Role Of Electricity In Frankenstein

Is Frankenstein Possible

In the novel Frankenstein Dr. Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist created a monster by sewing together body parts he collected then bringing it to life by shocking it with a bunch of electricity. The science fiction in the novel Frankenstein would not work in boundaries of reality, because just adding electricity wouldn’t give life to Victor’s monster, the body parts Victor found would be too damaged, and the brain dies after fifteen minutes without oxygen.

Electricity is used in modern medicine to bring a recently dead person “back to life” in the form of defibrillators, so could enough electricity bring body parts sewed together to life? Defibrillators are used on people who have recently clinically died, and

the heart stops beating. The electricity in the defibrillators shock the sinoatrial node (known as the hearts natural pace maker) which shocks the heart into working normally again (Woodford). Electricity is also known for making muscles contract even if there not connected to a living being, however that’s it, so all adding a bunch of electricity to a bunch of body parts sewed together would do is make the all the muscles (that haven’t rotted away) contract all at once (probably breaking the rotting bones inside the monster). Not only would adding all that electricity do more harm than good to the sewed together body parts, it would cook them and probably smell awful.
There are two kinds of death, brain death and clinical death.

Clinical death is the cessation of the body’s vital functions, like heart beat and respiration. Through modern medicine and life support someone can survive being clinically dead, with things like heart transplants. There’s even body part transplants like in 2011 there was the first double leg transplant. So if it’s possible to take deceased body parts and transplant them into a clinically dead person and have them live then taking a bunch of dead parts to make one living person must be possible right? No, body parts used in transplants must be from a very recently deceased person, undamaged, and are frozen to preserve them long enough to make it into the recipient’s body. The body parts Victor got from charnel-houses, dissecting room, and the slaughter house would probably be damaged and were probably there at room temperature for a couple days. So the body parts Victor got would be unsalvageable due to damage from lack of oxygen. “When cells are deprived of oxygen and nutrients, they soon begin to self-destruct” (Miller). That process of cell self-destruction takes different amount of time according to the body part and the temperature, but usually after six hours’ irreversible damage occurs. That’s why the transplanted body parts are frozen until they reach the recipient because when cells are frozen it slows down the processes of the cell, and therefore slowing the process of self-destruction of the cell. The

body parts Victor gathers were not frozen but most likely kept at room temperature so the cells in the body parts would have self-destructed before Victor even found them making them unsalvageable.
What if it was cold or Victor was fast with lucky timing and got to the body parts before the cells self-destructed and irreversible damage ensued? First Victor got the body parts months before and second even if it was a perfect case scenario where all the body parts were in perfect condition, it still wouldn’t work. The brain is the most important organ of the body, the brain only makes up two percent of the body’s total weight, however it takes up twenty-five percent of the body’s total oxygen (Wesson). That’s where brain death comes in., after one minute without oxygen the brain cells begin to die, after three minutes’ serious brain damage occurs, after fifteen minutes’ recovery is virtually impossible and they are considered brain dead (Multimedea). The brain works because neurons that send tiny signals of electricity that transmit information in the brain. Neurons are fragile and very important to being alive, when someone is struck by lightning it can severely damage or cook the neurons. “Direct strikes to the head have a high degree of fatality and often result in petechiae or larger brain hemorrhages” (Neurol). So even if Frankenstein had a perfect brain that had suffered no brain damage as a result of lack oxygen, he would have fried the delicate neurons in the brain by electrocuting the brain.
The science fiction the novel Frankenstein does not work in the science of reality, even in perfect conditions it still wouldn’t work.

However new medicine and scientific breakthroughs are made every day, so maybe in the future it would be possible to give life to body parts sewed together. If that is possible in the future we don’t know, however even in that feature what Victor did would just not work. The body parts Victor collected would have been clinically dead months before he created the monster, and all the cells would have self-destructed due to lack of oxygen. Even if the body parts where in perfect condition the biggest issue would have been the brain. The brain uses twenty-five percent of the body’s oxygen so when there’s no oxygen being pumped through the body the brain is the first organ that dies. What if Victor got a brain that despite not having oxygen in who knows how long still had some activity going on and was only brain damaged (which is impossible). The way modern doctors treat brain damage is through a team of highly trained specialists and carful procedures that even then have a low chance of full recovery, not by randomly shocking the patient with a lethal amount of

electricity.