The experiments that inspired Frankenstein

On January 17 1803, a young man named George Forster was hanged for murder at Newgate prison in London. After his execution, as often happened, his body was carried ceremoniously across the city to the Royal College of Surgeons, where it would be publicly dissected. What actually happened was rather more shocking than simple dissection though - Forster was going to be electrified. Giovanni Aldini's experiments with a human corpse - one of the first, and most controversial, to attempt to reanimate a human using electricity Luigi Galvani was an Italian physician who demonstrated what we now understand to be the electrical basis of nerve impulses, when he made frog muscles twitch by jolting them with a spark from an electrostatic machine. Galvani one day observed his assistant using a scalpel on a nerve in a frog's leg; when a nearby electric generator created a spark, the frog's leg twitched, prompting Galvani to develop his famous experiment.