Vad inspirerade Mary Shelleys "Frankenstein"?

Experimentet gjordes av italiensk läkare och fysiker Luigi Galvani medan han arbetade vid University of Bologna . Experimentet var ett resultat av Galvanis intresse för Medicinsk el , 6 november 1787 .

Att citera från wikipedia artikeln -

The beginning of Galvani's experiments with bioelectricity has a popular legend which says that Galvani was slowly skinning a frog at a table where he had been conducting experiments with static electricity by rubbing frog skin. Galvani's assistant touched an exposed sciatic nerve of the frog with a metal scalpel that had picked up a charge. At that moment, they saw sparks and the dead frog's leg kicked as if in life. The observation made Galvani the first investigator to appreciate the relationship between electricity and animation — or life. This finding provided the basis for the new understanding that the impetus behind muscle movement was electrical energy carried by a liquid (ions), and not air or fluid as in earlier balloonist theories.

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YtterligaredetaljeromGalvanisexperimentkanhänvisasfrånboken"En historia av elektrokardiografi" tillgänglig på Google Böcker .

    

Detta var ett experiment som gjordes av Luigi Galvani år 1781, diskuterat i den här artikeln :

On January 26, 1781, while dissecting a frog near a static electricity machine, Galvani's assistant touched a scalpel to a nerve in its leg, and the frog's leg jumped. Galvani repeated this and several other experiments, observing the same violent muscle spasms. He also noticed that frog legs occasionally twitched when they were hung from a brass hook and allowed to touch an iron trellis, so Galvani joined a length of each metal together to form a brass and iron arc that made the leg muscles contract when touched.

But where did the electricity come from?

Galvani, who called it "animal electricity," believed it resided in the frog itself.

...

One of Galvani's earliest readers was Italian physicist Alessandro Volta. Volta already had earned an imposing reputation as the discoverer of electrical capacitance, potential, and charge, and also discovered and was the first to isolate methane gas. He replicated Galvani's experiments and helped popularize his work.

Yet Volta reached very different conclusions. He believed the electricity came from the two metals used in the arc, and that the frog was acting as the conductor. Within the year, he replaced the frog's leg with brine-soaked paper, detected a current, and challenged Galvani.

The scientific world divided into two camps, animal electricity versus dissimilar metals.

...

So how did this influence a young Mary Shelly and lead her to compose one of the most widely read novels of all time, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus"?

Galvani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini, was a fierce partisan of animal electricity, yet he did not ignore Volta's pile. Aldini used it to tour the capitals of Europe and demonstrate the medical benefits of electricity -- or not. His demonstrations involved jolting corpses with electricity and making decapitated criminals sit upright.

Aldini's most famous exhibition took place in 1803 at the Newgate Prison in London, U.K. He inserted metal rods into the mouth and ear of the recently executed corpse of murderer George Foster. "The Newgate Calendar," a book about the criminals of Newgate Prison, described what happened next: "On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws of the deceased criminal began to quiver, and the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and one eye was actually opened. In the subsequent part of the process the right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion."

Not surprisingly, some observers thought Aldini was bringing Foster back to life.

Mary Shelley knew all about Galvani, Volta and Aldini. Humphry Davy and William Nicholson -- the era's leading electrical researchers -- were friends of her father. In 1816, at age 19, she spent the summer in Geneva, Switzerland with Lord Byron and her future husband, Percy Shelley. The season was cold and rainy, and they spent many evenings around the fire, reading German ghost stories and discussing electricity's potential to reanimate corpses.

It must have seemed like she was merely peering into the near future to imagine that one day, a Victor Frankenstein might succeed in reanimating an assembly of body parts.

Som nämnts på s. 72 av Shocking Frogs: Galvani, Volta och Neuroscience Electric Origins , var laboratoriet hemma i Bologna:

The possibility of carrying out the experiments at any time he could spare from his professional duties may have played a role in his decision to establish a laboratory in his house, instead of using the facilities offered by the equipment hosted in the rooms of the Institute. ... A home laboratory was not infrequent in eighteenth-century Bologna.

Det finns en samtida illustration av hans laboratorium på s. 73 (även synlig i Google Böcker länken ovan), och en annan schematisk illustration finns på den här sidan :

    

Arthur C. Clarke (i Mysteries AZ) skrev att Mary Shelley en gång deltog i en föreläsning av den viktorianska forskaren Andrew Crosse, som hade satt elektriska strömmar genom olika kristaller och blev förvånad över att finna små filament så småningom utskjutande som i sin tur utvecklade till små insekter. Den aktuella insekten namnges efter Crosse; till denna dag är det nomenklaturen är Acarus Crossi. Clarke höll att hon var så imponerad av exploateringen av denna "galna vetenskapsman" som skapade livet i ett laboratorium som efter en särskilt livlig mardröm inspirerades hon att skriva Frankenstein.