Giovanni Aldini

Giovanni Aldini was born in the year 1762 and at a young age of 36, he already acquired the position as a professor of Physics in the University of Bologna located in Northern Italy.  Though others may regard him as a very humble professor, he was also involved in a very bizarre experiment.  Galvanism is derived from the uncle of Giovanni Aldini named Luigi Galvani who experimented on dead frogs.  Galvani through this process discovered that by giving an ample amount of electric current to the dead frog, it was able to twitch and create movement as if it was still alive.

Aldini was greatly influenced by this experiment of his uncle.  He took the experiment of Galvani into a step higher, an experiment that has gone very controversial during his time due to the violation of the corpses.

Aldini was however unable to bring the dead back into life but he was able to make the dead move.  It is not a form of reanimating the corpse but rather animating the corpse.  He followed the same process that Luigi Galvani took but he did not use an animal as his test subject.  He used a body of a recently hanged man named George Foster.  His experiment is based on the use of electric current.

His experiment on the body of George Foster happened in 1803 at the Royal College of Surgeon in London.  George Foster was hanged for the crime of drowning his own wife and child.  By attaching rods to a large battery, (other rods are attached to Foster’s body) Foster’s left eye opened wide.  His jaw began to move in a very bizarre way as if he wanted to say something.

When the rods was attached to his arms, Foster’s hand rise.  But Aldini was quick into explaining that he did not literally bring the dead back to life instead the power of electricity make it looked like that the dead has come back from the grave.

Aldini died in 1834 when he was 72 years old.