Influence of Grave Robbing on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Grave Robbing

Mary Shelley's book Frankenstein explores many topics from the 19th century and one of them is grave robbing. What is grave robbing? It's when a person digs up a buried body to steal things that were buried with it. During the 19th century they were stealing body parts instead of personal items. They planned to use the body parts in resurrections. 

Mt. Zion Cemetery 

                         19th Century Medical InfluenceIn the 19th century medical schools were allowing students to use cadavers. There is one story in particular that made the media. During this time period students in Baltimore had a shortage on the dissection materials that they needed. They decided that they were going to take care of  the problem themselves. The school even hired the janitor to help. They hid shovels in the anatomy room and when night struck they went out in search of fresh unguarded graves. "The plunderers began by shoveling at the head of a freshly buried coffin, breaking the lid, placing a hook around the deceased’s neck or armpit and, with the help of a rope, easing the body out of the grave. For shipment elsewhere, the corpses were folded into barrels filled with whiskey—to mask the odor. At the destination, a medical school took the remains for dissection." (1) They ended up getting caught and going to court. The judge found them innocent. Many of the students and administrators got away with what they did. It's ironic because so far in the book Victor seems to be getting away with his illegal activities as well. 

                                                                  The Granger Collection, NYC
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein she brings up grave robbing and resurrection. This is because this was happening during the time period she was alive. I am sure it made an impact on her and helped her in creating the book and character Frankenstein. She also spent most of her teenage years in the graveyard sitting by her mothers tombstone. She had a fascination and sense of serenity there. Victor resurrects a creature which later goes by the name of Frankenstein. He was performing illegal experiments just like the medical students. He seemed to be using them for the same exact reasons too. His attempt was successful in the book, but the medical student's attempt in real life wasn't. I don't think Mary Shelley necessary agrees with these medical practices, because in the book it seems as if this medical experiment backfired for Victor and ended in instant regret.

There are many different things that the cadavers were being used for. Victor practiced one technique in particular: galvanism. Galvanism is the "science" of electrifying dead bodies. During the 1790s, Italian physician Luigi Galvani demonstrated what we now understand to be the electrical basis of nerve impulses when he made frog muscles twitch by jolting them with a spark from an electrostatic machine. When Frankenstein was published, however, the word galvanism implied the release, through electricity, of mysterious life forces. "Perhaps," Mary Shelley recalled of her talks with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, "a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things." (2)

Boris Karloff as Frankenstein's monster in Bride of Frankenstein

"I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials; and often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion." (3)

—Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Volume I, Chapter 3

                                                                       Works Cited                                                                         
 Antero Pietila. “In Need of Cadavers, 19th-Century Medical Students Raided Baltimore's Graves.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, 25 Oct. 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/in-need-cadavers-19th-century-medical-students-raided-baltimores-graves-180970629/. (1)

Flickr, Josh. Mt. Zion Cemetery. August 24, 2018. Georgetown, Washington DC. https://daily.jstor.org/grave-robbing-black-cemeteries-and-the-american-medical-school/ . Accessed March 2022.

 Marshall, Bridget M. “Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Body Issues.” Frankenstein and Body Issues, University of Massachusetts, 2011, https://faculty.uml.edu/bmarshall/frankensteinandbodyissues.html. (2)

Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus : the 1818 Text. Oxford ; New York :Oxford University Press, 1998. (3)