{"id":3387,"date":"2021-10-27T10:57:09","date_gmt":"2021-10-27T10:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3387"},"modified":"2021-11-10T11:02:14","modified_gmt":"2021-11-10T11:02:14","slug":"chemistry-off-the-leash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3387","title":{"rendered":"Chemistry off the leash"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading Sarah Rushton’s The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein for New Scientist, 27 October 2021<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1817, in a book entitled Experiments on Life and its Basic Forces, the German natural philosopher Carl August Weinhold explained how he had removed the brain from a living kitten, and then inserted a mixture of zinc and silver into the empty skull. The animal \u201craised its head, opened its eyes, looked straight ahead with a glazed expression, tried to creep, collapsed several times, got up again, with obvious effort, hobbled about, and then fell down exhausted.\u201d<\/p>\n

The following year, Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein captivated a public not at all startled by its themes, but hungry for horripilating thrills and avid for the author\u2019s take on arguably the most pressing scientific issue of the day. What was the nature of this strange zone that had opened up between the worlds of the living and the dead?<\/p>\n

Three developments had muddied this once obvious and clear divide: in revolutionary France, the flickers of life exhibited by freshly guillotined heads; in Edinburgh, the black market in fresh (and therefore dissectable) corpses; and on the banks of busy British rivers, attempts (encouraged by the Royal Humane Society) to breathe life into the recently drowned.<\/p>\n

Ruston covers this familiar territory well, then goes much further, revealing Mary Shelley\u2019s superb and iron grip on the scientific issues of her day. Frankenstein was written just as life\u2019s material basis was emerging. Properties once considered unique to living things were turning out to be common to all matter, both living and unliving. Ideas about electricity offer a startling example.<\/p>\n

For more than a decade, from 1780 to the early 1790s, it had seemed to researchers that animal life was driven by a newly discovered life source, dubbed \u2018animal electricity\u2019. This was a notion cooked up by the Bologna-born physician Luigi Galvani to explain a discovery he had made in 1780 with his wife Lucia. They had found that the muscles of dead frogs\u2019 legs twitch when struck by an electrical spark. Galvani concluded that living animals possessed their own kind of electricity. The distinction between ‘animal electricity\u2019 and metallic electricity didn\u2019t hold for long, however. By placing discs of different metals on his tongue, and feeling the jolt, Volta showed that electricity flows between two metals through biological tissue.<\/p>\n

Galvani\u2019s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, took these experiments further in spectacular, theatrical events in which corpses of hanged murderers attempted to stand or sit up, opened their eyes, clenched their fists, raised their arms and beat their hands violently against the table.<\/p>\n

As Ruston points out, Frankenstein\u2019s anguished description of the moment his Creature awakes \u201csounds very like the description of Aldini\u2019s attempts to resuscitate 26-year-old George Forster\u201d, hanged for the murder of his wife and child in January 1803.<\/p>\n

Frankenstein cleverly clouds the issue of exactly what form of electricity animates the creature\u2019s corpse. Indeed, the book (unlike the films) is much more interested in the Creature\u2019s chemical composition than in its animation by a spark.<\/p>\n

There are, Ruston shows, many echoes of Humphry Davy\u2019s 1802 Course of Chemistry in Frankenstein. It\u2019s not for nothing that Frankenstein\u2019s tutor Professor Waldman tells him that chemists \u201chave acquired new and almost unlimited powers\u201d.<\/p>\n

An even more intriguing contemporary development was the ongoing debate between the surgeon John Abernethy and his student William Lawrence in the Royal College of Surgeons. Abernethy claimed that electricity was the \u201cvital principle\u201d underpinning the behaviour of organic matter. Nonsense, said Lawrence, who saw in living things a principle of organisation. Lawrence was an early materialist, and his patent atheism horrified many. The Shelleys were friendly with Lawrence, and helped him weather the scandal engulfing him.<\/p>\n

The Science of Life and Death is both an excellent introduction and a serious contribution to understanding Frankenstein. Through Ruston\u2019s eyes, we see how the first science fiction novel captured the imagination of its public.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Sarah Rushton’s The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein for New Scientist, 27 October 2021 In 1817, in a book entitled Experiments on Life and its Basic Forces, the German natural philosopher Carl August Weinhold explained how he … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[373,935,790,934,232,86],"class_list":["post-3387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-chemistry","tag-frankenstein","tag-gothic","tag-mary-shelley","tag-new-scientist","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3387"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3388,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3387\/revisions\/3388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}