It’s now January 1803, in the city of London, and the body of the freshly executed George Forster is removed from the gallows and taken to the Royal College of Surgeons, says The Guardian. There, surrounded by fellow physicians and the idly curious, Dr. Aldini applied electrical current to various parts of Forster’s anatomy. The left eye “actually opened” at one point. Battery-powered conducting rods were inserted into Foster’s rectum, causing his fist to punch the air and his back to arch “violently.” (And who can blame him?) Despite the show-and-tell, Aldini was forced to admit he couldn’t actually kick-start a heart. No amount of electricity, no matter where it was applied, changed facts: Forster remained deceased.

The idea of electricity being the spark of life continued to be studied, with some people suggesting that it provided the seed that became Mary Shelley‘s novel Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. She would have been all of five years old when the attempted resuscitation of Forster took place, but by all accounts she was aware of galvanism by the time she was writing. Maybe all it took was a spark. Of genius.