O que inspirou o “Frankenstein” de Mary Shelly?

O experimento foi realizado pelo físico e físico italiano Luigi Galvani enquanto trabalhava na Universidade de Bolonha . O experimento foi resultado do interesse de Galvani em Eletricidade Médica , em 6 de novembro de 1787 .

Para citar o artigo wikipedia -

The beginning of Galvani's experiments with bioelectricity has a popular legend which says that Galvani was slowly skinning a frog at a table where he had been conducting experiments with static electricity by rubbing frog skin. Galvani's assistant touched an exposed sciatic nerve of the frog with a metal scalpel that had picked up a charge. At that moment, they saw sparks and the dead frog's leg kicked as if in life. The observation made Galvani the first investigator to appreciate the relationship between electricity and animation — or life. This finding provided the basis for the new understanding that the impetus behind muscle movement was electrical energy carried by a liquid (ions), and not air or fluid as in earlier balloonist theories.

As experiências de Galvani faziam parte de uma lista de leitura de verão da autora de Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. A história em sua forma não refinada foi uma história de fantasmas escrita como parte de um concurso de contos de histórias em um dia chuvoso na Suíça. O concurso de história foi curiosamente proposto pelo famoso poeta Lord Byron .

Mais detalhes do experimento de Galvani podem ser referenciados no livro "Uma História da Eletrocardiografia" disponível em Google Livros .

    

Esta foi uma experiência feita por Luigi Galvani em 1781, discutida em este artigo :

On January 26, 1781, while dissecting a frog near a static electricity machine, Galvani's assistant touched a scalpel to a nerve in its leg, and the frog's leg jumped. Galvani repeated this and several other experiments, observing the same violent muscle spasms. He also noticed that frog legs occasionally twitched when they were hung from a brass hook and allowed to touch an iron trellis, so Galvani joined a length of each metal together to form a brass and iron arc that made the leg muscles contract when touched.

But where did the electricity come from?

Galvani, who called it "animal electricity," believed it resided in the frog itself.

...

One of Galvani's earliest readers was Italian physicist Alessandro Volta. Volta already had earned an imposing reputation as the discoverer of electrical capacitance, potential, and charge, and also discovered and was the first to isolate methane gas. He replicated Galvani's experiments and helped popularize his work.

Yet Volta reached very different conclusions. He believed the electricity came from the two metals used in the arc, and that the frog was acting as the conductor. Within the year, he replaced the frog's leg with brine-soaked paper, detected a current, and challenged Galvani.

The scientific world divided into two camps, animal electricity versus dissimilar metals.

...

So how did this influence a young Mary Shelly and lead her to compose one of the most widely read novels of all time, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus"?

Galvani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini, was a fierce partisan of animal electricity, yet he did not ignore Volta's pile. Aldini used it to tour the capitals of Europe and demonstrate the medical benefits of electricity -- or not. His demonstrations involved jolting corpses with electricity and making decapitated criminals sit upright.

Aldini's most famous exhibition took place in 1803 at the Newgate Prison in London, U.K. He inserted metal rods into the mouth and ear of the recently executed corpse of murderer George Foster. "The Newgate Calendar," a book about the criminals of Newgate Prison, described what happened next: "On the first application of the process to the face, the jaws 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."

Not surprisingly, some observers thought Aldini was bringing Foster back to life.

Mary Shelley knew all about Galvani, Volta and Aldini. Humphry Davy and William Nicholson -- the era's leading electrical researchers -- were friends of her father. In 1816, at age 19, she spent the summer in Geneva, Switzerland with Lord Byron and her future husband, Percy Shelley. The season was cold and rainy, and they spent many evenings around the fire, reading German ghost stories and discussing electricity's potential to reanimate corpses.

It must have seemed like she was merely peering into the near future to imagine that one day, a Victor Frankenstein might succeed in reanimating an assembly of body parts.

Como mencionado em p. 72 de Sapos Chocantes: Galvani, Volta e as Origens Elétricas da Neurociência , o laboratório estava em sua casa em Bolonha:

The possibility of carrying out the experiments at any time he could spare from his professional duties may have played a role in his decision to establish a laboratory in his house, instead of using the facilities offered by the equipment hosted in the rooms of the Institute. ... A home laboratory was not infrequent in eighteenth-century Bologna.

Há uma ilustração contemporânea de seu laboratório na p. 73 (também visível no link do google books acima), e outra ilustração esquemática pode ser encontrada em esta página :

    

Arthur C. Clarke (em AZ of Mysteries) escreveu que Mary Shelley uma vez assistiu a uma palestra do cientista vitoriano Andrew Crosse, que colocou correntes elétricas em vários cristais e ficou surpresa ao encontrar pequenos filamentos que eventualmente se projetavam, o que, por sua vez, desenvolveu em pequenos insetos. O inseto em questão recebeu o nome de Crosse; até hoje, a nomenclatura é Acarus Crossi. Clarke sustentou que estava tão impressionada com as façanhas deste "cientista louco" que criou a vida em um laboratório que, depois de um pesadelo particularmente vívido, ela se inspirou para escrever Frankenstein.