Special Guest Blogger: Giovanni Aldini

As far as celebrity scientists go, i was a rockstar with global fame who traveled across Europe with my electricity experiments on dead animals which all begins at the gallows of Newgate in London and the dead body of the recently hanged criminal George Forster.
I was the professor of experimental physics at University of Bologna and my scientific work was chiefly concerned with galvanism which is the generation of electric current by chemicals.
My Uncle Giovanni would perform experiments on dead frogs, stimulating their legs with electricity and watching them twitch and i followed in his footsteps and began experimenting with reanimating dead frogs but moved on to something more exciting.
I began performing the same experiments on larger animals and crowds would gather a my lab to watch me reanimate sheep, pigs, cows, and oxen and gasp at the corpses heads shaking, their eyeballs rolling and their tongues rolling out of their mouths.
Such was my fame that i took it on tour but i always thought that if i could do it with dead animals, the natural progression was to move on to humans and maybe, bring them back to life.
Luckily for me the early 1800's was a good time for procuring recently dead bodies and i just waited at the door of the local executioner in Milan but beheading tended to drain the head of blood so i went to England where they hung rather than decapitated their bad guys and ordered myself one freshly hanged criminal.
A still warm deceased body was too much of an opportunity to miss so before a large audience, i prepared to return the corpse to life by taking a pair of conducting rods linked to a powerful battery and touched the rods to various parts of the body.
When the rods were applied to Forster’s face his jaw began to quiver and his left eye actually opened and when one rod was moved to touch the rectum, the whole body convulsed, giving the impression that the body was reanimating, in fact some of the spectators genuinely believed that the dead body
was about to come back to life.
Eventually, my battery died along with it Foster, this time for good but as much fun as it was, it did have a serious side as it was used to treat mentally ill patients with shocks to the brain and reported complete rehabilitation following transcranial administration of electric current.
There was a 5 year old girl who was obviously taking notice of my experiments because she mentions in the introduction to her book, Frankenstein, galvanism and used my experiments to draw inspiration when she sat down to write her book which would make me the inspiration for the mad scientist Dr Frankenstein.