2024: The Year I Electrocute a Dead Body
Need ideas for new year's resolutions? Consider something shocking.
At the turn of the 19th century, an Italian scientist named Luigi Galvani began conducting a series of experiments that caught the public’s attention.
This was a time of profound scientific progress, a period that saw the development of general anesthesia, the birth of atomic theory, and even the invention of the battery.
But Luigi Galvani wasn’t involved with any of these. No, his discoveries were more straightforward.
Luigi Galvani is the person who showed us what happens when you electrocute a dead body.
More specifically, Galvani — who is, by the way, the inspiration for the word “galvanize” — showed the world that electrical impulses applied to the brain and muscles could prompt “animation” of corpses: the movement of limbs, the twitching of joints, even the opening and closing of eyelids.
At the time, scientists made little distinction between something “moving” and something being “alive.” We now know that nerve impulses can cause limbs to move and jolt even after they’ve been severed from a body — movement doesn’t make something alive — but in Galvani’s time, movement was life. Galvani wanted to find out whether electricity was the secret to that alive-ness.
When he electrified the body parts of dead frogs, and the legs started twitching, bending, and kicking, he believed he had found his answer. He thought this was proof of “animal electricity,” a power that animated all living things.
(Contemporary physicist Alessandro Volta — yes, he inspired the word volt — later showed that the presence of two connected metals was conducting the electricity, not the creature itself, thus disproving Galvani’s idea and inventing the chemical battery along the way. In a heartwarming instance of respect amongst rivals, it was Volta who coined the term “galvanism” to describe chemical generation of electricity in honor of Galvani’s work.)
For Galvani’s part, he wasn’t all that interested in defending his claims or going any further than frog legs. He left that up to his nephew, Giovanni Aldini.
Aldini, it turns out, was much more ambitious than his uncle in the field of “electrocuting dead stuff to see what happens.” This ambition culminated in 1802 when Aldini, in front of an audience of stunned onlookers, attached electrodes to a recently executed murderer and blasted his corpse with battery-powered electrical currents — the type of thing you could apparently just do in 1802.
(Fun Fact: Performing experiments on recently executed criminals wasn’t just something people were ethically OK with back then because of the scientific benefits — it was actually enshrined as a suitable punishment for criminals under The Murder Act of 1752. Basically, it said that if you were a murderer, part of your sentence could include being dissected or experimented on after your death. Seriously. Look it up.)
When Aldini activated his battery, the crowd watched in shock and horror as the corpse’s jaws began to open and close, its eyes opened, and its head began to shake back and forth while the face formed a “horrible grimace.”
Aldini considered this experiment a failure — he was hoping that the dead convict’s heart would restart. Bummer. But as you can imagine, this little experiment left quite an indelible mark on the imaginations of the people in the crowd.
One of the people whom historians think may have been in that crowd — and if not, he was at least confirmed to be a friend of Aldini’s and certainly heard about the experiment after the fact — was the journalist, political philosopher, and novelist William Godwin.
Godwin, for what it’s worth, is responsible for jumpstarting the modern anarchist movement. He was also married to another revolutionary political philosopher, the feminist vanguard Mary Wollstonecraft.
Together, Godwin and Wollstonecraft had a daughter — also named Mary. At some point, Godwin told his daughter about what he’d seen when Aldini electrified a corpse and made it move and shake in an attempt to restart its heart with electricity.
This image clearly stuck with little Mary.
It imprinted on her so vividly that some time later, when she was bored on a summer vacation with some friends and one of them suggested they pass the time by having a short story writing contest, she remembered the tale of the galvanized cadaver.
Mary — by that point known as Mary Shelley — imagined what would happen if Aldini’s experiment had been a success. What if someone were able to reanimate dead human tissue?
The resulting short story would later become Frankenstein, one of the most influential creative works in history and arguably the first true science-fiction novel.
As long as I can remember, I’ve always felt that the way to communicate big, even subversive ideas is through aesthetically pleasing or palatable means.
In music, I wrote songs about anxiety disorders, stagnancy, hopelessness, and heartbreak but delivered them in sweet, polished music that could best be described as nice. My voice was clear, gentle and kind, the instrumentation and arrangements never doing anything that was unexpected or what anyone might call “strange.”
As a teacher now, my instinct is to make students comfortable. Surprised sometimes, absolutely. But always pleasantly surprised; surprised in the way that finding a cupcake in the fridge left over from the party the night before is a surprise. I’m agreeable. I have strong opinions but a very weak impulse to make them known in social settings. I’m the kind of person who’s entirely comfortable nodding along as someone shares their opinions, then walking away and thinking to myself: “That person is absolutely bonkers.”
In my writing, I’m far from a “stylist.” My written voice isn’t all that distinct or revolutionary. It leans somewhat academic (for example, I just used the word somewhat) but I always try to keep it connected to the way I actually speak in real life — with, you know, swearing and filler words and stuff.
The most stylistically distinctive thing about me is probably how many em dashes I use.
(These: —. Seriously, scan the essay up to this point. I use them a lot.)
Given all of this, it should come as no surprise that I’ve always been drawn to art and experiences that reflect my love of traditional, unchallenging aesthetic beauty.
I’m not an “art house” guy. I love big, complicated ideas, as long as they’re communicated in simple, straightforward media.
But as I recently read about the galvanized corpse, and how this one shocking event set off a chain reaction which ultimately led to the creation of one of the greatest works of art in history, it reminded me of something that I tend to forget.
There’s a place for the shocking, freaky, and downright uncomfortable stuff. The stuff that lodges itself in our brains, despite our best efforts. The indie art house movie that makes us feel a little off-balance. The novel that hits a little too close to home. The research study that force us to confront something we’d really rather not be true. The conversation with someone who convincingly argues an opposite opinion to one we hold.
I tend to believe that the most inspiring stuff is the best stuff — the art, writing, or messages that are just perfectly crafted and flawlessly executed. But I want to start looking for some electrified cadavers — the failed experiments, the strange works of art, the odd and uncomfy little strangenesses which it is my instinct to avoid.
For everything I enjoy because it’s great, I want to enjoy something else just because it’s different — and makes me think and feel differently.
Now, before you all run off and tell your friends that today you read an essay about why we should electrocute dead criminals to write better fiction — that’s not the point. I’m not saying we should do morally abhorrent things to inspire us.
This is simply a reminder for the people like me out there, the ones who love craft, efficiency, and the deft use of established conventions in their art. The people who like things to be nice and neat, or neat and nice.
It’s a testament to how much I want to be comfortable — and keep the people I write for comfortable — that I hesitated to even write this piece. Electrocuting corpses? Gross!
But as I enter 2024 and reflect on what an exciting career year 2023 was for me, I realize that every major achievement or step in the right direction has come from me going against my instincts, away from the comfortable, soothing, or easy.
So in 2024, I want more. More weird, uncomfy, shocking, and scary.
The next time you hear the word “galvanize” — like maybe in some stale corporate meeting when your manager says “We need something to really galvanize sales this quarter!” — remember that they’re appropriating that word. It has no place being used for something so dry. You tell that manager: “You know, you really shouldn’t say that unless you’re actually electrocuting a dead body.”
Okay, maybe not. But remember what it means to galvanize.
It’s about shocking yourself to life. Or, at least, shocking yourself into movement where once you were still. ✦
Questions for the Comments
What’s something you recently read, watched, saw, or did that “galvanized” you despite not being something you would normally be into?
How did going outside your comfort zone benefit you in 2023?
What are your New Year’s resolutions (or are you anti-resolution, and why?)
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