来源：《新科学家》
原文刊登日期：2021年10月27日
In 1817, the natural philosopher Karl August Weinhold removed the brain from a living kitten and replaced it with a mix of zinc and silver, essentially a battery. According to Weinhold, the animal “opened its eyes, looked straight ahead with a glazed expression… staggered about, and then fell down exhausted”.
1817年，自然哲学家卡尔·奥古斯特·温霍尔德从一只活着的小猫身上取出大脑，取而代之的是锌和银的混合物，本质上是一个电池。根据温霍尔德的说法，这只动物“睁开眼睛，带着呆滞的表情直视前方……蹒跚而行，然后精疲力竭地倒下”。
The following year, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published to a public hungry for the author’s take on one of the most pressing scientific issues of the day: is electricity the key to animal life? And if so, can a short sharp electric shock reanimate the dead?
次年，玛丽·雪莱的《弗兰肯斯坦》向公众面前出版，公众渴望看到作者对那时最紧迫的科学问题之一的看法：电是动物生命的关键吗？如果是这样，短时间的电击能让死人复活吗？
Recent history had blurred the once a clear divide between life and death. There were reports of transient consciousness of what looked like life in freshly guillotined heads in revolutionary France, and the invention of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation allowed people who had seemingly drowned to spring back to life.
近代史已经模糊了曾经泾渭分明的生与死的界线。有报道称，在法国大革命期间，刚被断头台砍下的头颅有短暂的意识，口对口人工呼吸的发明让那些似乎已经淹死的人重新活了过来。
Sharon Ruston covers this historical ground well, and takes it further, revealing Shelley’s firm grip on the scientific issues of her day – in particular, the growing understanding of the role of electricity in life.
莎朗·拉斯顿很好地描述了这一历史背景，并进一步揭示了雪莱对她那个时代的科学问题的坚定把握——特别是对电在生活中作用的日益加深的理解。
In the last decades of the 1700s, it was believed that animal life was driven by something called animal electricity, thought to be distinct from the kind that flows through metal. The idea came from the physician Luigi Galvani to explain why the muscles in the legs of dead frogs twitched when hit by an electrical spark.
在18世纪的最后几十年，人们相信动物的生命是由一种叫做动物电的东西驱动的，这种电被认为与流过金属的电不同。这个想法来自于内科医生路易吉·加瓦尼，他想解释为什么死青蛙的腿部肌肉在被电火花击中时会抽搐。
Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, took these experiments further. He passed a current through corpses. The bodies then opened their eyes, clenched their fists, raised their arms, beat their hands against the table or moved as though attempting to stand or sit up.
加瓦尼的外甥乔瓦尼·阿尔迪尼进行了进一步的实验。他让电流穿过尸体。然后，这些尸体睁开眼睛，握紧拳头，举起手臂，用手敲打桌子，或者动起来，好像要站起来或坐起来。
As Ruston writes, in Shelley’s book, Victor Frankenstein’s anguished description of the moment his Creature awakes “sounds very like the description of Aldini’s attempts to resuscitate 26-year-old George Forster”, one of the corpses experimented on after he was hanged for the murder of his wife and child in 1803.
正如拉斯顿所写，在雪莱的书中，维克多·弗兰肯斯坦痛苦地描述了他的创造物苏醒的那一刻，“听起来很像阿尔迪尼试图救活26岁的乔治·福斯特的描述”，乔治·福斯特在1803年因谋杀妻子和孩子被绞死后，他的尸体成为了阿尔迪尼的实验对象。
The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein is both a great introduction and a serious contribution to understanding Frankenstein. Through Ruston’s eyes, we see how the first sci-fi novel captured the imagination of a science-hungry public.
《<弗兰肯斯坦>中的生死科学》既是一个伟大的介绍，也是对理解《弗兰肯斯坦》的重大贡献。通过拉斯顿的眼睛，我们看到了第一部科幻小说如何抓住了渴望科学的公众的想象力。