Luigi Galvani
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Luigi Galvani was an Italian physician, physicist, biologist and philosopher, who studied animal electricity. In 1780, he discovered that the muscles of dead frogs' legs twitched when struck by an electrical spark. This was an early study of bioelectricity, following experiments by John Walsh and Hugh Williamson.
Experiment De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari
Electrodes touch a frog, and the legs twitch into the upward position
Luigi Galvani's monument in Piazza Luigi Galvani (Luigi Galvani Square), in Bologna
Frankenstein
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Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared in the second edition, which was published in Paris in 1821.
Draft of Frankenstein ("It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man completed ...")
An English editorial cartoonist conceives the Irish Fenian movement as akin to Frankenstein's creature, in the wake of the Phoenix Park murders in an 1882 issue of Punch.
Illustration by Theodor von Holst from the frontispiece of the 1831 edition