A number of public scientific experiments were perpetrated by the Professor of Anatomy from Bologna Giovanni Aldani in London on 17 January 1803. "Surrounded by eager publicity, Aldani attempted to revive the body of a murderer, one Thomas Forster, by the application of electrical charges six hours after he had been hanged at Newgate.
His demonstrations were graphically and melodramatically reported in the press: 'On the first application of the [electrical] arcs, the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened... The conductors being applied to the ear, and to the rectum, excited muscular contractions much stronger... The arms alternately rose and fell... the fists clenched and beat violently the table on which the body lay, natural respiration was artificially established... Vitality might have been fully restored, if many ulterior circumstances, had not rendered this - inappropriate'"*
Leading the medical thinking of the time was John Abernethy, born 1764, a "squat, sandy-haired (...) plain-spoken Scot of unconquerable shyness". In 1814, as a Professor of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons he worked and lectured on 'An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter's Theory of Life' (towards the end of his medical career John Hunter had developed "certain undefined mystical yearnings" and speculated with the carrying substance of Life). Building on this Abernethy proposed Life was a 'subtle mobile, invisible substance (...) as magnetism is to iron, and as electricity is to various substances with which it may be connected'
In drawing analogies “between Vitality and electricity, Albertheny also called on the authority of Humphry Davy’s Bakerian lectures at the Royal Society. Like many scientific men of the day he was entranced by the potentialities of the voltaic battery, and its possible connections with ‘animal magnetism’ and human animation. ‘The experiments of Sir Humphry Davy seem to me to form an important link in the connexion of our knowledge of dead and living matter.’”
It was to one of Humphry Davy’s earlier public lectures on chemistry at the Royal Institution in 1812 that William Goodwin first took her 14 year-old daughter Mary to listen in. Not a coincidence, Goodwin’s daughter would later marry a patient of “the youngest and most gifted pupil of Albertheny (William Lawrence, in time one of Albertheny’s most fierce opponents). Mary would share with her husband an interest in Vitalism and the heated debate on the source of life and man’s intervention.
At the height of the Vitalism debate and witness to most medical and philosophical debates on the topic they travelled to Italy and later to Switzerland. By this time Mary had adopted her husband’s family name ‘Shelley’. What happened next you already know.
* All excerps from The Age of Wonder
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