In 1780, the Italian physician and physicist Luigi Galvani began a series of experiments at the University of Bologna on the effects of electricity on dissected frog legs. He noticed that a frog's leg twitched when touched with a metal scalpel during an electrical storm, and he systematically investigated this phenomenon over the following years. These experiments in Bologna marked the beginning of the scientific study of bioelectricity, the idea that living organisms generate and respond to electrical forces.

Galvani's experiments in Bologna inaugurated the era of bioelectricity, providing the scientific foundation for one of the most influential literary works of the nineteenth century: Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" (1818). Shelley explicitly drew on Galvani's and Giovanni Aldini's public demonstrations of electrical animation of dead tissue to imagine the reanimation of a constructed being. The broader question Galvani raised, whether the principle of life itself was electrical, became a central theme in Romantic literature's exploration of the boundary between the living and the dead.