Electricity is used for a multitude of things in our daily lives. It can light up our houses or even bring a dead individual back to life. The practice of resuscitating a person via electricity is known to us as defibrillation. Mary Shelley included a loose idea of defibrillation in her novel entitled Frankenstein. Although the defibrillator was introduced more than forty years following her death, Shelley’s interpretation is reasonably accurate. In the 1780s, a biologist named Galvani generated the idea that people could come back from the dead. Galvani used a steel scalpel to cut open the frog and a brass hook to hold the frog’s leg open. By accident, the tools touched and created a small shock of electricity. This mistake caused the frog’s …show more content…
Kouwenhoven’s design allowed for paramedics and doctors to safely resuscitate a patient suffering from cardiac arrest. Most defibrillators used today are portable and generally lightweight. Some are even wireless, but do not have as high of a voltage level as the stationary machines.
His design also caused defibrillation to become a more common practice within the medical field. Before the modern defibrillator, there was no solution to this dilemma and an ample amount of people died from cardiac arrest.
The plot of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein coincides with resuscitation in the idea that electricity can put life back into the deceased. However, the main character of Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein, did not want to save lives. The monster that he created yearned to expunge lives instead.
Victor Frankenstein was a young scientist who attended the University of Ingolstadt. While working in a lab, Victor became inspired to give resuscitation an attempt. He snuck dead body parts into the lab and prepared them for his experiment. By binding amputated appendages, Frankenstein had a dead body ready to be experimented on. Even though there was a harsh thunderstorm brewing outside his lab, Frankenstein found the weather perfect for messing with electricity