A Gruesome Tale: Reanimating the Dead BY PROFESSOR AMY FISHER
Using wires to attach a powerful battery to the corpse’s ear and mouth, the dead man’s “jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened” (1). Convicted of murdering his wife, Jane, and their twelve-month-old daughter, Louisa, by drowning, Britain’s criminal court in London—the Old Bailey—sentenced George Foster to death by hanging on January 17, 1803 (2). Government officials sought to deter other potential malefactors in two ways. First, they allowed the public to witness each execution. Second, the Murder Act of 1752 denied convicted murderers of the right to a family burial and gave their corpses instead to physicians for anatomical and physiological research, a fate many considered to be worse than death (3). In a macabre
Figure 1: A public execution at Newgate Prison Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
spectacle, thousands of people attended each public execution at Newgate Prison between 1783 and 1868 (Figure 1). An hour after Foster died before a jeering crowd, men transported his corpse from the prison to the Royal College of Surgeons’ anatomical theatre. There, with the Figure 2: Giovanni Aldini Image courtesy of assistance of medical Wikimedia Commons faculty, a student, and an instrument maker, Italian professor of experimental physics Giovanni Aldini (Figure 2) subjected the dead man “to the Galvanic stimulus.” Interested in determining whether electricity could be used “as a means of excitement in cases of asphyxia and suspended animation,” Aldini sought experimental support for his uncle, Italian physician Luigi Galvani’s theory of animal electricity (1). Doctors struggled to help people suffering as a result of accidents and/or diseases that caused paralysis or a seemingly irreversible loss of consciousness. Many people feared being buried alive (taphophobia), so much so that British physician William Dawes founded the Society for the Recovery of Persons Apparently Drowned in 1774 (4). Whereas some physicians experimented with ‘reviving’ pharmaceuticals, such as tobacco, Aldini investigated the potential applications of Galvani’s electrical research to reanimate patients caught between life and death. In the 1780s and 90s, Galvani had used his knowledge of anatomy and physiology to study the effects of electricity on the parts of animals. Inspired by research on electric fish, such as the torpedo (electric) ray in the Mediterranean, he endeavored to better understand the possible electrical nature of and physiological mechanisms at play in animals,
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