Real Frankenstein Experiments: Andrew Ure, The Scottish Genius Who Electrified Dead Bodies Before A Crowd
Wikimedia CommonsAndrew Ure, the Scottish scientist who publicly experimented on dead bodies.
Around the time Aldini was experimenting with his executed criminals in London, a young Scottish scientist and “scriptural geologist” named Andrew Ure was pursuing his degree in Glasgow. Ure was another one of those generalized geniuses interested in everything.
Fresh out of university and looking for something to study, Ure found Aldini’s work fascinating and decided to try it out for himself.
By 1818, Ure had his own steady supply of freshly-hanged criminals to play around with. There was no shortage of executions in Britain at the time, since around 300 crimes carried the death penalty, so Ure kept busy.
Wikimedia CommonsAn 1867 engraving of Andrew Ure’s galvanic experiments on a corpse.
Unlike medical researchers of today, Ure liked to have a crowd watching his procedures, which were not experiments so much as they were public freak shows that helped Ure build a reputation as a scientific wizard. Like Aldini, he specialized in shocking various parts of the body to make them move. The scientific validity of this was questionable, as Ure didn’t seem to be answering any specific questions with his work. It apparently looked cool, though.
On Nov. 4, 1818, Ure carried out an electrical experiment on the body of an executed murderer named Matthew Clydesdale with James Jeffray, an anatomy professor at the University of Glasgow. As reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, Ure wrote of the experiment:
“Every muscle of the body was immediately agitated with convulsive movements resembling a violent shuddering from cold. On moving the second rod from hip to heel… the leg was thrown out with such violence as nearly to overturn one of the assistants, who in vain tried to prevent its extension.”
The scientists also electrically stimulated Clydesdale’s diaphragm and phrenic nerve to make it appear as if he were breathing. And when they applied the electricity to the supraorbital nerve on his face, “every muscle of his countenance was simultaneously thrown into fearful action; rage, anguish, horror, despair, and ghastly smiles united their hideous expression.”
“At this period,” Ure noted, “several of the spectators were forced to leave the apartment from terror or sickness, and one gentleman fainted.”
Ure eventually ran out of steam with his real Frankenstein experiments, as local churches were threatening to shut him down by force if he didn’t stop summoning devils in his lab. He soon gave up the reanimation efforts, correctly concluding they were a waste of his time. He then turned his attention to more productive pursuits, such as revolutionizing the way volumes are measured and developing a working thermostat.
He also spent the years between 1829 and his death in 1857 arguing passionately that the Earth was 6,000 years old and that “true science” always agrees with the Bible.
