DOCTOR Frankenstein’s identity has finally been revealed after almost 200 years. Mary Shelley’s infamous fictional figure was inspired by the eminent Scottish scientist John Lind, the first person in Britain to try to animate dead animals with electricity.
Ever since Shelley wrote her classic book, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, in 1818, scholars have argued over where the inspiration for her obsessive doctor came from. She acknowledged that her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, played a part in stimulating her creativity, and she was present in the summer of 1816 when he regaled his fellow poet Lord Byron with tales of the latest scientific developments during their famous stay at Byron’s villa on the shores of Lake Geneva.
But where did Percy Shelley acquire his deep knowledge of the subject? According to Christopher Goulding, a researcher in English literature at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, much of it came from Lind. While Percy was a schoolboy at Eton, the Scottish scientist was his mentor.
Advertisement
Lind by that time had retired. But he was extremely well connected and well travelled, and brimming with tales of science and adventure. “He knew everyone who was anyone in science,” says Goulding.
What was most relevant to Frankenstein was Lind’s passionate interest in “galvanics”, the revolutionary experiments to “animate” dead limbs with electricity pioneered not long before by Italian scientist Luigi Galvani. Lind’s curiosity about the subject had been kindled by William Cullen, his tutor at the world-renowned Edinburgh Medical School and the author of the first clinical guide to reviving victims of suffocation.
In the 1790s, Lind became the first British scientist to repeat Galvani’s experiments, jolting frogs’ legs with electric pulses. “I have no doubt he could have shown young Shelley this, or at least told him about it,” says Goulding. “At the time, it was seen as disturbing the murky area between life and death.”
Galvani’s ideas about using electricity to breathe life into dead body parts later formed the scientific core of Mary’s novel. But her bleak passages about icy wastelands might also owe much to Lind, who had served as a ship’s surgeon and travelled to Iceland with Sir Joseph Banks, then President of the Royal Society, to study geology and botany. “Lind would have been able to tell Percy about glaciers, although much of the imagery in Frankenstein might have come from what Mary saw in Switzerland too,” Goulding admits.
His analysis overturns the accepted idea that Percy did little more than rehash popular scientific ideas of the time. “I think he had much more knowledge than people give him credit for,” Goulding says.
“What science there is in Frankenstein came from James Lind via Mary’s husband,” says Goulding. Mary herself acknowledged the debt, quoting her husband as saying of Lind: “I owe that man far—oh! Far more than I owe my father.”
- More at: Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (vol 95, p257)
