Frankenstein’s creature is coming back to life – again. As Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s gothic masterpiece airs on Netflix, we provide an anatomist’s perspective of her tale of reanimation. Could an assembled body ever breathe, bleed or think?
When Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818, anatomy was a science on the edge of revelation and respectability. Public dissection theatres drew crowds, body snatchers supplied medical schools with illicit corpses and electricity promised new insights into the spark of life.
Shelley’s novel captured this moment perfectly. Victor Frankenstein’s creation was inspired by real debates: Luigi Galvani’s experiments on frog legs twitching under electric charge, and Giovanni Aldini’s demonstrations making executed criminals grimace with applied current. To early 19th-century audiences, life might indeed have seemed a matter of anatomy plus electricity.
