The real experiments that inspired Frankenstein

When Mary Shelley published her iconic novel in 1818, raising the dead seemed to be the near-future. Join the Video Lab! Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has been reimagined onscreen hundreds of times and is a staple of pop culture. The prevailing takeaway is science-gone-wrong and the dangers of pursuing the unnatural. But contemporary readers, surrounded by Enlightenment-era scientific breakthroughs that were beginning to shift the definition of death, would have read the story as fri