The Real Dr. Frankenstein
Article by Bindi Lavelle

We are all familiar with Dr. Frankenstein and his monster; they are huge figures within the horror genre not to mention, pop culture icons. Mary Shelly developed her novel, as a grim warning about where science could take us, inspired by the experiments occurring in the universities at the time. One series of experiments and the clearest choice for comparison is the work of Giovanni Aldini. Aldini, the nephew of Luigi Galvani, whose early experiments with electricity, not only made frogs legs twitch, but also lead to the study of bioelectricity and the nervous system; the key difference between their work was that Giovanni did not stop with dead animals.
An advocate of galvanism (the contraction of a muscle that is stimulated by an electric current, named after Luigi Galvani), Aldini used electricity not only on mental patients but also in highly theatrical displays on dead animals and human body parts before an audience of peers.
However, Giovanni was not satisfying with entertaining his university buddies with twitching dogs’ heads; Aldini, like some other surgeons at the time, believed galvanisation could re-animate and possibly revive a corpse.
But in order to revive a corpse, Aldini needed a dead body. And when he came across the strapping prisoner, George Forster, Aldini waited like a vulture for his execution. Following the hanging of Forster, Aldini swiftly took custody of the body and assembled an audience of academics and general public to watch as he attempted to prove his theory.
What followed was dramatic but not what the doctor had expected: He connected 2 rods to various parts of the body, causing much the same results shown in his earlier, so Aldini boosted the power and continued to move the rods around. The body thrashed around and violently convulsed while the eyes rolled back, which while visually impressive, did not prove his theory.
The experiments of Giovanni Aldini not only inspired Mary Shelly but other surgeons; and it just goes to show sometimes the facts are scarier than fiction.