The Lady and Her Monsters

by Roseanne Montillo

  Chapter 2

  WAKING THE DEAD

  Lastly, where is that most noble

  electrical fluid that seemed entrusted

  with motion, sensations, blood, circulation,

  in short, with life itself?

  LUIGI GALVANI, “CARNIVAL LESSONS”

  During Bologna’s carnival season of 1786, Luigi Galvani stood in the anatomical theater, rhythmically sharpening his surgical tools. A large crowd had assembled to view the lectures and demonstrations, and they milled about in the wood-paneled room, while the wealthier members of the city had already seated themselves in the soft-cushioned chairs near the center of the auditorium. These public demonstrations were open to everyone, but the groups had been segregated according to social rank, with the rich sitting near the spot where the cadaver lay splayed in the circular center of the theater and the poorer classes viewing the proceedings from the far back.

  Iconographic lithograph of Luigi Galvani at the height of his academic career.

  It was a good place for them to be. Their presence, with its snickering and loud groans, enlivened this somber occasion and was clearly heard among the presentations. If the cadaver had been someone notorious, they felt lucky. If he happened to be someone they had known personally while alive, so much the better, for they could judge for themselves whether or not such a public ending was warranted. More often than not, they felt, the ending was appropriate.

  The crime rate in Bologna during the late 1700s was especially high, due mostly to gangs of bandits that ruled the city and were oblivious to its laws. They crept down the swaths of darkness created by the city’s kneeling buildings, or across its shady alleyways, and robbed people at knifepoint as they crossed Bologna’s many squares and piazzas, especially the farmers, who left their homes as first light dawned and returned when darkness descended. Some gangs were more vicious than others, and they would commit murder for nothing more than a basket of vegetables, a dozen eggs, a dead rabbit.

  They had the best hiding spots, places the law never thought to look, such as sacristies within the churches or the cells of monasteries. But if one was actually caught, he was then tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. The death would be very public, announced in bulletins plastered all over the city. These advertisements of “hanging, quartering and beating” not only scared would-be criminals but also invited the community to participate in the big event.

  Punishments for minor crimes may have been less severe, but they were no less painful or public. The insertion of spikes (wooden or iron) between the fingernails and the skin, or the toenails and the skin, was a favorite form of torture until the early 1800s. Sometimes angry dogs were unleashed on criminals until the felons, bitten and pawed nearly to death, had no other choice but to confess. But before the punishments were inflicted, the felons were piled on horse-drawn carriages and paraded across the city where the citizens, commoners as well as those belonging to the nobility, had an opportunity to view them. Some were specifically hanged or beheaded, and those were the ones brought beneath the anatomist’s knife.

  The crowd in the anatomy theater waited anxiously as the anatomist prepared the tools of his trade. This loud show of anticipation brought some laughter and nervous coughs from the rear of the building, a reaction that those sitting up front did not appreciate. Those coveted seats were filled by the members of the podestà, the town’s officials, the doctors, the students, the scholars, the fine ladies who donned their puffy-sleeved silk gowns with baubles on their fingers or wore fancy carnival masks. Outside, the bells from across the street tolled and the melodious strains of monks reciting a rosary sounded in the auditorium, in hope for the peaceful rest of the cadaver’s soul.

  Each year an official member of the anatomy team was chosen with great fanfare to demonstrate his skills to his peers, students, and the public at large. He gave fourteen oral lectures but also showed practical dissections of human corpses. It was no coincidence that they took place during carnival season—late January to mid-February. Carnival ushered in Lent, and by nature this was a time of sanctity and revelry, giving the demonstrations the double-edged feeling of the sacred and profane. But there were also more practical reasons: students were excused from their official studies then and could attend the lectures without guilt. But more to the point, the dead preferred the cold weather, which lessened the decomposition and smell of a dissected cadaver on a marble slab.

  Luigi Galvani led these ceremonies on four occasions: 1768, 1772, 1780, and 1786. Cutting deeply into the flesh with long, secure, sinuous strokes, the presentations were proud moments that allowed him to share his thoughts on his latest experiments with his colleagues, who then had the opportunity to dispute his claims. As he spoke, he must have realized that these demonstrations were somewhat lurid, especially when the anatomists themselves gave vent to their own speculations and feelings.

  Most students knew that in 1521, Professor Jacopo Berengario da Carpi had described the gruesome dissection of a woman, and then detailed it in a book called Commentaria. The story trickled down within the halls of the university and became notorious among students and professors. It told of Berengario’s removal of a woman’s placenta while performing a public demonstration, of how he had held it aloft “before almost five hundred students and our University of Bologna and also many citizens.” The viewers were riveted as the professor brought the woman’s entrails out of the rib cage toward the open air. He seemed to find nothing odd in what he was doing; to him, the anatomist was not only someone poking the flesh and prodding the innards of a corpse, “but a philosopher who investigates the secrets of nature.”

  As the crowd watched Galvani prepare to dissect the cadaver, one thing became quite obvious: the Bolognese were not a sheepish people. Even earlier than Berengario da Carpi’s demonstrations, in the year 1315, medical students attended human dissections performed by Mondino De’ Luzzi, whose first corpse had also been a woman. Not surprisingly, those procedures were later described in his book Anatomia Corposi Humani. An enthralled witness to Mondino’s event, Guy de Chauliac, described the ordeal: “the body, having been placed on a table, he would make from it four readings: in the first the digestive organs were treated, because more prone to rapid decomposition; in the second, the organs of the respiration; in the third, the organs of the circulation; and in the fourth, the extremities were treated.”

  But Mondino was a dissector in name only: he did not perform the actual operations on the flesh. Three people, each with his own particular set of skills, did the real work. A barber made the initial cuts using sharp razors and scissors; a demonstrator pointed to each organ, extremity, or nerve as he removed it from the body; and the anatomist sat apart from the body and, never touching the corpse, explained to the masses what they were seeing. Like his colleagues, Mondino published a textbook, Anatomia, which became the go-to guide for dissectors for centuries afterward.

  In the sixteenth century Bologna was awed by the dissections of a new anatomist, the Belgian Andreas Vesalius. His fame had come in part because while performing his own dissections he recognized that many of the earlier references by Claudius Galen had been faulty.

  Vesalius had begun by dismembering dogs, kittens, and other small animals, not unlike Galen, but he later moved on to humans and was able to understand that the notions of all dissectors and anatomists—Galen’s idea of the four humors—were wrong. This idea had developed in Galen’s youth, when he declared that the body’s organs possessed four humors, or substances: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.

  Andreas Vesalius. Portrait of the famous anatomist renowned not only for his work but for his body snatching in the French cemeteries.

  When these substances were not in accord with one another, according to Galen, disease and corruption occurred. For example, an excess of black bile would cause a person to show signs of depression and melancholy; of course if the person appeared sickly and pale, there must be an excess of the yellow bile. Bu
t Galen had not performed dissections on humans; instead he had performed vivisections of animals, which he believed were comparable to humans. For example, he thought human livers had five lobes, just like dogs’, and that the human heart had two chambers, when it actually had four. Despite these incongruities, for centuries thereafter anatomists adhered to his ideas.

  In early 1537, the custom of publicly viewing the dissection of dead bodies was reinstated after a hiatus of nearly eighteen years. Vesalius was given the honor of being the first anatomist to conduct the ceremony, and he needed to find a perfect specimen. With the lectures nearing, on a blustery winter evening, he heard that a thief had been burned at the stake. Body snatching was frowned upon, but Vesalius needed to get his hands on corpses so he could study his theories.

  Disregarding the laws, Vesalius neared the burning spot and contemplated what was left of the smoldering corpse. He then climbed atop the stake and dismantled the remains, which came apart with a great creaking sound. “The brigand had provided the birds with such a tasty meal that the bones were completely bare and bound together solely by the ligaments,” he later wrote. He went on, detailing how he had “pulled away a femur from the hip bone,” and how, when he “pulled at the upper limbs, the arms and hands came away bringing with them the scapulae.”

  Making sure no one was watching this dreadful ordeal, he lugged the corpse away. “I allowed myself to be shut outside the city at nightfall; so keen and eager was I to obtain those bones that I did not flinch from going at midnight among all the corpses and pulling down what I wanted,” he said, speaking of that experience and of others he had been involved in. “I had to climb the stake without assistance, and it took a great deal of effort and hard work. Having pulled down the bones, I took them away a certain distance and hid them in a secret place, and brought them home bit by bit the next day through another of the city gates.”

  Frontispiece to Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica. His most famous work, it was published in 1543, when he was in his late twenties.

  This was not the only time he stole a corpse. While a student in Paris, he had often scavenged the cemeteries for bones and flesh, particularly at the Gibbet of Montfaucon, the notorious spot where criminals were hung. The cadavers were then hauled to his home, carefully stripped to the bare bones, boiled in large odorous vats of water, and cleaned. Then, using the cleaned pieces, he reconstructed the human skeleton. This practice of becoming such a hands-on dissector allowed him, at the age of twenty-six, to write the seminal work De Humani Corporis Fabrica, “On the Fabric of the Human Body,” a dramatically original work published in 1543. In short order, he became the finest and most sought-after dissector Europe had ever seen. In December 1537, he had been appointed professor of surgery at the famed University of Padua.

  In 1540 officials from the University of Bologna invited Vesalius to give several lectures and anatomical presentations. Not surprisingly, thousands of students attended, though the most reliable note-taker appears to have been Baldasar Heseler.

  “The anatomy of our subject was arranged in the place where they used to elect the Rector Medicorum,” Heseler’s notes read. “A table, on which the subject was laid, was conveniently and well installed with four steps of benches in a circle, so that nearly 200 persons could see the anatomy. However, nobody was allowed to enter before the anatomists, and altogether, those who had paid 20 soldi. More than 150 students were present, and D. Curtius, Eigius, and many other doctors followed Curtius. At last, D. Andreas Vesalius arrived, and many candles were lighted, so that all should see.”

  The wisps of smoke that arose from the melting candles undulated by the cadaver’s feet and hands and rose above the dead flesh. Some spectators followed those tendrils skyward, but only for a few minutes, before they dispersed as they made it all the way to the painted ceiling. Then the students and spectators returned their eyes to the corpse and watched as a confident Vesalius worked on “the body cut up and prepared beforehand, already shaved, washed and cleaned.” He pointed to each organ, bone, nerve, vein, referring to Galen’s claims, refuting them, as the crowd stood by, either awed or insulted.

  By the time Galvani took the stage in the 1700s, some of the practices normally associated with the lectures and demonstrations had been done away with—such as the clear division of labor—though the theatricality still thrived. The historian William Brockbank noted that the theaters had been constructed less for practicality than to merge art and science, a way for the public to take part in the demonstrations that for so long had held an air of secrecy and mystery. “It is clearly connected not only with the history of medicine and of teaching, but also with the history of art. The theater arose out of the stream of ideas which flowed through Italy at the time of the Renaissance. Its purpose was to offer a performance,” Brockbank argued, “for an anatomical dissection those days was really more of a theatrical occasion than a lesson. The outstanding personalities and authorities of the town were invited to be present. It was the first laboratory, the first place where scientific research was carried out.”

  For much of Galvani’s earlier career, he had been intrigued by other areas of medicine, including the study of the bone structure, the uterus, and particularly the development of the ear canals in humans and birds. But as time passed, he seemed less interested in those research subjects, especially after a fellow medic and researcher appeared to have used some of Galvani’s publications on ear canals in his own text. A scandal broke out, but Galvani did nothing about it—either because he didn’t relish such a public display of anger or perhaps because he’d become so absorbed by the study of animal electricity, he’d lost his passion for any other medical interest.

  Whatever the reason, the seriousness of his behavior and his steady nerves came in handy in 1791. On March 27, he published his findings on animal electricity in the scientific journal of the Bologna Academy and the Institute of Sciences. De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius (Commentary on the effects of electricity on muscular motion) was the culmination of nearly eleven years of experiments. Many in the academic world read Galvani’s work with interest, and though impressed, they were not greatly disturbed because Galvani was not the first, or the earliest, scientist to look into animal electricity. Two other Bolognese before him, Floriano Caldani and Giambattista Beccaria, had been able to elicit twitches from dead frogs. Galvani mentioned their findings in the Commentaries. But unlike Caldani and Beccaria, Galvani’s scope was so massive, his research and experimentation so extensive, it was difficult to set it aside without giving it further thought.

  Galvani spoke of the moment when all of his experiments culminated: “Accordingly, on an evening early in September 1786, we placed some frogs horizontally on a parapet, prepared in the usual manner by piercing and suspending their spinal cords with iron hooks. The hooks touched an iron plate; behold! A variety of not infrequent spontaneous movements in the frog. If, when they were quiescent, the hook was pressed with the finger against the iron surface, the frogs became excited almost as often as this type of pressure was applied.”

  Apparatus formerly used by Luigi Galvani. This is a small plate electrostatic machine, used to harness electricity. One of the many objects found in his laboratory.

  He was showing that the frogs’ muscle contractions were the result of the vital fluid that circulated within their bodies. This fluid was then instigated to revitalize by a metallic arc that touched the crural nerves and muscles. The fluid then became excited, so to speak, which caused the movements in the frogs’ limbs. Galvani’s nephew Giovanni Aldini said this was something “no one had attempted” before. He came to believe that Galvani’s “ingenuity” led to an understanding that “we may have muscle disposed to contraction by mere passage of a spark.”

  Throughout Europe, from France to England and Germany, scientists began replicating Galvani’s experiments.

  At the University of Pavia, Bassiano Carminati, a professor of anatomy, began to scruti
nize a copy of the Commentaries sent to him by Galvani. Carminati was a well-known professor whose acquaintances included a wide range of colleagues and students, one of whom was the renowned physicist Alessandro Volta. Eventually Carminati passed the Commentaries on to Volta, who had kept abreast of the latest so-called discoveries in animal electricity, as well as the scientists who delved into the field.

  Ordinarily, Volta never considered animal electricity a valuable source of scientific study. But as he reclined at his desk in Pavia reading the Commentaries as Carminati had urged him to do, he changed his mind. He was intrigued by Galvani’s proposals and even considered dabbling in these studies himself. In March 1792, he connected the muscles of a frog, dismembered in Galvani’s style, to its exposed nerves, without the use of the so-called artificial electricity. Surprisingly, he interpreted the results in the same manner Galvani had. He even announced, “We have to adapt to the idea that animal electricity exists.” But he still had no real enthusiasm for the concept. He thought there was something odd in the experiments and doubted his findings. Even more, he doubted Galvani’s.

  Not long after Volta published his statements, Galvani received a letter from Bassiano Carminati that offered false praise and a certain measure of insult. Volta, Carminati explained, had been delving deeply into the subject of animal electricity, conducting experiments similar to Galvani’s. But, as it stood, Carminati continued, Volta had also managed to disprove Galvani’s claims, having “concluded that the deficiency of electric fluids exists on the part of the nerves . . . therefore, our distinguished Signor Volta, wishes the contrary of your opinion, which is not yet held as a settled thing.”