Mary Shelley drew from many sources of inspiration to write her novel Frankenstein (1818), including Fantasmagoriana (an anthology of German ghost stories translated into French in 1812), her childhood in Scotland, contemporary theories of galvanism (the use of electricity to induce muscle stimulation), Erasmus Darwin’s experiments on spontaneous vitality, and a waking nightmare she experienced about a student horrified by his creation made of reassembled body parts.
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