Franken-Fido

Frankenstein is a story of unintended consequences.

Dr. Frankenstein was not a bad man. He was simply trying to push death beyond the horizon by returning life to the recently deceased. 

He did not set out to make a monster. 

For the record, Author Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein story has roots in reality.  

Its core premise was rooted in a scandal of her 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 the 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.

What’s all this have to do with dogs?

A bit.

You see, the eugenic ideas of Francis Galton, upon which the Kennel Clubs are built, were hammered up with good intentions.

Galton’s cousin, Charles Darwin, had postulated that the invisible hands of Mother Nature and Father Time had come together to forge the fires of Natural Selection.

But natural selection was so slow!

Surely, things could be speeded up by the hands of man, as stock man Robert Bakewell had already done with cattle and sheep?

And so “unnatural selection” at the hand of man was created.  The idea here was simple:  select a few dozen of the best of a form or type, and then breed best to best, ad infinitum, until perfection was achieved.  What could go wrong?  Nothing!

But while cattle, sheep, and chicken breeders had a steak-and-eggs axis against which to judge their efforts, dog breeders did not.

The result was increased selection for exaggeration, leading to serious deformity and dysfunction. 

In addition, small closed gene pools meant that invisible recessive genes (an idea not yet fully understood) were often doubled up on, resulting in a rise in disease.

Here was Franken-fido come to life; German Shepherds unable to stand unaided, Bulldogs that could not breed or whelp on their own, and Dogue du Bourdeaux that routinely expired at age five or six.

No one started the Kennel Club intending any of this to happen, anymore than Dr. Victor Frankenstein intended to unleash a monster on the world.

But there it was; unintended consequences. 

Now the question was “What are we going to do about it?”

And the answer, so far, has been to fumble the ball for a hundred years.