Giovanni Aldini: The Mad Scientist Who Helped Inspire “Frankenstein”
Wikimedia CommonsGiovanni Aldini believed that electrical currents might help revive the dead.
Giovanni Aldini was considered fairly ingenious for the early 1800s. Known for experimenting on the dead, he found that a subject’s face contorted after he swabbed the subject’s ears with saltwater, attached metal wiring to each ear, and then connected that wiring to a battery.
It was remarkable for the era, especially since the subject was long dead, and there was only a head that was on display — with no body attached.
In his youth, the future physician had watched his uncle perform odd experiments. A doctor himself, Luigi Galvani had noted that electrical currents placed on dead frogs made them move and thought that this same method might work to raise humans from the dead. Naturally, his nephew never forgot this — and then tried to do just that as an adult.
Growing up in Bologna, Italy, Giovanni Aldini initially spent his time on frogs like his uncle. He studied medicine at the University of Bologna, with his research expanding to larger animals like sheep and cows. Eventually veering into the realm of a mad scientist, he finally tried to reanimate a person.
Wikimedia CommonsAn illustration of Giovanni Aldini performing experiments on an oxen.
Aldini had already succeeded at getting dead animals to move around, roll their eyeballs, and wag their tongues by applying electrical impulses to the corpses using a battery. He was now determined to try as much on a human being — by borrowing a fresh body from the local executioner.
But he soon realized an issue: Italy was executing prisoners by beheading them, which meant that the bodies were often drained of blood and thus emptied of any pathways for electricity to travel through. Aldini thus took to England, where prisoners were sent to the gallows, and ordered one newly hanged criminal to be delivered to the Royal College of Surgeons.
Attaching his probes to the corpse of a man named George Foster, Aldini became mad scientist incarnate when he got Foster to open his left eye, shake his jaw, and seemingly take a breath. The doctor considered his experiment a failure because Foster didn’t rise from the dead. But in 19th-century Italy, this was an utterly miraculous feat to Aldini’s peers.
Perhaps most astounding is that news of this macabre experimentation reached the ears of a young girl named Mary Shelley — who would be so entranced by the tale that it helped inspire her book Frankenstein.
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