!-------------Section 6: BODY----------------------->
DON JUAN AND FRANKENSTEIN
Bread has been made (indifferent) from potatoes;
And galvanism has set some corpses grinning,
But has not answer'd like the apparatus
Of the Humane Society's beginning,
By which men are unsuffocated gratis:
What wondrous new machines have late been spinning!
-- Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto I, CXXX.
Lord Byron was with Mary Shelley and her friends when she began writing Frankenstein during the summer of 1816. Like Mary and Percy Shelley, he was intrigued by science and used scientific elements in his poetry.
In this canto from Don Juan (1819 - 1824), Byron jestingly mentions that "galvanism has set some corpses grinning," a possible reference to the sensational electrical experiments of Andrew Ure in 1818 (the same year that Frankenstein was published). In a dramatic set of experiments in Glasgow, Ure applied electricity to the corpse of a murderer. By connecting electrodes to different parts of the body, he was able to make the corpse "breathe," open its eyes, and display facial expressions of rage, anguish, happiness, and despair.
Byron also cites the Human Society's apparatus for "unsuffocating" men. This may refer to the work of Charles Kite and other society members, who constructed various devices for reviving the "apparently dead." Kite wrote an essay in 1788 describing the possibility of applying a strong electrical shock to the chest to revive a victim of heart fibrillation.
Adapted from a display at the Frankenstein exhibition of The Bakken: A Library and Museum of Electricity in Life, Minneapolis. Visit the Bakken at http://www.bakkenmuseum.org/.
Table of Contents -- 5/17/97