Topsy the Elephant being executed by electrocution in 1903.
Today’s post is a guest post by Chris Kincaid. Normally you can find him writing about Japanese pop culture over on JapanPowered.com, but today he’s stopped by to tell the sad, strange story of Topsy the Elephant.
Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla had a…strained relationship. Edison and George Westinghouse, Telsa’s bankroller, competed to electrify the United States. Edison championed his direct current (DC). Westinghouse peddled alternating current (AC). DC was safer than Telsa’s current, but direct current couldn’t travel long distances without losing power. Because of this, Tesla was winning the War of the Currents.
Edison refused to be undone however. He started a marketing campaign to prove Tesla’s AC was too dangerous to be used. How did Edison do this you may wonder? He publicly electrocuted dogs and cats.
In 1903, Edison heard of an opportunity to stage a true circus act and bury Tesla’s AC once and for all.
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Topsy was a famous Coney Island elephant. Well loved by her trainer, Gus, she was a good elephant. Her tricks amazed the crowds, and they adored her tutu. But eventually the crowds thinned and Topsy’s fame became a memory. Gus drifted away, tending new animals that wowed the crowds. Gus still took care of Topsy, but he didn’t lavish her with the attention she once knew. Well, poor Topsy became the butt of jokes and cruelty by other people. One day, two of Gus’s buddies stopped over to tease the elephant. One of them tossed a lit cigarette into her mouth, burning her. Elephants are unable to spit out an object. It was at that moment when the years of Gus’s indifference and the pain of the cigarette sparked Topsy’s elephant rage. She grabbed one of the men with her trunk and threw him against a post. Then, she knocked over the man who threw the cigarette into her mouth and crushed him under a mighty foot.
Topsy would eventually kill two more people before she was tried and sentenced to be hanged. It seems strange to hang an elephant, but ever since the Middle Ages, animals have been sentenced to death for various crimes. Pigs were often executed. In 1457, a pig and her six piglets were accused to murdering a five-year-old girl. The piglets were acquitted on bail, but their mother was hanged.
The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals stepped in to prevent Topsy’s hanging. They deemed it too cruel. Edison offered his services.
In a marketing event that drew 1,500 people, Topsy was electrocuted to death. In the event it would have failed, she was fed a last meal of carrots laced with cyanide.
Edison used the event with Topsy along with other animal executions, to try to discredit Tesla’s AC. Prior to Topsy, Edison developed an electric chair using AC to make people afraid of the current. Well, today we continue to use both electric chairs to execute criminals and AC to light our homes.
“Stegosaurus ungulatus” by Perry Quan from Oakville, Canada – Pittsburgh-2013-05-18-054Uploaded by FunkMonk. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The history of science is full of ideas that were consigned to the junk drawer. Some were useful, at least until they were finally overturned, but others were just plain wacky. The science of Paleontology in particular has attracted its fair share of junk ideas. And why not? After all, these are scientists who are studying tiny fragments of once living creatures who lived millions and millions of years ago. There’s bound to be some error there. Since most of those creatures are no longer alive, some of their more peculiar features are tough to explain. Take, for example, Stegosaurus‘ most noticeable feature: its armor plating.
Today, scientists believe they might have been used for attracting mates or to regulate body temperatures, but no one is really sure. Scientists of the 19th century were just as baffled by the plates. Early paleontologists believed they might be protective armor and that the plates could be flapped, sort of like mini wings.
W.H Ballou, writer and amateur paleontologist, expanded on this idea. In 1920, he wrote an article in the Ogden Standard-Examiner laying out his hypothesis that Stegosaurus used its flaps as glider wings. The massive beast would, according to Ballou, flatten its flaps as it leaped off high spots, allowing it to glide safely to the ground.
His evidence for this behavior was…well, pretty scant. It was mostly based on the fact that Stegosaurus is classified as a “bird-hipped” dinosaur. To Ballou, this meant that birds descended from Stegosaurus and fellow “bird-hipped” species. The similarity between birds and “bird-hipped” dinosaurs was nothing more than a case of evolutionary convergence, when species of different lineages develop strikingly similar features. A classic example of this would be the evolution of wings in both birds and flying insects.
Needless to say, no scientists took Ballou’s ludicrous idea seriously. However, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, put the creature in one of his novels. In his world, the creature had a habit of dive bombing its foes, zipping through the air using its spiky tail as a rudder.
American troops guarding the gates of the infamous concentration camp, Dachau
The crimes of the Nazi regime baffle the ability for the human mind to comprehend them. The Nazis were not only responsible for plunging the world into a war that would kill 60 to 100 million people in six years, but they perpetrated the Holocaust, the most infamous genocide in history where more than 6 million people, mostly Jewish people but also homosexuals, the infirm, the mentally ill, Gypsies, and other groups the Nazis dubbed inferior.
Ever since the collapse of the Nazi empire and the revelations concerning their evil deeds, science has tried to understand how things could go so wrong. Many psychological and sociological experiments were performed in the wake of the atrocities to try and understand how such a thing could happen. The most infamous of these was the Milgram experiment, where participants administered deadly shocks to people on the order of men dressed as doctors.
The most unorthodox and frightening of these journeys into the human psyche was not performed by a scientist at all. His name was Ron Jones, and he was a high school history teacher. In April of 1967, at Cubberly High School in Northern California, he was teaching his students about Nazi Germany when one of them asked how the German citizens could ignore the slaughter of the Jews in their midst? How could they claim ignorance, or, worse, that they were just doing their jobs? It’s a question many have asked in the decades since World War II. Jones found himself without an answer, so he formulated an on the fly experiment to delve into the German mindset. What followed was five days when a teacher’s demonstration flew out of control and founded a proto-fascist movement called the Third Wave.
Five days in the Nazi brain
The exercise started innocuously enough. Jones began by introducing to a key quality that allowed the Nazis to turn otherwise normal people into monsters: discipline. He lectured on how discipline was a powerful force that allowed a person to control their destiny and triumph over their more basic urges. It was the force that drove athletes, artists, and scientists alike to succeed in their fields. He then gave a simple exercise in discipline: he ordered his students to adopt a strict, upright seating posture. He drilled them to take this posture immediately upon entering the classroom by having them stand and then sit at attention as quickly as possible. What surprised Jones was how fast the students took to the strict discipline; in fact, many of them seemed to enjoy it. What surprised him even more was that on the second day he walked into the classroom and found them all sitting at attention.
Continuing the experiment. Jones wrote two messages on the blackboard: “Strength through discipline” and “Strength through community.” He lectured on the value of community, and then had the class recite the two phrases in unison. Jones himself became sucked into the building sense of unity, feeling less like an instructor or even an experimenter, but rather a leader of a group that he’d created himself. By the end of the class, he spontaneously created a distinct salute to only be used among the group. He called it the Third Wave salute because the hand position resembled an ocean wave. The name itself, Third Wave, came to define the group. Surfer lore holds that waves come in three, with the third being the biggest.
A funny thing happened then. The students began to greet each other using the salute. Other students saw this, and soon students from other classes began to ask if they could join the group. On day three, thirteen students cut class to join Jones’ class. That day he issued membership cards to identify members. He then lectured on the importance of taking action as the community and for the community. He gave students assignments to do on behalf of the group, from designing banners to guarding the classroom door. Perhaps most disturbing was the three students he assigned to police the others, telling them to report when other students criticized the movement or broke classroom rules. He also set up a mechanism by which other students at the high school could join the group.
Things began to get out of control by this point. Many students clamored to join the group. Even teachers and administrators started to adopt the Third Wave salute. The three students assigned to police the group were soon joined by about half the Third Wave members, who kept wary eyes on one another in search of even the smallest infraction. Jones began to agonize over what he had started. He found himself the accidental dictator of a proto-fascist group.
The demise of the Third Wave
Photo from the Nuremburg Rally of 1934. Source: Wikipedia/German Federal Archive
By Thursday of that week, Jones began to try and bring the experiment to a close. Many students were becoming far too engrossed in the Third Wave; it was becoming the main thing in their lives. Students were cutting class to join the group. School counselors were beginning to investigate the Third Wave. Eighty students crammed themselves into Jones’ classroom that day, eagerly awaiting the next lecture. Jones confided to the group that they were a part of a nationwide movement aimed at spurring young people to change the way society is run. It was not an experiment: It was a revolution. Their leader would reveal himself the next day at a noon rally for Third Wave members.
The students were thrilled. The next day some 200 students gathered in the gym. Jones had set up a television set that would supposedly broadcast the leader’s message. The students were confused when the television played nothing but static. Jones revealed that there was no leader, that the whole experiment was just that, an experiment. He then turned on a projector showing clips from the Nuremberg rallies. He said that they had fallen into the German mindset, giving up their individuality to the group, based on the idea that they were somehow superior to others by being part of the group. The students were horrified. Many started to cry, while others sat in shock.
Once the “rally” ended, the Third Wave was over. Jones was fired two years later, although not explicitly for the Third Wave experiment. Jones feels remorse for the experiment, wishing that he had ended it long before he accidentally formed a teenage fascist party.
Medical science has taken humanity down some very strange paths during its long history. From cures that involved cannibalism to an attempt to measure the weight of the soul at the beginning of the last century, doctors–those sober, respectable people we trust with our lives and health–can sometimes have more in common with the fictional Dr. Frankenstein.
One such doctor turned mad scientist was Dr. Leo Stanley. Serving as San Quentin’s chief surgeon for the better part of forty years, he played a big role in modernizing the infamous prison’s medical facilities. While this was undoubtedly good for prisoners, the good doctor’s research took darker, more unethical turns during his years at the prison. His research focused on eugenics, a now infamous pseudoscience that posits that humans can be bred via artificial selection to function better in society. The most extreme version of eugenics was practiced by Nazi Germany, who killed millions during the Holocaust in an attempt to rid the world of those they believed were racially undesirable.
Dr. Stanley did not want to exterminate those who he felt were undesirable. Instead, he focused on rejuvenating their masculinity through two bizarre methods: sterilization, and by implanting them with “testicular substances” from executed prisoners or, in some cases, livestock.
Rejuvenation and sterilization
While it might seem strange today to implant another person’s–or an animal’s for that matter–testicles into a human being, the procedure had become something of a fad in the early 20th century. The practice was known as rejuvenation, the idea being that an aging man could have his masculinity renewed by having the testicles of a younger man implanted into him.
Teasing out just how a quack cure like rejuvenation has anything to do with eugenics takes a little lateral thinking. Dr. Stanley–who was not coincidentally an aging middle class white man–obsessed over the plight of white masculinity in a country increasingly inhabited by a melting pot of races and ethnicities. He believed that the decline of white, masculine vigor would lead to a degrading of the moral values of the country. To put it bluntly, he was afraid that “undesirables” would reproduce faster than “good” people (which naturally meant white Christian people in the racial thinking of the time) and flood society with their bad genes. By reinvigorating aging white men, and by sterilizing more people with less desirable traits, Dr. Stanley believed that violence in society could be reduced.
While involuntary sterilization was legal in California, and in many parts of the country at the time, the amount allowed in prisons was limited. Dr. Stanley found a workaround to this by asking for volunteers for what he called “asexualization.” He advertised it as a procedure that would increase their “general health and vigor,” and that it would increase their libidos to boot. By 1940, 600 prisoners had volunteered to be sterilized. Some did so simply because they did not want more children. others believed the notion that the procedure would improve their health, while others feared that they might father children who were as bad as themselves.
Image from the Eugenics Congress of 1920.
Bizarre experiments
The sterilization program at least fit in with the idea of stopping the spread of “undesirable” genes. Rejuvenation fit into the scheme in a twofold way. First, if the practice could be proven to actually work, it might be something that could become more available to the broader society. the prison gave Dr. Stanley a controlled setting with lots of male test subjects with which to develop proof of concept. Second, Dr. Stanley and others at the time believed that disease and malfunction of endocrine glands might play a part in criminal behavior. So, while Dr. Stanley did no want the prisoners reproducing, he still felt that by revitalizing their masculinity they might be reformed.
He began the rejuvenation experiments in 1918, five years after taking the post at San Quentin. He grafted testicles from executed prisoners into old, senile prisoners. Over time, the supply of human testicles could not keep up with experimental demand, and he began to source the glands from goats, boars, and deer. These surgeries were meant to correct the imbalance of the prisoner’s glands and thus correct their behavior.
When the “donors” moved from humans to animals, Dr. Stanley changed the procedure from implanting the glands to smashing them into a kind of slurry, which was injected into the patient’s abdomen just under the skin. Patients reported an increase in energy and health, although how much of that was psychological and how much actually resulted from the treatment itself is anyone’s guess. Many prisoners volunteered for the procedure; prison society is hyper-masculine, and any way to improve one’s physical strength and manliness was welcome in such a society. When World War II came around, volunteering for medical experiments gave prisoners a way to feel like they were helping a bigger cause.
Dr. Stanley did his part for the war as well, serving as a surgeon for the Navy in the Pacific. He returned to San Quentin after the war, and found that the institution had undergone a shift in thinking, away from the more biologically driven ideas of yesteryear toward psychological treatment. The sterilizations dropped to a trickle, and the rejuvenation experiments dropped to nothing.
Stanley retired in 1951 and took a position as a doctor aboard a cruise ship. He himself underwent a vasectomy, apparently believing his own hype about their benefits. He died in 1976 at the age of 90. It is interesting to note that despite his beliefs in eugenics and his fear that inferior stock would take over the human population, Dr. Stanley never had any children of his own.
Sources
Blue, Ethan. “The Strange Career of Leo Stanley: Remaking Manhood and Medicine at San Quentin State Penitentiary, 1913-1951.” Academia.edu. Accessed May 3, 2014.
Dr. Walter Freeman (left) and Dr. James W. Watts studying an x-ray before performing a lobotomy.
Psychiatric medicine has come a long way in the 21st century. While the mind still holds many mysteries, at the very least we now have many non-invasive treatments, typically drug therapies but also talk therapies like cognitive behavioral therapy, that bring relief to millions suffering from mental illnesses every year.
Fifty or sixty years ago, however, many of the treatments taken for granted today were not available. Families, caretakers, and patients alike were desperate to find a cure for mysterious mental ailments that seemed to defy all treatment. This desperation, in many cases, led them to turn to a controversial treatment that today is viewed as barbarous: lobotomy.
Surgery for the soul
A lobotomy is a procedure where the prefrontal cortex’s connections to the rest of the brain are severed. It was intended to ease the symptoms of such severe mental disorders as schizophrenia, manic depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, panic disorders, and severe depression. Research had established that these ailments stemmed from malfunctions in the brain itself, although just how these malfunctions arose was anyone’s guess. Some claimed the brains of patients suffering from these disorders functioned differently on a fundamental level, that their brains were morphologically different than healthy brains. Another school of thought, the one that informed those who performed lobotomies, believed that the brains of those with mental illness were structurally the same as healthy brains, but that disordered thinking trapped certain neuronal circuits in loops that could only be broken by physically destroying the neurons.
While it’s obvious to the modern observer that this wasn’t the case, we have to remember that the modern diagnostic techniques like fMRI and CT scans didn’t exist at that point in time, so really anyone’s hypothesis could have been correct because there wasn’t any way to tell.
If that sounds like a faulty basis to perform a surgery on…well, it is. Especially a surgery like lobotomy. Initially the procedure was performed in an operating room, with the patient under anesthesia. Holes would be drilled into the front and back of the skull, and then alcohol was injected into the front hole to dissolve the white matter.
Horrifying though that is, for Walter Freeman–a lobotomy pioneer–the procedure wasn’t enough. Psychiatric hospitals and asylums were not exactly wealthy institutions, and many lacked the funds or facilities to perform the procedure outlined above. An outpatient procedure was needed, one that could be performed with little training and relatively simple tools.
Illustration of the prefrontal cortex (highlighted in orange) from Gray’s Anatomy.
The ice-pick cure
Freeman hit on the so-called ice pick lobotomy, known in clinical circles as a suborbital lobotomy, where an instrument that looked like an ice pick (hence the name) was placed into the corner of the eye, then hammered through the back of the skull into the brain. Then the instrument was twisted around, destroying the prefrontal cortex’s tissue. The instrument was withdrawn and then repeated on the other side. No anesthesia was necessary, although usually patients were given electroshock therapy to knock them out before the procedure was performed. The surgery took approximately ten minutes.
Sounds pretty awful, right? Awful though it was, for many families this was the only option to attempt to cure their loved ones. Sadly, in many cases the procedure was forced on people for less noble reasons, as families or caretakers who tired of trying to care for an unruly loved one saw the procedure as a way to make the patient more docile and easier to handle. For these and other reasons, lobotomy became something of a craze (maybe a poor choice of words) in the fifties and sixties.
In truth, results from the procedure were mixed. There was no real precision involved, as the surgery was essentially performed blind. Some patients saw improvement of symptoms with no significant side effects. Other patients saw their symptoms become worse, to the point where some became suicidal. Still others reverted back to a child-like mentality where they acted essentially like a full grown toddler. Some, including John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s sister Rosemary, became little more than vegetables. In all groups, seizures were a common side effect.
End of an era.
Lobotomies fell out of vogue with the rise of antipsychotic medications like chlorpromazine, thorazine, and others. These drugs could have similar effects as lobotomies, but with less risk of permanent brain injury or death. As for Walter Freeman, he continued to champion the procedure even as the psychiatric world moved on. He performed the final lobotomy of his career in February, 1967. His patient was named Helen Mortenson, and she died later of a brain hemorrhage. Freeman’s career ended with her death. he spent the rest of his life traveling the country in a camper, trying to reconnect with his former patients, to show that his now infamous procedure had improved their lives. He died of cancer in 1972.
Today, lobotomies are not performed, although in their place a similar sounding but altogether different procedure has arisen – the loboectomy. This procedure essentially separates the two hemispheres of the brain, and it is used in severe cases of epilepsy to reduce the risk of permanent brain injury from epileptic seizures.
Psychiatry in particular and medicine in general has come a long way in the past sixty odd years. It’s easy to look back now from our era of advanced technology and be horrified at this barbaric procedure. And we should be, because this was an often ineffective and many times unnecessary procedure inflicted on people, often without their consent, by care givers who simply wanted to silence them. However, in the cases where the procedure was undertaken in good faith it did provide hope for those in suffering, and while in some circles it was criticized frankly at the time there was no better alternative.
Illustration of a mouth with teeth removed from Cotton’s book The defective delinquent and insane: the relation of focal infections to their causation, treatment and prevention.
The mind is a mystery. For as long as humans have been human, they have sought to solve the mysteries that lurk in their own skulls. Nowadays, research into the mind lay more in the realm of the scientific than the spiritual. While many scientists believe in the concept of the soul (one even tried to measure its weight), most confine their investigations into the nature of human behavior to the more quantifiable realm. Early work in psychology and neuroscience was largely a shot in the dark. They naturally lacked modern technology and techniques, and so had to fumble around and figure out how things worked. That fumbling mixed with questionable ethics sometimes resulted in horrifying experiments.
Few experiments in the field of psychology were more horrifying than those conducted by Dr. Henry Cotton in the Trenton State Hospital in Trenton, New Jersey. While some doctors in the history of psychiatry have advocated for surgery to heal the mind, Dr. Cotton took matters a step further. In many cases, he all but butchered his patients in an effort to heal their minds.
Focal sepsis and insanity
Dr. Henry Cotton had an esteemed educational pedigree. He studied under Emit Kraepelin and Alois Alzheimer–who lent his name to the terrible degenerative disease–and Dr. Adolf Meyer. All of these men were pillars in the field of psychiatry in the early 1900s. Dr. Meyer was especially impactful in America. He observed that patients with very high fevers could suffer hallucinations. From this, he hypothesized that infections might be the root cause of behavioral abnormalities. His idea entered an arena where two contrasting hypotheses were already battling it out. Eugenic theories posited that behavioral problems resulted from heredity. According to eugenicists, selective breeding of humans could change the make up of a society and breed more desirable citizens (it also resulted in some strange Soviet experiments that attempted to crossbreed apes and humans.) Sigmund Freud held that behavioral problems stemmed from childhood trauma. Essentially, the two opposing ideas set up the nature vs. nurture argument that still rages today.
An infectious cause for insanity was a pretty attractive option. The idea of bacterial infections was a pretty cutting edge one at the time, after wide acceptance of the Germ Theory of disease had finally taken root. But more than being a sexy new theory, the idea that bacteria caused psychological illness offered hope for a relatively simple treatment for devastating ailments that nobody really understood.
Dr. Cotton became a champion for the concept. He took over as the medical director of Trenton State Hospital in 1906 at the relatively young age of 30. There he implemented the practice of surgical bacteriology. Basically, if infection of certain body parts–dubbed focal sepsis–caused insanity, removing that body part would cure the psychological ailment. Cotton would begin by pulling patient’s teeth. If the patient failed to show improvement, he might remove the tonsils next. If again there was no improvement, he would move to steadily more major surgeries, including removing–partially or in total–testicles, ovaries, gall bladders, stomachs, and spleens. Dr. Cotton was especially interested in how suspected colon infections would impact psychological health, and he often removed whole sections of people’s intestines.
A severely flawed method
If it sounds like the doctor was more insane than his patients, well, you aren’t far off. The methodology behind surgical bacteriology was flawed from the get go. Dr. Cotton did not approach the matter skeptically, testing for results carefully and holding his results to strict scrutiny of the scientific community. He proceeded as if focal sepsis was the one and only cause of mental illness. Horrible things happen when people assume they’re correct. For one thing, they ignore any evidence to the contrary; for another, they exaggerate their successes. Dr. Cotton claimed an 85 percent success rate, a statistic that gained him a lot of praise from the scientific community of the day. Subsequent investigations did not paint such a rosy picture. Patients, their families, and former employees of the hospital began to raise a ruckus about both the treatments and the conditions in the hospital. During the period of the investigations and public hearings, Dr. Cotton apparently suffered a nervous breakdown, which he treated by pulling several teeth. He pronounced himself cured. After the period of controversy, he was retired and appointed as medical director emeritus in 1930. He died of a heart attack three years later. Even the brief period of controversy did not much tarnish his reputations as a pioneer in the field of psychiatry.
As for his patients, well, their lot didn’t improve substantially. Many were left toothless and suffered unnecessary surgeries in pursuit of a cure that didn’t exist. Dr. Cotton, who was not a trained surgeon, performed abdominal surgeries in the age before penicillin. Death rates from the needless procedures were as high as 45%. Less extreme forms of surgical bacteriology were performed in Trenton State Hospital until the 1950s. After that point, the advent of anti-psychotic drugs led to more noninvasive treatments for mental illness, and the need to cut people apart to cure their mind fell by the wayside.
Luigi Galvani, painted with electrode and frog legs.
Science is something that people take for granted in the age of ubiquitous technology. It is good to remember that the technological and scientific prowess we enjoy today is built on a foundation of trial and error spanning thousands of years. Working from scratch, our ancestors often got it wrong, sometimes hilariously so, but their efforts paved the way for today’s advances.
Now and then during that long march of progress, science has taken macabre turns. One of the stranger walks down dark paths occurred during the lives of Luigi and Giovanni Galvani, whose odd experiments inspired the works of a horror icon.
Macabre but popular experiments
Luigi Galvani lived from September 9, 1737 to December 4, 1798 in Bologna, Italy. Initially, Galvani wanted to join the clergy, but his parents steered him toward the medical field. An anatomist, surgeon, physicist, and philosopher, Luigi Galvani was a gentleman of his times. And the thing that captivated the gentlemen of the 18th century was the new and mysterious power of electricity. Luigi was no exception; he discovered that applying an electrical current to dissected frogs made their legs twitch and move. From this he formulated his theory of bioelectricity, which today is known as galvanism. It is the idea that the electrical impulses that move muscles are carried by fluid in the nerves. He also formulated an idea called animal electricity, which is basically the idea that the electrical impulses that produced the movements he observed were caused by electricity sources inside the animals body, rather than the application of the outside electrical source.
This conclusion led to a conflict with an associate by the name of Volta, who believed that the so-called animal electricity was simply the result of chemical reactions that could occur outside of the body. He designed a battery called a voltaic pile that essentially demonstrated this fact. Luigi, in failing health, did not actively defend his animal electricity theory. He left that to his nephew, Giovanni, who wowed the public with a series of macabre demonstrations.
Giovanni went bigger in his demonstrations than mere frogs. One notable experiment occurred in the early 1800s where Aldini applied a strong charge from a Leyden jar to a decapitated ox head. The dead animal’s ear’s twitched, the lips moved, and the eyes opened and shut. One experiment was performed on the corpse of a recently executed 30 year old man. Electrical current applied to nerves in the base of the neck produced grotesque facial expressions. Applying current to the sciatic nerve produced violent kicking that assistants present couldn’t stop by holding down. An electrode to the rectum reportedly made the corpse bolt upright. Finally, Aldini applied current to decapitated human heads using electrodes that looked a bit like modern headphones. The heads grimaced and twitched and opened their eyes wide, much to the horror of onlookers.
Inspiration for a literary icon
These gruesome experiments were the talk of the learned circles of Europe. One particular group on Lake Geneva in Switzerland spoke about the experiments with great enthusiasm. Mary Shelley, her future husband Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori decided to have a competition as to who could write the best horror story. Inspired by the competition, the morbid talk, and reading about the works of Aldini and Galvani, Mary Shelley put pen to paper and wrote one of the most iconic horror novels in history: Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus.
Colonel Patterson with the first Tsavo lion he shot.
Serial killers are the predators among humanity. Amoral, and motivated only by unfathomable urges, they have killed and terrorized likely for as long as there has been civilization. However, humans are not the only animal capable of senseless killing. The animal world has its share of killer beasts as well, monsters our ancestors whispered about around camp fires while casting wary eyes toward the impenetrable blackness of the night.
Most often, animals leave humans alone. If there is an animal attack, often the violence is provoked by a human invading the animal’s territory or otherwise making the animal feel threatened. However, under certain circumstances these rules of human/animal interaction do not apply. If a predator, such as a big cat, can no longer access its regular prey, they have no problem switching to humans as a food source. After all, compared to large herbivores we are slow, easy kills. This is especially the case in regions where humans have encroached into predator territory.
Back in 1898, this was the case in the Tsavo region. From March through December of that year, monsters stalked in the darkness of the African night. Known as The Ghost and The Darkness, the pair of predators would become legends known as the Tsavo Man-Eaters.
Monsters on the hunt
The British Empire commissioned the Uganda/Kenya railway be built to connect its colonial territories. The workers used to build the project were primarily Sikhs and Hindus from Britain’s India colony. Designers planned the railway to cross the Tsavo River, which obviously meant that the workers would need to build a bridge to span the waterway.
The best planners in the world couldn’t have foreseen what would happen next. Panic began to ripple through the work camp when workers began to disappear, dragged screaming into the night by some massive predator, only to be found killed and shredded when the morning sun peeked over the horizon. Nothing the workers did–from building massive fires to scare the beasts to surrounding their encampments with fences of thorns–kept the attackers at bay. Fear of The Ghost and The Darkness–the worker’s name for the predators that plagued them–became so widespread that many workers fled. For all intents and purposes, construction came to a halt.
What were these creatures that inspired such terror among the work crews? The killers stalking hapless construction crews were a pair of mane-less male lions. It is odd, although not unheard of, that a pair of adult male lions would be lack a mane. And adults they were, at least in terms of size–the first of the pair to be shot was about 10 feet long, which is huge for a lion (or any animal for that matter) and it took 8 men to carry the corpse back to camp. Their appearance wasn’t the only strange thing about them. Lions do attack people from time to time, but again only if said people are in their territory. Or alone. These animals deliberately attacked a large gathering of humans, and some contemporary accounts of the attacks claim that the lions didn’t always eat their victims. In some cases, it seems, the lions killed simply to kill.
The second man-eater.
Enter Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson
If this sounds like something from a monster movie, well, just wait. It gets better. Or worse I guess, if you were a Sikh or Hindu rail worker. Not only were The Ghost and The Darkness brutal, they were also cunning. Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson, leader of the project, set out to kill the animals so that the project could continue as planned. In true monster movie fashion though, they didn’t go down easy.
When Patterson set out to hunt the lions, he soon found himself hunted. He shot the first lion in the rump, only to have it come back and stalk him that night even as he hunted it. Patterson had to shoot the thing several more times before he managed to bring it down. The second lion didn’t go down easy either–Patterson shot it five times, and then even when it was laying their crippled it tried to charge him again. Three more shots rang out, and the beast was dead.
All told, the death toll from the Ghost and the Darkness’ killing spree was exceptionally high for a series of animal attacks. Patterson claimed that 135 workers were killed in that 9 month period. Modern estimates, based on complex measurements of various isotopes taken from the bones of the Tsavo man-killers, put the number at closer to 35.
Not as monstrous as they first appear
Science has shown in recent years that the Tsavo Man-Eaters were not quite as monstrous as the legends surrounding the infamous incident would have them be. This begins with their appearance. Lions in the Tsavo region generally do not have the heavy manes traditionally associated with male lions, because the Tsavo region is drier and a heavy layer of fur would make it harder to stay cool. Their man eating ways were also not entirely unusual. As was mentioned earlier, any big predator will turn to humans if we are A) encroaching on their habitat and B) more plentiful than their normal prey. Arab slave caravans had long traveled through the region, often leaving behind bodies of unfortunate slaves who could not survive the harsh conditions. These became meals for lions, who have no problem being opportunistic scavengers, giving them a taste for human flesh. In addition, sick or injured predators are more likely to go for human prey, because again we’re slower and squishier than a large herbivore. One of the Tsavo Man-Eaters had an infected tooth that would have made it less able to kill its normal prey.
All in all, the story of the Tsavo Man-Eaters is unusual more for the scale of the killings than anything else. Which if anything is more horrifying. Humans are usually content to think of ourselves as the top of the food chain, but we would do well to remember that without our technology, we are little more than small, weak primates in a world full of killing machines who would like nothing better than to make us into lunch.
The history of science is littered with bizarre experiments. From the macabre demonstrations of the ‘real-life’ Frankensteins in the late 18th and early 19th centuries to the man who attempted to weigh the human soul, the pursuit of knowledge has taken people down very strange pathways.
Now and then, though, experimentation moves from the mere weird to unethical and borderline evil behavior that puts a blemish on the entire scientific community. Such a case occurred in 1874, when Dr. Robert Bartholow was presented with a patient named Mary Rafferty. What followed was an experiment worthy of a modern torture-porn movie.
A ghoulish experiment
Dr. Robert Bartholow was born November 28, 1831. He earned his medical degree from the University of Maryland in 1854. A year later he served as a US Army surgeon, a position he held for nine years. In 1864, he became a professor at the Medical College of Ohio in Cincinatti. During that time, he and Mary Rafferty fatefully crossed paths.
Mary was a 30 year old woman with a 2 in diameter hole in her skull caused by a cancerous ulcer, exposing her brain to the open air. Bartholow, whose interest was in electrical medicine, saw this as a unique opportunity. Electrical experiments had been performed on the exposed brains of animals, but never on humans. Dr. Bartholow decided to be the first to make an attempt.
Using a small needle, Bartholow applied small amounts of faradic current to different sections of Rafferty’s brain. Low current produced movements in various body parts, but it did not cause Rafferty any pain. But when Bartholow sunk the needle deeper and applied more current, Rafferty had a seizure and briefly slipped into a coma. She eventually recovered and was able to undergo more experiments, but days later she was struck by another seizure and died.
Dr. Bartholow published the results of his ghoulish experiment in the American Journal of Medical Sciences. The American Medical Association condemned Dr. Bartholow’s actions, forcing the doctor to write an apology letter to the British Medical Journal. Despite the critcism, Dr. Bartholow did not suffer any professional censure. He went on to become Professor Emeritus at Jefferson Medical College in 1893. He did eleven years later in his home. No one has tried to replicate the Rafferty Experiment since.
The USS Sargent Bay, an escort class American aircraft carrier from WWII. Uptick in the production of these ships made the Habbakuk obsolete before it was even created.
Something about warfare seems to encourage lateral thinking. However, while using cranes and sunlight for weapons could seem like good ideas in the right circumstances, most people would not look at ice and see a potential weapon. Geoffrey Pyke was not most people. In 1942, with Allied shipping coming under almost constant attack from Nazi submarines and with land based Allied planes unable to reach the mid-Atlantic to protect them, Pyke proposed a revolutionary concept: an aircraft carrier made of ice.
The biggest ship in history
To say that the ship Pyke proposed would have been massive is an understatement. The Habbakuk II — second of the proposed models and the one favored for design– would have displaced 2.2 million tons of water and it would have been spacious enough to accommodate 150 fighters and twin engine bombers. It would have measured 300 feet wide and up to 2000 feet long, and it would have been powered by 26 externally mounted electric engines that would have supplied 33,000 horsepower. The top of the craft would have been flattened to construct an airstrip from which the fighters and bombers could launch.
The walls of the craft would have been composed of 40 foot thick blocks of pykrete, a mixture of ice and 14% wood pulp that was both strong and durable. It also took longer to melt than normal ice, and it could be cut and shaped much like wood. damage from bombs and torpedoes could be easily repaired by simply pouring water into the damage and allowing the ship’s cooling system to freeze it.
Pyke envisioned Habbakuk crafts plying the waters of both the Atlantic and the Pacific, acting as massive platforms for Allied air squadrons (Side Note: the name Habbakuk came from an Old Testament verse from the Book of Habakkuk, 1:5: “Behold ye among the heathen, and regard and wonder marvellously: for I will work a work in your days, which ye will not believe, though it be told to you.” Pyke misspelled the name Habakkuk early in the project. The typo stuck.) The ice craft would give a huge advantage over more traditional aircraft carriers because they could house larger planes in larger numbers. However, there were several harsh realities that sunk the project before any of the massive ships could be built.
Dead in the water
The Achilles Heel of Project Habbakuk– like many ambitious projects from history–was simple economics. While the pykrete itself was relatively inexpensive to produce, securing enough wood pulp to build ships the size of the proposed vessels would have put a big strain on the paper industry. In addition, the ships would require massive amounts of steel both for the skeleton around which the pykrete hull would be built and the cooling system to keep the pykrete from melting and deforming the shape of the ship. This steel could be put to better use building conventional ships and planes with proven track records of success.
In addition to being impractical economically, the shifting circumstances of the war rendered Project Habbakuk obsolete before it could be built. The British government secured permission from the government of Portugal to establish airbases on the Azores, allowing Spitfires to extend deeper into the Atlantic. Also, Allied air forces started to use longer range fuel tanks, allowing planes based on the British Isles to fly further and longer on patrol. Finally, more escort carriers were attached to shipping convoys. While not as revolutionary as the Habbakuk, the flat tops managed to fend off German wolf packs just the same.
By 1943, Project Habbakuk was dead in the water. The closest Geoffrey Pyke’s ambitious idea came to being a reality was a 60 by 30 foot prototype built on Lake Patricia near Jasper, Ontario, Canada. It was cooled by a 1 horsepower motor. When the project was scrapped, the motor was taken out and the ship was left to melt. By the summer of 1944, the only tangible result of Project Habbakuk had sunk to the lake bottom.
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