Mad Scientist Blog » Mad Physiologists

Mad Scientist #17: Robert Cornish

Max Hartshorn — Wed, 08 Jan 2014 04:57:00 +0000

March 1934. The groan of creaking wood fills Dr. Robert Cornish’s laboratory as the rocking teeterboard strains under Lazarus’ dead weight. Rocking provides a crude form a circulation—a weak substitute for Lazarus’ heart, which has stopped beating.¹

With an urgency more commonly found among the living, the Berkeley-based doctor plunges a brew of adrenaline, liver extract, gum arabic, and blood into the corpse’s thigh.¹ He then puffs bursts of oxygen into Lazarus’ gaping mouth as the rocking board slowly draws the solution up and down the body.¹

A leg twitch—a gasp—an unmistakable heartbeat.¹

The wooden teeterboard, typically used to launch circus acrobats to death-defying heights, is being employed by Cornish to raise something far more dangerous—the dead.

Raising the dead is one of mad science’s most secretly cherished goals. Imagine a wondrous world where Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve continued to be hosted by Dick Clark—where you could be served at a TGI Fridays by zombie Einstein—or have your groceries bagged by zombie Abraham Lincoln.

Tobacco smoke enema. They won't teach you this in lifeguard training folks.

Problem was Cornish had no idea where to start. CPR didn’t come about until the 1950s.² Before then even the most basic resuscitation methods had this old-wivey quality. Common guidelines for reviving a drowned person back in the day included:

Rolling the victim over a barrel on their back.²
Using a bellows to pump air into their mouth [and presumably right out their nose]. ²
Siphoning tobacco smoke up the victim’s bum. ²

If reviving an unconscious drowning victim seems ludicrous with these methods, imagine using them to bring back the dead. Robert Cornish tried virtually every reanimation method known to man,³ at one point even jiu-jitsuing a dead sheep,³ without producing so much as a single zombie—or even your basic C.H.U.D.

By the mid 1930s, Cornish finally hit on a winning combination: A rocking teeterboard, adrenaline-based injections, and Fox Terriers.³ Sweet, trusting, Fox Terriers, as opposed to humans, gave him control over both the means of death, and the timing. In 1934, Cornish was able to resuscitate a dead dog, Lazarus IV, 5-minutes after its heart had stopped.⁴ Dogs that stayed dead for longer didn’t fare so well (see Lazaruses I-III).^1,5,6

One of Cornish's lil' pups.

But for some reason, the public found the idea of killing/zombifying Fox Terriers oddly repellant. After much bad press, Cornish was ousted from his UCLA laboratory and forced to conduct studies in a more suitable mad-science locale, his home.⁶

The young doctor needed some way to convince people that his research was not only humane, but vital. This improbable wish was granted in the form of Life Returns⁷, a Universal horror flick that seemingly exists only to advertise Robert Cornish and his research.

In the film, John Kendrick (Onslow Stephens) is a doctor obsessed with life restoration, who works for a drug company that funds his research. When his employer urges him to study something a little more “practical,” Kendrick snaps and spirals into insanity and depression. Somehow it works out that the only way the doctor can win back the respect of his son Danny (George Breakston) is to enlist the help of an on-screen Robert Cornish in reviving his beloved dead dog (uncredited).

Cornish is Kendrick’s former colleague. While Kendrick was foolish enough to throw his lot in with big pharma, Cornish went about research the right way and (in the movie) has become a huge success.

No animals were killed an not subsequently brought back to life in the making of this film.

Amazingly, Robert Cornish actually portrays himself in the film.⁸ Even more amazingly, the dog revivification footage used in the film’s climax is actual footage from one of his Lazarus experiments (spoiler alert: this movie’s terrible).⁸

Life Returns might have turned the public tide in Cornish’s favor, if it wasn’t instantly forgettable. Over the next decade our disputable doctor began to slip steadily into the clammy waters of obscurity. He might have disappeared entirely, if it weren’t for a proposed experiment so ghastly it made killing and reviving dogs look like an invisible man taking a nude dip in an invisible lake, which is to say like nothing.

In 1947, condemned child slayer Thomas McMonigle contacted Dr. Cornish with a bizarre offering—his body.⁹ Awaiting a death sentence in San Quentin, Cornish believed McMonigle could be revived using a home-made heart-lung machine and 60,000 shoelace eyes.¹⁰ All he needed was immediate access to the corpse.⁹

Unfortunately, prison warden Clinton Duffy was dead set against the idea.¹¹ McMonigle was set to be executed in a gas chamber.¹² This chamber required at least an hour to air out after the execution before anyone could safely enter.¹² If Robert Cornish wished to resuscitate the inmate almost immediately after he was put to death, another Robert Cornish would need to be on hand to resuscitate the resuscitator. And that Robert Cornish, succumbing himself to gas poison, would in turn require a third Robert Cornish to resuscitate him. And so on and so forth ad infinitum. But, of course, there are only a finite number of Robert Cornishes. So we can easily see why this is impossible.

Robert Cornish in Life Returns. "Now sit still, this will only kill you just a little bit."

Cornish and Duffy’s bizarre feud snagged headlines nationwide, with the doctor threatening at one point to gas and revive a sheep as proof of concept.¹³

But beyond practical concerns, there is an even more troublesome legal consideration. If someone on death row is put to death, then subsequently revived, have they already served their death sentence? Would they then, like this former Iranian prisoner, be free? After all, double jeopardy prevents anyone from being tried twice for the same crime.

And do we want to live in a world where zombie Ted Bundies and Timothy McVeighs are free to roam the Earth? I doubt even the judge from Night Court would want to be around when that precedent is set.

B-b-b-b-rains??? Photo by Cory Cousins.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Why should we subject humans to this bizarre experimentation when we’ve yet to perfect it on animals? Dr. Cornish was able to revive a dog that had been dead for just 5 minutes.⁴ If you’re a first responder speeding across town in an ambulance, that window may be just long enough. But if you a last responder, which is to say some sort of criminal mastermind intent on breaking into the city morgue and raising a brood of zombie lackeys to do your bidding, you’re going to need a bit more time.

In 2003, scientists in Pittsburgh discovered that you could revive dogs after they had been dead for up to 2 hours.¹⁴ First, researchers bled their animal subjects to death. They then pumped a near-freezing saline solution into the dogs’ veins. This kept the creatures in a state of suspended animation, chilling their organs to prevent lasting damage. Finally, they swapped the saline solution with the original blood and defibrillated their tiny little hearts back into existence with carefully timed electric shocks. 24 of the 27 dogs tested live to bark about it.¹⁴

"Cornish will revolutionize the world," says random actress from Life Returns.

When it comes to revivification science, it’s tough to separate the practical benefits (i.e. reviving the drowned, shocked, and asphyxiated) from the obvious creep factor. Robert Cornish’s bizarre research style certainly didn’t help with this distinction. From his biblically named Lazaruses (Lazari? Lazarodes?!), to his horror movie cameo, to his plot to turn dead men walking in to the walking dead, it’s like this guy’s trying to come off as a mad scientist.

So the next time you find yourself trapped in an abandoned warehouse, pursued on all sides by brain-ravenous zombies, as you wait out the precious final moments of your human existence, take a couple minutes to think about Robert Cornish, and the mad scientists who made your inevitably grisly demise possible.

Sources:
1. Science: Lazarus, dead & alive (1934, March 26) Time Magazine. Retreived from: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,747260,00.html
2. Eisenberg. M. S. (2005). History of the Science of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation. In J. P. Ornato & M. A. Peberdy (Eds.), Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (pp. 1-9). Totowa, NJ: Humana Press.
3. Swain, F. (2013). How to make a zombie: The real life (and death) science of reanimation and mind control London, UK: Oneworld Publications.
4. Science: Dog no. 4 (1934, October 8). Time Magazine. Retrieved from: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,770001,00.html
5. Science: Dog no. 3 (1934, April 30). Time Magazine. Retreived from: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,787857,00.html
6. Science: Dog no. 3 (cont’d) (1934, June 4). Time Magazine. Retreived from: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,754224,00.html
7. Life Returns (1935). Stream for free here: https://archive.org/details/LifeReturns
8. Weaver, T., Brunas, M. Brunas, J. (2007) Universal horrors: The studio’s classic films, 1931-1946. McFarland & Company.
9. Murderer offers body: Dr. Cornish would revive dead man. (1947, March 14). Lodi News-Sentinel, p. 1. Retrieved from: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2245&dat=19470314&id=F8czAAAAIBAJ&sjid=p-4HAAAAIBAJ&pg=2614,4837678
10. New Scientist (2009). How to make a tornado: The strange and wonderful things that happen when scientists break free. London, UK: Profile Books.
11. Prison warden bans ‘resurrection’ attempt. (1947, March 14). The Miami News, p. 7A. Retrieved from: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2206&dat=19470314&id=5gctAAAAIBAJ&sjid=h9UFAAAAIBAJ&pg=6320,6111564
12. Doomed convict asks effort to bring him back to life. (1947, March 14). The Saratosa Herald-Tribune, p. 8. Retrieved from: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1755&dat=19470314&id=ZeIcAAAAIBAJ&sjid=n2QEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6321,6372170
13. Test may bring dead to life. (1947, June 8). The Tuscaloosa News, p. 10. Retrieved from: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1817&dat=19470608&id=Ae8-AAAAIBAJ&sjid=FE0MAAAAIBAJ&pg=6390,464891
14. Behringer, W. et al. (2003). Survival without brain damage after clinical death of 60-120 mins in dogs using suspended animation by profound hypothermia. Critical Care Medicine, 31(5), 1523-31.

The post Mad Scientist #17: Robert Cornish appeared first on Mad Scientist Blog.

Mad Scientist #12: Giles Brindley

Max Hartshorn — Sat, 12 May 2012 15:02:45 +0000

The talk began, as all great urology lectures should, with slides of the speaker’s own penis. The erection plastered over the screen, explained Dr. Giles Brindley, was caused by smooth muscle relaxant injected directly into his shaft. It’s a method so powerful, he continued, that a single dose can make an impotent man stay hard for hours. In fact, concealed behind the podium, Brindley was hard right now. He shot up in his hotel room beforehand.

Skeptical? The audience sure was. This was 1983 by the way. Viagra, and the days when aging senators and soccer legends spoke candidly about their struggles with ED, were still years off. So the elderly professor leapt from behind the podium and dropped his slacks, revealing “a long, thin, clearly erect [achem] penis.”¹

Now, he said, “I’d like to give some of the audience the opportunity to confirm the degree of tumescence.”¹

Pants at his knees, Brindley shuffled awkwardly toward the first row of horrified urologists. The future of male sexual therapy flopped between his legs, joggling to and fro with each step. Women began to scream.

As jarring and painful as penile injection therapy may seem, it’s genteel compared to the so-called treatments it came to replace.

Disgraced Russian surgeon Serge Voronoff advocated grafting monkey testicles to our own in order to effect rejuvenation. Beyond that, there were penile prostheses, rods fashioned from silicone (or initially bone and cartilage) and surgically inserted into the penis to restore rigidity. And let’s not forget the inflatable phallic sacs controlled by scrotum-embedded pumps, shall we?

What’s more, injection treatment really worked—too well even. In a 1986 paper,² Brindley injected 17 different drugs into his own penis and measured the effects. The most successful dose resulted in an erection lasting 44 hours, well beyond the 4 hour limit after which Pfizer recommends you seek immediate medical assistance.

The sheer force of Brindley’s “technological marvel of phallic authority,”³ compelled people to take notice.

Brindley's interest in rigid tubular structures was not limited to erect pensises. A bassoon inventor, his "logical bassoon" (pictured above) provided musicians with a more intuitive layout and an electric interface. The guy was also a pole vaulter.

The New York Times went as far as to declare Brindley’s spectacle the herald of a “second sexual revolution.”⁴ “The…revolutionary import,” explains sociologist Barbara Marshall, “was to visibly sever the mechanism of penile erection from any sort of psychological or emotional arousal…and to reconceptualize it as a primarily physiological event.”⁵

But if Brindley was the Che in this bizarrely literal penile “uprising,” Pfizer was more like Castro.

Just two years after Brindley’s lecture, Pfizer began noticing strangely pleasurable side-effects in Sildenafil, a drug it was developing to treat Angina. A decade later, Sildenafil was on the market as Viagra. Scholar Stephen Maddison cites the success of the good doctor’s erection as a crucial inspiration for the pharmaceutical giant.³

Dole's for sure exaggerating.

Viagra and its competitors now constitute a multi-billion dollar a year industry. And while spokes-parody Bob Dole was the face of the drug in the 90s, these days Viagra is increasingly targeting young, healthy individuals.

Now more than ever, we are a culture of what Annie Potts terms “viagra cyborgs” or “viagraborgs”—half man, half pharmaceutically modulated erection machine.

It was Sir Brindley (yeah, he was knighted) who unleashed unto us this strange breed of male sexual prowess. The man himself seems to have slid silently into the cryptosphere. But his legacy lives on in the scores of risqué Viagra, Levitra, and Cialis ads that continue to bop us over the head with the blunt force, if not the physical manifestation, of an erect penis.

Jamming in the key of ED

Sources
1. Klotz, L. (2005). How (not) to communicate new scientific information: A memoir of the famous Brindley lecture. British Journal of Urology International, 96(7), 956-957.
2. Brindley, G. S. (1986). Pilot experiments on the actions of drugs injected into the human corpus cavernosum penis. British Journal of Pharmacology, 87, 495-500.
3. Maddison, S. (2009). “The second sexual revolution”: Big pharma, porn and the biopolitical penis. TOPIA, Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, 22, 35-53.
4. Hitt, J. (2000, February 20, 2000). The second sexual revolution. The New York Times.
5. Marshall, B. (2002). ‘Hard science': Gendered constructions of sexual dysfunction in the ‘Viagra age’. Sexualities, 5(2), 131-158.
6. Jonas, U. (2001). The history of erectile dysfunction management. International Journal of Impotence Research, 13, S3-S7.
7. Potts, A. (2005). Cyborg masculinity in the Viagra era. Sexualities, Evolution & Gender, 7(1), 3-16.
8. Brindley, G. (1968). The logical bassoon. The Galpin Society Journal, 21, 152-161.
9. Showalter, A. (2006). The logical basoon. Retrieved January 18th, 2012, 2012, from http://alignmap.com/giles-brindley-the-logical-bassoon/

The post Mad Scientist #12: Giles Brindley appeared first on Mad Scientist Blog.

Mad Scientist #3: Duchenne de Bologne

Max Hartshorn — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 19:09:50 +0000

The first problem with cadavers is that they’re actually hard to come by. The early Italian anatomist Vesalius was known, on occasion, to send his students into cemeteries to obtain recently deceased corpses for his famously theatrical public dissections.

The second problem is that cadavers are…um…dead. All the muscles, viscera, nerves and ligaments are there in plain sight, but they’re still and lifeless. What’s more, the very act of dissection cuts their connection to the skin, prohibiting us from understanding precisely how the body’s internal mechanics give rise to a coherent outward appearance.

19th century French physiologist Duchenne de Bologne cracked this little conundrum. He discovered a way to perform living dissections through electrical stimulation, which is (slightly) less sadistic than it sounds.

Armed with a set of old-timey electrode thingies, he wandered Paris hospital wards, zapping the unsuspecting infirm. By applying the mild electric shock of his “faradization” device to specific points on the skin, Duchenne was able to provoke the action of individual muscles in isolation. This “vivisection without mutilation” allowed him to study the human muscular system in action, and his experimental results laid the foundation for such diverse fields as neurology, kinesiology, electrotherapy, blah blah blah.

In Duchenne’s zaniest, and hence most historically important work, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, the good doctor turned his voltaic probes to the human face. His goal was ambitious, to determine the exact muscle configurations behind every human facial expression, and thus chart the physiologically defined “language of the soul.”

Since effect of the charge only lasted for a few seconds, Duchenne became the first clinician ever to employ the exceedingly new-fangled technology of photography to document experimental results.

The iconic photograph above shows his principle subject, a toothless (and possibly mildly retarded) old man, his mm. platysma contracted to produce an expression of terror, to which “the horrible pain of torture has been added,” via lowering of the jaw and contraction of the mm. corrugator supercilii. The expression, according to Duchenne, “must be that of the damned.” Let’s look at some more of these:

Stimulation of the muscle of 'foppish dismay'

Buh? Wuh?!

"My readers may think that I exaggerate the truth by saying that the eye sparkles with its own fire, under the influence of an ardent passion, but the preceding experiment is the incontestable proof of my assertion."

I'm going to murder you in your sleep

Single and lovin' it! What's new with you Trish?

Duchenne seems to have gotten a lot of flack for his choice of subject. “The old man photographed in most of my electrophysiological experiments,” he writes in a later version of Mechanism, “did have common, ugly features. To a sophisticated man [man of the world, cosmopolite, sybarite, voluptuary] such a choice may seem strange.” But in his own defense Duchenne claims he “did manage, with the help of my electrodes, to mark the lines of the highest sentiments and the most profound thoughts on the mundane surface of this dull forehead.”

Nevertheless, he released a subsequent “aesthetic” section, “in an attempt to placate those who possess ‘a sense of beauty’.” If the pictures of the toothless old man in Duchenne’s “scientific section” are creepy, his aesthetic section is actually legitimately horrifying.

It also gives us a glimpse into Duchenne’s weird artistic ambition. More than a scientist, Duchenne viewed himself as a critic of the fine arts, and an artist in his own right. With his electrodes and camera, he could literally sculpt portraiture with mathematical precision, thus revealing the shortcomings of other artists’ work. See below:

“There is only a very slight difference between the ecstatic expression of celestial love and that of terrestrial love…this is something that artists have seldom appreciated.”

His photographs are micro-dramas to showcase his theories:

“I wanted to show a little comedy, a scene of coquetry, a gentleman surprises a young lady while she is dressing. On seeing him, her stance and her look become disapproving (cover the bottom half of her face). Nevertheless, we note her nudity, which instead of covering she seems to reveal with a certain affectation. It is the mannered pose of her hand, which supports a rather overly revealed bosom. All this betrays her coquetry. The young man was becoming more audacious, but the words ‘Get out!’ pronounced in a scornful way by the girl, stops him in his enterprise (see only the left side of the lower half of the face). The mocking laughter that accompanies the amorous rejection (see the right side of the lower half of the face), we believe to mean ‘conceited ass!’ Perhaps she says also, much lower: ‘the fool, if he had dared…'”

“A mother comes to lose one of her infants. Another infant—the only one that remains—is equally gripped by a mortal illness; he is on the point of succumbing. Sitting at the foot of his cradle, she abandons herself to the greatest sorrow. Yet a last hope can save him. A crisis may deliver him! Clinging to the life of the poor child, she anxiously follows the progress of the disease and discovers in these features the first signs of this happy crisis; she cries: ‘He is saved!'”

Duchenne’s star pupil, Jean-Martin Charcot, went on to found the scientific discipline of neurology, a field made possible by Duchenne’s unique application of electricity to the study of muscle coordination. It’s been suggested that Duchenne’s sense of theatricality set the stage for Charcot’s renowned “Theatre of Hysteria,” where mental patients at the Salpêtrière, under the close direction of Charcot, would stage fits of insanity to the astonishment and delight of medical students and Parisian gentlefolk. Charcot’s star pupil was of course, Sigmund Freud, who built a career out of his own case histories of the hysterical passions.

Augustine, one of the stars of Charcot's "Theatre of Hysteria"

More obscurely, Duchenne has been cited as an influence on anything from method acting, to plastic surgery, to filmmaking. The Greek-Australian avant-artist Stelarc (whose works include senselessly hurling himself through a pane of glass, and grafting a biologically engineered superfluous third ear beneath his arm) staged a number of performance pieces where audience members were able to control a substantial portion of his body via similar electro-localization methods.

Duchenne really did a lot of other things besides zap the faces of people with questionable autonomy, but he did so with such dispassionate zest that I just can’t be bothered to talk about anything else. You’re in the club Duchenne! We’ll see about Charcot and Freud later.

Stelarc, Ljubljana, 1996

The post Mad Scientist #3: Duchenne de Bologne appeared first on Mad Scientist Blog.