The Real Scientific Revolution Behind ‘Frankenstein’

To dive into the scientific world that Frankenstein author Mary Shelley lived in, Science Friday took a peek at the experiments tucked between the pages of late 18th- and early 19th-century texts at the rare book room of the New York Academy of Medicine in New York City with historical collections librarian Arlene Shaner. Books written by scientists like Luigi Galvani and his nephew Giovanni Aldini contain electric medical instruments, practices on how to revive the apparent dead, procedures of early skin grafting, and galvanic experiments on human corpses. The vivid and rather macabre depictions are easily reminiscent of Frankenstein.

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