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were confident galvanic electricity could do far more than provide a macabre puppet show. They promised that, under the right circumstances, it could restore life itself. Ure wrote of his experiment on the murderer Clydesdale, “There is a probability that life might have been restored. This event, however little desirable with a murderer, and perhaps contrary to law, would yet have been pardonable in one instance, as it would have been highly honourable and useful to science.”
    As late as the 1840s, English physicist William Sturgeon (inventor of the first electromagnets) described electrifying the bodies of four drowned young men in an attempt to bring them back to life. He failed but felt sure he would have succeeded had he only reached the scene sooner.
    Mary Shelley never indicated on whom she had based her character of Victor Frankenstein, but the experimental electri- fication of corpses was undeniably a source of inspiration for her. In the introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein , she wrote that the idea for the novel came to her in June 1816, after she overheard Lord Byron and Percy Shelley discussing recent galvanic experiments and speculating about the possibility that electricity could restore life to inanimate matter. That night she had a nightmare about a “pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.” And 1 so, from a journey of discovery that began with a twitching frog, Victor Frankenstein and his monster were born.

Zombie Kitten

    During the early nineteenth century many researchers repeated the galvanic experiment of electrifying a corpse. But only one man claimed to have used the technique to restore life to the dead. His name was Karl August Weinhold.
    Weinhold published a work, Experiments on Life and its Primary Forces through the Use of Experimental Physiology , in which he detailed an experiment that, supposedly, succeeded in revivifying a decapitated kitten.
    The procedure went as follows. First, he took a three-week-old kitten and removed its head. Next, he extracted the spinal cord and completely emptied the hollow of the spinal column with a sponge attached to a screw probe. Finally, he filled the hollow with an amalgam of silver and zinc. The metals acted as a battery, generating an electric current that immediately brought the kitten to life—so he said. Its heart revived, and for a few minutes it pranced and hopped around the room. Weinhold wrote, “Hopping around was once again stimulated after the opening in the spinal column was closed. The animal jumped strongly before it completely wore down.” To modern readers, his creation may sound disturbingly like a mutant version of the Energizer Bunny.
    Historians believe that Weinhold performed this experiment, but the consensus is that he lied about the results. After all, a kitten lacking a brain and spinal column is not going to dance around a room, no matter how much electricity you pump into it. As medical historian Max Neuburger delicately put it, “His experiments illustrate the fantasy of his thinking and observations.”
    Weinhold probably would have preferred to use a human corpse instead of a kitten, but in 1804 German authorities had banned the further use of human bodies in galvanic experiments. The public, it seemed, had lost its stomach for such postmortem grotesqueries. Thus restricted, Weinhold focused his efforts on animals. He was willing to break the laws of nature, but not of the German state.
    Weinhold’s personal life matched the strangeness of his experiment. His contemporaries described him as peculiarly unattractive. His long arms and legs contrasted with his small head, and his voice sounded feminine. He had no beard. He made many enemies on account of his campaign to eliminate poverty by forcibly