From Clouds to the Brain. Celine Cherici
and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter. [SHE 18, pp. 75–76]11
Shelley’s text is not without ambivalence on the technical aspects. As mentioned above, her father was a supporter of galvanism. Her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), took part in lively debates, notably with Dr. William Lawrence (1783–1867), on the physical origins of life and the possibility of sparks bringing the dead back to life. The novel Frankenstein represents the fascination for the possibility of artificially creating life, but also, and perhaps above all, a surpassing of the dualism present in the fact of animating human automatons, insofar as the creature is not a machine but possesses a consciousness embodied in its matter. Mary Shelley, in a holism and materialism in which spirit is generated by matter, linked the organic parts from which the creature is formed, coming from different criminals, and their influence on consciousness. From the project of distinguishing the stages that range from life to death, the powerful myth of making life or giving it to organic matter in its modern, technical and progressive version, represented in the Frankenstein epic where materialism is next to the technical power of Man, was born:
From the suggestion of these experiments came a wide range of Gothic literature, especially in Germany, England and America, of which the most famous expression, but also the most open to multiple interpretations, was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. [FRE 14, p. 254, author’s translation]
Thus the exploration of the possibilities of reanimating matter had clearly taken hold of many experimenters in medical electricity. The voltaic pile, symbol of major technical progress, made the hand of the modern Prometheus powerful. Works of fiction on these issues were not uncommon and some can be considered gems of the genre. Here is an excerpt from a play, published in 1854, symbolizing the fascination and fear of galvanism but also the human ambiguity of its position in nature. The scene takes place in Bologna, in 1797:
(Galvani alone, sitting by the table.) Bringing the dead back to life! Recalling the divine breath in an inanimate body! O thought of breaking the brain! A thought that contains a hundred times more pride than it took to lose the first man! Giving life to the dead! But it is to want to correct the work of God; to want to be God himself! And yet, it is certain that since the earth has been turning, there has been a misunderstanding between the Creator and his noblest creature: that one should die when one has reached the limits of extreme old age, when the springs of the organism are worn out, one understands it: this is the universal law; but in the prime of life, in the flower of youth, to die! To die altogether is a nonsense that God did not commit. [AND 54, p. 3, author’s translation]
In the rest of the story, a murder and a galvanic resurrection are staged during which a female character stands at one end of a semi-organic circuit with a Leyden jar and transmits the electric fluid to her lover’s lifeless body, under the instructions of the doctor [AND 54, p. 123].
Another renowned author, who was not insensitive to the electric imaginary and the Promethean culture that emerged from it, is Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). An assiduous reader of the Medico-Chirurgical Journal; or, London Medical and Surgical Review edited by Dr. James Johnson (1777–1845) and published between 1820 and 1847, and of the famous medical journal The Lancet, he dispersed in his tales and essays episodes of galvanism or dead people coming back to life, not without a certain irony.
In his 1844 short story “The Premature Burial”, he captures the societal anguish of being buried alive and emphasizes the galvanic apparatus as a diagnostic tool for death:
The mention of the galvanic battery, nevertheless, recalls to my memory a well known and very extraordinary case in point, where its action proved the means of restoring to animation a young attorney of London, who had been interred for two days. This occurred in 1831 and created, at the time, a very profound sensation where it was made the subject of converse. The patient, Mr. Edward Stapleton, had died, apparently of typhus fever, accompanied with some anomalous symptoms which had excited the curiosity of his medical attendants […]. An incision of some extent had been actually made in the abdomen, when the fresh and undecayed appearance of the subject suggested an application of the battery. One experiment succeeded another, and the customary effects supervened, with nothing to characterize them in any respect, except, upon one or two occasions, a more than ordinary degree of life-likeness in the convulsive action. It grew late. The day was about to dawn; and it was thought expedient, at length, to proceed at once to the dissection. One student, however, was especially desirous of testing a theory of his own, and insisted upon applying the battery to one of the pectoral muscles. A rough gash was made, and a wire hastily brought in contact, when the patient, with a hurried but quite unconvulsive movement, arose from the table, stepped into the middle of the floor, gazed about him uneasily for a few seconds, and then spoke. What he said was unintelligible, but words were uttered; the syllabification was distinct. Having spoken, he fell heavily to the floor. [POE 44, pp. 757–758]
The theatricalization underlines the stupor of the subject who awakened fully conscious, differentiating him from the automaton to which mobility is infused in the experiments of Aldini or Ure. The body was clearly not brought back to life since it did not bear the post-mortem alterations. So he was alive but unconscious. Beyond the literary aspects, galvanization was rationally applied to a body that could not be considered dead. The point here is to differentiate between galvanic culture and the imaginary symbolized by the novel Frankenstein. Another of Poe’s texts will help us to make this distinction. In Some Words With a Mummy [POE 45], he recounts, not without humor, the case, much closer to the myth than to a societal application of galvanism, of a mummy three or four thousand years old. His nerves exposed and feeling the first effects of the application of a galvanic cell caused movements very close to Aldini’s descriptions of the tortured corpses. Absorbing contractions of the palpebral muscles and lower limbs, the mummy ended up giving a strong kick to a scientist. The fictitious dimension made it possible to go further than the description of automatic movements. This text refers to the popular fear of the dead returning from the dead, the novelty of which lies in the fact that the mummy’s return was under the effects of the technique and not under supernatural conditions. The comparison of the two texts shows very divergent cultural and literary instrumentalizations of galvanization. While in the first, Poe relates the fictional conditions of reanimation; in the second, under the guise of mocking traditional fears, he takes the experience of the tortured to the absurd by taking as his object a mummy several millennia old. Poe’s reference to electricity corresponds to a long reflection on the unity of the laws of physics in the universe, culminating in Eureka [POE 48], an essay dedicated to Alexander von Humboldt. Body and soul of the universe, electricity allows us to understand nature in its totality, material and spiritual, to which we must relate the phenomena of vitality and consciousness:
The cosmos was a vast electrical machine that could be understood and manipulated in much the same way as they understood and manipulated the electrical machines and artefacts with which they plied their trade. Human bodies were part of the electrical universe too. [RHY 02, p. 102]
From the research on clouds, whose meteorological disturbances generate thunderstorms, a culture of the powers of electricity was born. From the sky to the body of the torpedo fish, electricity seems to flow everywhere. In this materialistic mechanics, it found its political and cultural foundation in the revolutionary period and developed to the core of organic fibers. From inorganic to matter, it permeated all 19th Century research. Several medical branches developed from the knowledge of electricity and the way it intervenes in vital phenomena: diagnosis, resuscitation, electrophysiology and electrotherapy are all fields born from the physics of this energy. The history of electricity is not only played out in medical circles, it permeates societies shaken by political events. In addition to allowing the development of medical and physiological experimentation, it poses the exploration of the boundaries of life and death as a philosophical, medical and societal issue. The concepts of the electrical body, electrical culture or galvanic culture are the results of this intertwining of electricity and society. Within a materialistic philosophy, it promotes the awareness that not everything stops with voluntary movement and