I recently had occasion to talk with someone about developments that occurred some 35 years ago, and I searched for a metaphor -- a single line that could illuminate the whole of where we started and where we ended up.
That particular enterprise, it should be said, started off to do good and to thwart evil, but in the end it became consumed by the very thing which it sought to prevent.
"It was like Frankenstein." I said. "Dr. Frankenstein was trying to prevent an evil -- to push death beyond the horizon by returning life to the recently deceased. He did not set out to make a monster. But there it is; that was the result."
I'm not sure the person got the entirety of it.
Not everyone knows the origin of the Frankenstein story.
Where to start?
Suffice it to say it was not an accident that Victor Frankenstein was a medical doctor.
Author Mary Shelly was referencing a practice and a scandal of her own time -- body snatching done by, and for, doctors who were studying human anatomy in order to teach medicine and make medical advances to save lives.
Anatomy beyond the skin is learned through dissection, and it was through dissection that Herophilus, Leonardo DaVinci, Michelangelo, and even Benjamin Franklin learned about bones, heart, lungs, kidneys, muscles, and the human circulatory system.
Up to the start of the 20th Century, most medicine was built on the dissected bodies of dead men and women. By studying the dead, the health problems of the living could be understood and perhaps even reduced.
The first bodies used for anatomy were those of criminals who came fresh from the gallows, and their use by medical science for this purpose was legal.
But as the pursuit of medicine and science exploded, and capital punishment became rarer, the demand for bodies outpaced the supply.
In order to bridge the gap, doctors and universities began to pay grave robbers to find a supply of fresh bodies... by any means necessary.
This was the era before embalming, and bodies turned bad quickly, especially in warm weather.
A man might die on a Friday evening, be buried Saturday afternoon, and his body dug up and disappeared by Sunday morning.
The problem was severe enough that in New York City in 1788, there was a small riot by the poor against doctors who were employing grave robbers (called "resurrectionists") to provide corpses.
This was the background against which 20-year old Mary Shelly wrote her novel, Frankenstein, a cautionary tale about scientists playing God and acting in isolation on the ragged edge of permitted thought and action.
Dr. Victor Frankenstein sought to banish death to a distant shore by discovering the spark of life that, when extinguished, resulted in grief for living friends and relatives.
Surely, that spark could be reignited?
After all, electricity made dead limbs jerk and still hearts pump again. This was a mechanical problem -- a simple question of wiring and chemistry -- was it not?
And so Victor Frankenstein set out to make a new Adam and, by doing, rid the world of sorrow.
He set out to do good, not evil.
But that's not how it worked out, was it?
Instead, Victor Frankenstein created a monster.
Instead of banishing death, he created a thing that brought fear, death, and destruction with it.
Here was a tale of unintended consequences; of good intentions gone to very bad results.
Frankenstein was first printed in 1823.
At the time, grave robbing was so common that massive stones and even ironwork cages were being put over graves to thwart the activity.
Relatives and hired men watched over graves for a week or more after burial to thwart those looking for fresh corpses.
And yet, the demand for fresh corpses for anatomy students continued unabated.
Capitalism being what it is, incentives were paid for grave robbers to move fast and find a "fresh one."
Apparently the incentives were enough to spark murder.
In 1828, some five years after the first publication of Frankenstein, William Burke and William Hare along with their wives, began murdering in order to provide fresh corpses for their patron, Dr. Robert Knox of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Many of the murders were travelers lodging at Hare's house.
All in all, Hare and Burke killed at least 16 people before they were finally caught and put on trial.
Dr. Knox received no charges at all even though, at some point, he clearly knew that the men he was paying were in fact murdering the poor and sick for quick cash.
William Hare avoided the gallows by implicating Burke and Burke's wife, Helen McDougal.
Burke was found guilty of murder on Christmas Day 1828 and, in a twist of irony, the court ruled that: "Your body should be publicly dissected and anatomized. And I trust, that if it is ever customary to preserve skeletons, yours will be preserved, in order that posterity may keep in remembrance your atrocious crimes."
Burke's body was, in fact, dissected at the local medical school. His skin was turned into a book cover. His bones are still on display at the Edinburgh Medical School.
When Charles Darwin set out his Theory of Evolution, how was he to know that his cousin, Francis Galton, would hammer his theory into a new "science" of eugenics and that this "science" would be used to justify forced sterilization and mass murder some 50 years later?
When the Smokey the Bear campaign was created, who could have imagined it would result in massive fuel loads in American forests that would result in crown-fire conflagrations?
When European powers created a set of interlocking alliances designed to preserve peace, who would imagine they would result in a World War set off by a single gun shot... or that the peace treaty signed at the end of that World War I would sow the seeds for the next?
No one who built a dam to stop flooding ever aimed to kill fish migration anymore than a couple having a child set out to chainsaw a forest or fill a landfill with disposable diapers.
Proponents of religion and free market capitalism rarely embrace the horrors done in the name of those ideas.
No one voting for Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein in 2016 intended to propel Donald Trump into the oval office.
But there it is. Unintended consequences.
It's the Law.
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