The Lady and Her Monsters (7 page)

I
n early January 1802, a respectable crowd of scholars and doctors gathered in a semidarkened laboratory in Bologna, staring at the head of a slaughtered ox. They shifted uncomfortably in the unusually chilly room, rubbing their hands vigorously. Winter in Bologna could be cold, and this year was no exception. They shuffled in their chairs as they viewed the ox's head, the dead stump resting in the middle of a surgical table. Earlier that day, Aldini had procured a voltaic pile, which he hoped to use on the animal.

Aldini entered the room and stood by the table where the ox's head lay. He didn't feel the need to speak or to explain his doings, but with the flourishing gestures that were his stamp, he picked up an electrical arc, which sizzled loudly in his hands. Then he applied it to the ox's head. Right away the eyes flew open and the animal's ears began to twitch. He heard the crowd inhale sharply as the head, despite being decapitated, seemed alive, its “tongue . . . agitated . . . .” As Aldini later wrote, the ox moved “in the same manner as . . . the living animal when irritated and desirous of combating another of the same species.”

Giovanni Aldini performing galvanism experiments on warm-blooded animals, detailed and printed in his book
Essai théoretique et expérimental sur le galvanisme
, published in Paris, 1804.

Aldini knew his uncle had wanted his experiments to help find a cure for illnesses, particularly paralysis. While working at Sant'Orsola, Galvani had been keen to “subject an amputated arm or foot to his experiments,” and “when a metal arc was carried from a muscle to the nerves, vigorous contractions suddenly arose.” Often, Aldini had been employed as an assistant in his uncle's laboratory, where he had been exposed to a treasure-trove of amputated limbs, dead frogs, and other small animals in various states of decomposition, as well as assorted chemicals.

To continue his uncle's work, Aldini needed to properly master the voltaic battery. At first, he had a tendency to turn up the switches and knobs to such a powerful level that he inadvertently caused the animals' heads to convulse in a more repugnant manner, or to explode altogether. Sometimes, unaware of what was happening, the eyeballs rolled back and forth or protruded completely out of the animal's sockets—something he discovered when screams arose in his audience.

In January 1802, Aldini secured the bodies of two criminals who had been executed that morning. In life the two had been “very young . . . and of a robust constitution,” traits Aldini always favored.

Galvani's experiment. From Giovanni Aldini's text
Essai théorique et expérimental sur le galvanisme
, depicting two decapitated cadavers and his efforts to restore movements to them.

The visitors who arrived at the laboratory that night were expecting an ox, a dog, a calf, maybe. They were taken aback when Aldini uncovered two tables: on the first rested the lower body of one of the cadavers, and on the second was the second cadaver's separated head. Holding a zinc pile in his hands, Aldini neared the man's head, whose ears he had dampened with salt water. Then he “formed an arc with two metallic wires, which proceeding from the two ears, were applied.” Those present moved uncomfortably in their chairs when, as he later wrote, he “observed strong contractions in all the muscles of the face, which were contorted in so irregular a manner that they exhibited the appearance of the most horrid grimaces. The action of the eyelids was exceedingly striking, though less sensible in the human head than in that of the ox.” Despite the grimaces, some looked closer, as the corpse seemed to drool a thin rivulet of saliva from its lips.

To further prove the efficacy of the experiment, Aldini set the two criminals' heads side by side on the table. The official communication between the two heads was formed when the arc was stretched from “the right ear of one head, and to the left ear of the other.” As he had anticipated, the two faces contorted as if alive, giving away such “horrid grimaces,” those in attendance were “actually frightened.”

Professor Mondini, a local academic and practitioner of medicine who had been eager to see for himself the result of such operations, pressed Aldini to repeat the experiments on different cadavers. January 1802 seemed to have been a prolific month for the executioner, as several criminals had their lives ended by the axe. This gave Aldini a steady supply for his experiments.

In front of a selected group of individuals, including well-known doctors and physicians, a very strong and muscular body was galvanized. “By applying the arc . . . ,” Aldini later reported, “the violence of the contractions was much increased. The trunk was thrown into strong convulsions, the shoulders were elevated in a sensible manner, and the hands were so agitated that they beat against the table which supported the body.”

Aldini knew that a number of scientists wondered why he was not using his experiments to discover cures for the sicknesses of the living. But he rejected this criticism and stuck to the notion that he was “promoting the welfare of the human race, and may be of service to cases of apparent death.”

O
n May 17, 1801, a young man named Luigi Lanzarini had been institutionalized at the hospital of Sant'Orsola for what doctors had termed “melancholy.” He was twenty-seven years old and a farm worker. Prior to his hospitalization, he had suffered from a prolonged bout of fever, which the doctors assumed had triggered his descent. Upon arriving at Sant'Orsola, Lanzarini began to complain of mistreatment and soon to display uneasiness around his doctors, so much so that his caretakers came to believe the melancholy had “degenerated into real stupidity.”

Giovanni Aldini had always been intrigued by the notion of melancholy madness. He had come to believe the disease was due, first and foremost, to an imbalance in the brain, but also thought the responsibility could lie with accidents where the victims were hit over their heads, diseases of the body that traveled to the brain, or the bludgeoning of the victims. Such dire traumas to the skull and brain would often allow for “variations of the intellectual powers.” He was determined to try the galvanization process on those suffering from melancholia madness, those who had “little hope . . . of their being restored to society.” Lunatics, as they were called.

Prior to starting the experiments, he had tried to galvanize himself in a “long series of painful and disagreeable experiments.” But even having had the experience himself did not stop him from trying galvanism on others. To Aldini, this was an extension of his uncle's desires.

Aldini conferred with Professor Gentilli and Professor Palazzi, both of whom were working at Sant'Orsola, and together they observed firsthand the tragic young Lanzarini. His melancholy had deepened, and the doctors were running out of options. Aldini suddenly realized he'd found the perfect subject: he was young; relatively healthy, aside from his current disease; and had only become a “lunatic” following a tangible ordeal, which was his fever. Aldini decided, with permission from Lanzarini's doctors, to administer galvanism.

During the first session, Aldini's therapies were administered slowly, adjusting the voltaic battery as he went along. He saw no marked improvement. Lanzarini was questioned about his disease and where he believed it had been generated. But his state of mind had been so damaged that it did not allow for any clear answers. He merely stared at his doctors and Aldini, as well as the galvanization machine. His eyes were fixed and he slurred, which appeared to “indicate a great degree of stupidity and derangements.”

As Aldini continued his ministrations, Lanzarini seemed to get better, his melancholy lessening. Aldini became convinced that his doings were able to “prove that Galvanism absolutely exercised an action on such a disease.” Lanzarini didn't suffer from the process itself, and when doctors spoke to him days later, he was able to answer them—in a clear and concise voice—that he felt no adverse reaction to the voltaic arc Aldini was using. Over the following days, Lanzarini's pain evaporated, and to everyone's surprise, he even began to smile. He ate well and recovered enough that the doctors felt comfortable releasing him.

But Aldini was not entirely done with Lanzarini and invited him to Aldini's house. They ate and talked, and it was during one of these conversations that Lanzarini revealed that his father, Fabiano Lanzarini, had also been gripped by the same disease. He had been institutionalized at Sant'Orsola, where he had died on June 12, 1790. Aldini researched the information and learned it was true.

Knowing about Lanzarini's father didn't seem to change Aldini's beliefs. He did not make a connection between heredity and Lanzarini's current state of mind, but rather continued to believe that the environment had played a larger role in Lanzarini's disease, going so far as to suggest Lanzarini's moving away. “I advised Lanzarini to spend the rest of his life at a distance from his native country,” Aldini wrote, “lest, having continually before his eyes these objects which had occasioned his disease, it might occur with double violence.”

Lanzarini heeded his advice, but only for a short while. Suffering from “nostalgia,” he later returned to his hometown, where, Aldini learned, he was doing well.

Lanzarini's case proved to be one of the few positive ones. The galvanization process seemed worthless for others suffering from mental disorders. Aldini even discovered that the process could be “dangerous” in patients where the disease was even more severe.

T
hough Aldini tried to work with the living, he continued most of his experiments on the dead. And performing galvanizations on dead corpses, he finally came to believe that “the heart, which, according to Haller's principle, is the first muscle that receives life and the last to lose it, in comparison of the other muscles, can with difficulty be made to feel the influence of the galvanic action.”

Though he had no tangible proof it could be done, his new goal was to restart the heart and bring a dead corpse back to life. But the cadavers he got in Bologna were decapitated and long emptied of the vital force. He wanted to experiment on corpses that were still intact and were nearly warm to the touch. He needed to go someplace that offered such opportunities. England, with its progressive thinking, was the logical choice.

Chapter 3

M
AKING
M
ONSTERS

To Examine the cause of life,

we must have recourse to Death.

M
ARY
S
HELLEY,

F
RANKENSTEIN; OR,
T
HE
M
ODERN
P
ROMETHEUS

G
iovanni Aldini arrived in London in the winter of 1802 with his uncle's galvanic instruments and a dash of the swagger that made him so controversial in Bologna. His goal was to find a perfect dead body that he could use to perform his galvanic experiments and prove that his theories, and those of his uncle, were correct.

The city that greeted him was by then growing rapidly. By the early 1800s, nearly one million people had poured into the metropolis from all corners of Britain and abroad, allowing for an amalgamation of cultures and social classes to take place. In the West End the ostentatiously rich made use of every technological advance available, every medical discovery money could buy them, and every frivolous fad they believed would prolong their lives, or at least rejuvenate their sagging bodies.

Meanwhile, the poor barely survived in the ramshackle alleys of the old city. Those who had left the country and come to the city to better their lives instead found filth, disease, and destitution. The streets around them reeked with every possible shade of humanity hawking their goods—shoes, pots and pans, roasted chestnuts—all for a few measly coins. The fetid, ripe smells that rose from the carts they dragged and the stink wafting from the workhouses and spewing out from the hundreds of chimneys mingled with the horse dung strewn across the cobblestone streets, giving everything a foul, dingy quality.

The city was also at the cusp of a medical revolution. The main hospitals were teeming with doctors and surgeons experimenting on the living as well as the dead, busy trying to find new ways to cure the sick. And in discreet and out-of-the-way corners of the city, private laboratories had sprung up where doctors undertook experiments that hospital officials found too gruesome to perform in a respectable environment. During this time of medical innovation, there were charlatans, or so-called visionaries, who claimed their intentions and advances could save humanity. Unfortunately for Aldini, one of London's most scandalous quacks had experimented with electricity not long before he came to England.

James Graham, like most future doctors in England at the time, began his medical studies in Edinburgh, Scotland. But the curriculum did not include the new innovations in the medical sciences, so he traveled to the United States. He spent his early twenties in Philadelphia, where he learned about Benjamin Franklin's experiments with electricity. The notion of using electricity for medical purposes struck Graham like a lightning bolt and convinced him that electricity could be the cure for all that pained humankind. It has been suggested that in reality he never truly believed that electricity was a medical cure-all. Nevertheless, it was important to him that
others
would believe it.

When he returned to England, he was called upon by members of London's upper class to administer bolts of electricity; they believed it would cure them of headaches, menstrual cramps, gout, and everything else in between. With his reputation bolstered, he sought out a place where people could make use of his electrical machines, and in 1779, he opened the doors to the Temple of Health.

His clients were more than willing to pay the two guineas he charged for admission; once inside, their bodies and senses were immediately stimulated. To some, the opulent décor of the temple's rooms seemed entirely obscene: the shimmering, imported silks; the strong furniture whose curvatures implied, in not-so-subtle a way, the female body; the mirrors in which one could see oneself in all manners of seductive poses. The delicate perfumes and welcoming scents of lavender and roses that were misted in the air immediately recalled a fine spring morning and played delicately on the senses. Music flowed from unseen corners of the room, and tall Greek statues of voluptuous women stood seeming to guard the place. To the men's delight, scantily clad women frolicked among the statues.

By the time the clients saw the electrical apparatus, their bodies and senses were already stimulated and ready for anything. And for an extra fifty guineas at night, if they so desired, patrons could make use of the infamous “Celestial Bed,” which had bolts of electricity crackling through it. Those who slept in the bed would be “blessed with progeny. Sterility and impotence would be cured.” Though the environment was erotic, it was the electricity that did the actual work. It ran continuously from the headboard across the length of the bed, “filling the air with magnetic fluid calculated to give the necessary degree of strength and exaction to the nerves.”

The Celestial Bed and the Temple of Health appealed to people who had latent issues with their sexuality—husbands who wished to step out on their wives in a comfortable environment, and wives who sought that extra something their husbands could not provide. Existing under the guise of a respected medical institution gave it credibility.

Caricature of James Graham
(center)
. James Graham was called “the quintessence of quackism,” the highlight of his career culminating in the building of the Temple of Health. There he made use of electricity to cure his sexually depleted patients. Here he stands in between Gog and Magog, the two footmen at the entrance of the Temple of Health.

Though many attested to the benefits of Graham's electrical apparatus, others saw the temple for what it was: an upper-class bordello. Horace Walpole, who went to the temple for a session, described it as “the most impudent puppet show of imposition I ever saw, and the mountebank himself that dullest of his profession. A woman, invisible, warbled to clarinets on the stairs. The decorations are pretty and odd, and the apothecary, who comes up a trap-door (for no purpose, since he might as well come up the stairs), is a novelty. The electrical experiments are nothing at all singular, and a poor air-pump, that only hurts a bladder, pieces out the farce.”

Faced with Graham's legacy, Aldini had to be careful how he promoted and described his methods. Graham had tried to restore peoples' depleted sexuality; Aldini wanted to restore life to the dead and to show that it was possible to do so with scientific methods. It was a highly dangerous move, impractical in a sense, and fraught with difficulties, not the least of which was the possibility of his experiments being undermined and of his being seen as a fool. He needed to do things precisely and in order.

First, he needed the perfect subject to galvanize. Youth and health were priorities, but most people died of disease and malnutrition, so it would be hard to find a vigorous body in its prime. He could rely on the gallows, as most anatomists did, but English law allotted only ten or twelve bodies for anatomizations, and those came highly prized by the medical institutions, which clamored after them. He could have hired a “resurrectionist,” or a body snatcher, like most others in his position did, but they were expensive. Moreover, resurrection men were indiscriminate in whom they dug up—whether young or old, man or woman, healthy or diseased. The only requirement for a resurrectionist was a recent time of death, because then putrefaction would not have set in. Although Aldini needed a nonputrefied body, he would not stoop to employing a resurrection man to find one.

Most anatomists were not as picky as he was. Up until the 1800s, most medical students learned surgical procedures by watching their teachers perform actual surgeries. But as the population grew, students and doctors realized a more hands-on method was needed, one in which each student could work on a corpse. This hands-on practice, called the Parisian method, gave them a chance to study how each organ, muscle, nerve, and bone operated. It was called the Parisian method because the law in France allowed surgeons to use the unclaimed bodies left in hospitals and death houses. However, in England the gallows were the only
legal
source from which to collect corpses.

But the graveyards held a plentiful supply of unused corpses, and stealing them was not a serious crime. Actually trespassing was the grave robber's biggest concern. If anatomists and their cohorts (mostly students) were found lurking in a place where they did not belong, say a cemetery, they could be arrested. They could also get in trouble if they were caught stealing objects—for instance, anything that belonged to the corpse, such as the clothes he or she had been interred with, any jewelry, shoes for the girlfriend, or mementoes, like portraits. To be careful, they conducted all transactions during the most absolute stillness of the night, and if the moon only rose to a sliver, so much the better, because too much light could be devastating. But some learned that too much silence could also cause problems, as it was hard to disguise the echo of their footsteps running down the street with a corpse bouncing off their backs.

Snatching bodies proved a lucrative enterprise for the anatomists, though many found the actual digging of the bodies too stressful on their psyche. The general population thought it was disgraceful and gruesome. Doctors could have their reputations tarnished if they became known as grave robbers and body snatchers. Middlemen were needed to do the work for them.

The money the resurrection men earned was appealing. A corpse could yield more than a week's pay at any menial job. There was something in the forbidden act itself that was alluring to many as well. Christian Baroent described his work by saying, “The time chosen in dark winter nights . . . A hole was dug down to the coffin, only where the head lay—a canvas sheet being stretched around to receive the earth, and to prevent any of it spoiling the smooth uniformity of the grass. The digging was done with short, flat, dagger-shaped implements of woods, to avoid the clicking of iron striking stones. In reaching the coffin, two broad iron hooks under the lid, pulled forcibly up with a rope, broke off a sufficient portion of the lid to allow the body to be dragged out . . . the surface of the ground was carefully restored to its original conditions . . . the whole process could be completed in an hour, even though the grave might be six feet deep.”

Resurrectionist gangs sprang up all over the city of London and the suburbs, working, for the most part, during the winter season. Their favorite haunts were the burial spots of the poor, who placed their dead in pine boxes that were easy to break into. If the gangs got particularly lucky, they found mass graves where several people who had died in the same day were buried together. The corpses were unearthed, put in sacks (hence the resurrection men's nickname “sack-'em-up men”), and dragged to the waiting party, most likely a servant working for a well-known anatomist in a back-alley laboratory, who would haggle over the price of the corpse as if it were a barrel of fruit.

Messr. Cruncher and his son, two typical men who worked as resurrectionists. These two were mentioned by Charles Dickens in his novel
A Tale of Two Cities.

Ben Crouch was the leader of the most famous gang in that period. He was a foul-mouthed former pugilist whose physical strength was an asset when it came to digging out corpses but also to bullying others intending to enter the business. He also was a crook who would wait until his mates were drunk before dividing the take. With the advantage of sobriety, he managed to keep a larger share of the profit without anyone being able to tell. If someone pointed out the fact, the muscular Crouch didn't waste a minute but carefully landed a bejeweled fist (he was fond of wearing thick rings and bracelets) over the opponent's mouth, as if engaged in one of his former fights.

The other members included Bill Harnett; Jack Harnett; Tom Light; men named Daniell, Butler, and Hollis; and Joseph Naples, who might have been the only resurrection man who ever kept a journal that described all of their doings. It was not even a journal, but more of a log that told how many bodies they stole, where they removed them from, and where they sent them. Published under the title of
The Diary of a Resurrectionist,
it listed the gang's doings from 1811 to 1812, often with such simple entries as “Sunday, 21st, Went to S. Thomas's. Sent 1 to Mr. Tounton, 2 to Edinburgh S. Thomas's took 6 of the whole this week, came home and slept at home all night.”