad.

Among his experiments was an attempt to unite the sciences of geology and galvanism by using electrical current to induce the growth of quartz crystals. In his music room he fashioned a device that continuously dripped an acidic solution over an electrified stone. Crosse hoped crystals would form on the stone, but this never happened. What happened instead was much stranger. His own words tell the story well:

On the fourteenth day from the commencement of this experiment I observed through a lens a few small whitish excrescences or nipples, projecting from about the middle of the electrified stone. On the eighteenth day these projections enlarged, and struck out seven or eight filaments, each of them longer than the hemisphere on which they grew. On the twenty-sixth day these appearances assumed the form of a perfect insect, standing erect on a few bristles which formed its tail. Till this period I had no notion that these appearances were other than an incipient mineral formation. On the twenty-eighth day these little creatures moved their legs. I must now say that I was not a little astonished. After a few days they detached themselves from the stone, and moved about at pleasure.

For weeks Crosse watched perplexed as insects multiplied and squirmed around his experiment until they numbered in the hundreds. He repeated the experiment and got the same result—more insects. But being the respectable Englishman that he was, he didn’t want to leap to conclusions. Specifically, he hesitated to claim that his experiment had somehow brought forth a new form of life. But a visiting publisher got wind of what had happened and claimed this for him, announcing the news in the local paper under the headline
EXTRAORDINARY EXPERIMENT
. The media dubbed the insects
Acarus crossii
, in his honor.

Once word of the experiment got out, Crosse’s neighbors decided he was not only mad, but quite possibly a devil worshipper as well. In the ensuing months he received numerous death threats. He was called a Frankenstein and a “reviler of our holy religion.” Local farmers claimed his insects had escaped and were ravaging their crops, and a priest performed an exorcism on the hill above his house.

Ironically, though his electrical-insect experiments occurred long after the publication of Shelley’s novel, it is possible that Crosse was the original role model for the character of Victor Frankenstein. Twenty-two years earlier, in 1814, he had delivered a lecture in London on “Electricity and the Elements.” He described the network of wires strung around his country estate that allowed him to conduct bolts of lightning into his house. Sitting in the audience was a young Mary Shelley. His speech reportedly made a great impression on her.

Meanwhile, in 1836, the British scientific community didn’t know what to make of Crosse’s discovery. A few, such as Cambridge geology professor Adam Sedgwick, angrily denounced it. But others were intrigued. The surgeon William Henry Weekes repeated the experiment, and after a year claimed to have obtained “five perfect insects.” But four other researchers—John George Children, Golding Bird, Henry Noad, and Alfred Smee—repeated it and obtained nothing. Likewise, the esteemed biologist Richard Owen examined the insects and pronounced them nothing more than common cheese mites. That judgment pretty much ended the debate over the electrical
Acarus crossii
. They were downgraded from an extraordinary discovery to a common pest.

More than one hundred years later, in 1953, two researchers at the University of Chicago performed an experiment in a similar vein. Stanley Miller and Harold Urey combined water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in a flask, and subjected this chemical brew to periodic electrical discharges.
³
Their goal was to mimic the atmospheric conditions thought to exist on the primitive earth, to see whether the building blocks of life would emerge. They did. Within a week Miller and Urey found high concentrations of organic compounds, including many of the amino acids that form proteins in living cells. However, they reported no sign of cheese mites. Andrew Crosse would have been disappointed.

The weighted blade of the guillotine crashes down and with a whack severs the neck. Another head rolls into the executioner’s basket.

The French Revolution and the decades following it were productive years for the guillotine. But as the heads piled higher, a disturbing question formed in the minds of onlookers. Did those decapitated heads retain consciousness for any length of time? Were they aware of what had happened to them? Amateur researchers tried yelling at the heads to see whether they could get a response, but such efforts proved futile. However, they did inspire men of science to ponder a more far-reaching question: Could a head be made to survive isolated from the body? Having thought of the question, they were determined to find an answer.

In 1812 the French physiologist Julian Jean Cesar Legallois speculated that an isolated head might survive if provided with a supply of blood, but it wasn’t until 1857 that his theory was put to the test. Dr. Charles Édouard Brown-Séquard lopped off the head of a dog, drained its blood, and after ten minutes injected fresh blood back into the arteries. Soon, he reported, the severed head stirred to life, displaying what appeared to be voluntary movements in the eyes and face. This continued for a few minutes until the head once again died, accompanied by “tremors of anguish.”