50 Things That Made The Modern Economy

With Tim Harford

Murderers in early 19th century London

sometimes tried to kill themselves before they were hanged.

Failing that, they asked their friends to give their legs a good, hard tug

dangled from the gallows. They wanted to be absolutely certain. They were dead.

Their freshly hanged bodies, they knew, would be handed to scientists for anatomical studies.

They didn't want to survive the hanging and regain consciousness while being dissected.

If George Foster, executed in 1803, had woken up on the lab table,

it would have been in particularly undignified circumstances.

In front of an enthralled and slightly horrified London crowd, an Italian scientist

with a flare for showmanship was sticking an electrode up Foster's rectum.

Some in the audience thought Foster was waking up.

The electrically charged probe caused his lifeless body to flinch and his fist to clench.

Applied to his face, electrodes made his mouth grimace in an eye twitch open.

One on looker was apparently so shocked he dropped dead shortly after.

Foster's body was being galvanized.

A word coined for Luigi Galvani, the Italian scientist's uncle.

In 1780s Italy, Galvani had discovered that touching the severed legs of a dead frog

with two different types of metal caused the legs to jerk.

Galvani thought he'd discovered animal electricity and his nephew was carrying on the investigations.

Galvanism briefly fascinated the public, inspiring Mary Shelley to write her story of Frankenstein.

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