There have been any number of books, some reviewed in Magonia, which have examined the story of Frankenstein’s ‘creature’ from various perspectives: as an aspect of folklore and popular belief, as a literary theme, as a popular cultural icon. This book looks at Mary Shelley’s masterpiece as a presentation of the medical and scientific controversies of the era in which it was written.
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For a woman brought up in the early nineteenth-century Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley had a remarkably broad scientific education. Her parents were William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Rushton notes that “She grew up in a household that was interested in science and medicine”, and that although she never knew her mother, she was aware of her scientific interests through reading her writings and her belief that science was a fit topic for a woman to be engaged with.
Mary’s interests in examining the nature of life and the borderlands between life and death may have been stimulated by her mother’s attempted suicide, throwing herself into the Thames, only to be rescued and ‘returned to life’, against her will, describing the action as being “inhumanly brought back to life and misery”. There was no clear distinction between life and death. There was widespread, and justified, fear of being buried alive which was so great that some doctors considered that bodily putrefaction was the only sure indication of death.
In her novel Mary Shelley gives no indication of the method that Frankenstein uses to give life to his creation, other then a ‘life force’ but it has been assumed from the beginning that this life force was electricity, and this has certainly been shown in most film adaptations of the story. In an introduction to a later edition of the book, she seems more explicit that this is the case.
GALVANI'S EXPERIMENTS AT REVIVING DEAD ANIMALS WITH ELECTRICITY
The idea that electricity provided the vital ‘spark’ that animated the body was promoted by Luigi Galvani, who experiment passing an electrical charge to frogs-legs, making them spark and twitch. His nephew Giovanni Aldini took the idea further. Ruston describes the often gruesome attempts to revive cadavers, often using the bodies of recently executed murderers, as well as attempt to revive suicides and drowning victims by such methods.
In writing about these experiments, Aldini says “the love of truth and the desire to throw some light on the system of Galvanism overcame all my repulsion”, and Frankenstein uses almost the same phrase: “I was unable to overcome my repugnance to the task which was enjoined me,” when attempting to make a female companion for his creation.
Two prominent physicians who contributed to the debate on what constituted ‘life’ and the source of bodily animation both had connections with Mary and Percy Shelley; John Abernethy and William Lawrence. The debate between the two was fierce. Abernethy was the older conservative figure who saw some external force being necessary for the creation of life. It was something that was additional to the physical body and gave it its vitality.
William Lawrence, who was for a time Percy Shelley’s doctor, argued against this, saying that the body’s own physical mechanisms provided its animation and it require no external vital force. This idea was seen as dangerously close to atheism, and Lawrence was dismissed from his role as a lecturer at the Royal College of Surgeons, and forces to withdraw all his earlier lectures. Clearly, he learned all too well the lessons of what happens to people who rock the boat, ending up as Surgeon-General to Queen Victoria!
A key element in the Frankenstein story, and in the medical life of the period was the process of obtaining cadavers for dissection by medical students, and for creating the Creature. Along with fears of being buried alive, there was the fear that even if truly dead when consigned to the grave, one might be then dug up to provide such specimens. In the novel Frankenstein describes the churchyard “merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life”. He sees his experiments as a way of “bestowing” life on inanimate matter.
The fears and problems that Mary Shelley’s novel raised at the time of its publication still seem to have resonances today, from fears about stem-cell experiments to controversies over the retention of body parts for further research. The author concludes the main part of her book by observing that “Perhaps anger at Frankenstein’s medical objectivity – his lack of care for the ethics of his project – is one of the many lasting influences that Mary Shelley’s novel has had on the public.
This is a fascinating, if sometimes rather grisly, account of the scientific and cultural background to the writing of Frankenstein, with a fascinating, and sometimes rather grisly, selection of illustrations.
- John Rimmer
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