History of Medicine

MEDICINE IN THE TIME OF FRANKENSTEIN

     Exactly two hundred years ago, in 1818, one of the world’s great bestsellers, Frankenstein, hit the London bookstores. The

Mary Shelly, by Richard Rothwell (Wikipedia)

author of the book, anonymous at first, turned out to be a woman, Mary Shelly.

     In the story a Swiss youth, Victor Frankenstein, while studying chemistry and physiology in Germany, asks himself “whence…did the principle of life proceed?”. His discoveries led him to create a living being out of an assembly of body parts. He learns later that his creation has intelligence, language, and emotions, and is so alone in the world that he begs Frankenstein to create a female companion. I won’t go further, but the story is germane in today’s world of cloning, genetic engineering, and intelligent robots.

     In a preface to the 1831 edition Shelly writes, “The event on which this fiction is founded has been supposed, by Dr. [Erasmus] Darwin and some of the physiological writers of Germany, as not of impossible occurrence”. In another paragraph she mentioned experiments by Darwin on “vermicelli” that had been induced to move. She probably meant vorticella, a bell-shaped ciliated protozoan, to which Darwin restored motion after adding water to its dehydrated state.

     Restoration of life was on her mind.

     Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, was arguably the most prominent physician in England at the time. He had an

Erasmus Darwin, by Joseph Wright (Wikipedia)

extensive practice in and around Lichfield in the Midlands and was famous for his diagnostic and prognostic skills, his kindly manner, and his broad scientific interests. He was a founder of the famous “Lunar Society”, a collection of business and scientifically oriented men who exerted wide influence in British Enlightenment thought. Darwin penned two works that probably influenced Shelly, Zoonomia and The Temple of Nature.

     In the preface to Zoonomia Darwin laments that scientists (to use a modern word) too often thought of laws of the body in terms of mechanics and chemistry, forgetting that the “spirit of animation” was its essential characteristic. He defines “sensorium” as consisting of the brain, nerves, muscles, sensory organs and “the living principle, or spirit of animation, that resides throughout the body”. The “living principle” was an ethereal spirit or fluid residing in the brain, nerve, and muscle tissues that was necessary for motion, or for life itself. It flowed through nerves in a poorly defined way. The idea was championed by the Swiss scholar, Albrecht von Haller, and was not new with Darwin. The vorticella that regain life appear in The Temple of Nature, briefly.

     In 1791 Luigi Galvani, a professor in Bologna, startled the scientific world by

Luigi Galvani, artist unknown (Wikipedia)

publishing the summary of a decade of work on effects of electricity in biological subjects, showing that nerves conducted an electric “fluid”. He showed as well that the charge did not spread beyond nerve channels because of their insulating sheath of lipid material. The idea of electrical “fluid” conduction by nerves eventually replaced the ethereal fluid. For human experiments Galvani’s nephew, John Aldini, raced to the scaffold immediately after executions. “On the first application of the process to the face the jaw 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. It appeared…as if the wretched man was on the eve of being restored to life.”(Med Phys J, 9:195, 1803) The journal editor indicates that this technique might be useful in reviving victims of “apparent death” by drowning or asphyxiation. The idea of reviving the recently dead was certainly considered feasible.

     In Shelly’s novel the only sentence that describes bringing the creature to life is, “…I collected the instruments of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet” (italics mine). Presumably electricity played a role, but the text is vague.

     Electricity, or “Galvinism”, became popular as a treatment for all sorts of diseases and conditions. Tingling or outright shocks were something a patient could feel, after all. Conditions treated ranged from blindness and deafness to urinary calculi, insanity, and, of course, various forms of muscular paralysis. Treatment

devices and techniques proliferated, though were rarely properly evaluated.

Electrotherapy apparatus. The columns are of alternating silver and zinc discs in 
dilute HCL, creating a current (Voltaic pile). The wires lead to a metal clamp on 
the head. (London Medical and Physical J. 7: 528-40, 1802)

     It is probable that Mary’s husband, Percy, influenced her thought. Though primarily a poet Percy was intensely interested in science, and Mary remembered accompanying him to a public lecture on Galvinism. A close friend and mentor of Percy was Dr. James Lind, a cousin of the James Lind associated with scurvy. Percy’s Lind was widely traveled and corresponded with several intellectuals of the day. His library was said to resemble an alchemist’s lab and he was probably the model for Frankenstein’s chemistry professor. Lind undoubtedly guided Percy’s reading.

     The “spirit of animation” as a concept lasted for a while but inevitably gave way to developments in chemistry and physiology later in the century. Electrotherapy suffered a similar decline. Mary Shelly’s novel has never been out of print, however, and is perhaps more pertinent today than it was in her time.

SOURCES

Simili, R. “Two Special Doctors: Erasmus Darwin and Luigi Galvani”, in The Genius of Erasmus Darwin, Smith and Arnott, eds. 2005; Ashgate.

Pfeiffer, CJ. The Art and Practice of Western Medicine in the Early Nineteenth Century. 1985, McFarland & Co.

Finger, S. Origins of Neuroscience. 1994; Oxford U Press.

Goulding, C. “The Real Doctor Frankenstein?”. J Roy Soc Med 2002; 95: 257-9.

Bresadola, M. “Medicine and Science in the Life of Luigi Galvani” Brain Res Bull 1998; 46(5): 367-80.

Medical and Physical Journal 1803; 9: 195 (on Aldini’s experiments)

Darwin, E. Zoonomia (1794), Section II,2.  and The Temple of Nature (1804), p 36.