He had achieved widespread fame and was the talk of the town. Images of him sitting calmly in a room filled with foot electrical sparks were made for Hollywood. The next time one watches a Frankenstein movie, think of Luigi Galvani and the joy he must have felt when he thought that he had discovered the secret of life.
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Toggle navigation. Basket 0. How did you hear about SciFri Book Club? If you chose "Other source" describe here:. Many medical texts often served dual purposes, containing both information on practices and treatments as well as a catalog of instruments for sale, explains Shaner.
Courtesy of the New York Academy of Medicine. In the same vein of searching for the force that powers life, scientists and society troubled over distinguishing states of life and death—especially in victims of drowning. Doctors published manuals on signs of human death, while societies popped up across Europe that disseminated information about how to resurrect those who drowned, such as the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned. A device such as the bellows and pipes depicted above were used for resuscitation.
Carpue, The illustrations above shows a kind of skin grafting, reconstruction procedure of a soldier who had lost his nose. Performed by English surgeon J. Carpue, skin from the forehead is sliced and turned down over the nose to restore the lost tissue.
The three pages show the different steps and healing process of the operation. Johannes Ritter even carried out electrical experiments on himself to explore how electricity affected the sensations.
The idea that electricity really was the stuff of life and that it might be used to bring back the dead was certainly a familiar one in the kinds of circles in which the young Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley — the author of Frankenstein — moved. The English poet, and family friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was fascinated by the connections between electricity and life.
Others took the idea very seriously. In the English surgeon John Abernethy made much the same sort of claim in the annual Hunterian lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons. His lecture sparked a violent debate with fellow surgeon William Lawrence.
Abernethy claimed that electricity was or was like the vital force while Lawrence denied that there was any need to invoke a vital force at all to explain the processes of life. Both Mary and Percy Shelley certainly knew about this debate — Lawrence was their doctor.
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