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I found these weird experiments or whatever you wanna call them at the great BibliOdyssey: Galvanizing Aldini

Among the inspirations for Mary Shelley’s gothic classic ‘Frankenstein’ from 1818 were the (in)famous experiments carried out in public by the physicist Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834) at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1803.

Aldini was the nephew of the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani who experimented with frog legs in the late 18th century and noted that the muscles contracted with the passage of an electrical current (he thought he had discovered a unique ‘animal electricity’). Provoking muscle contraction by applying electricity came to be known as galvansim [and galvanize or galvanise came to have a wider meaning: stimulate into activity]. Aldini assisted with his uncle’s work and later promoted the principle in his own experiments and publications.