HFM 027 –
The Real Life Dr. Frankenstein:
Johann Conrad Dippel (1673-1734)
Michael Rank: This is the History in Five Minutes Podcast, the #1 podcast for learning
about anything in history in no time at all! I’m your host, Michael Rank.
Today’s topic is The Real Life Dr. Frankenstein: Johann Conrad Dippel.
The person we’re going to be looking at today isn’t very well known. If you hear his name,
you almost definitely won’t recognize it. But once you start to hear the details of his life,
they’re going to sound familiar in an eerie way.
Dippel was a German pietist theologian, alchemist, and physician. He became notorious for
some of the experiments that he conducted mostly with dead animals of which he was an
avid dissector. He claims in some of his writings to have discovered the elixir of life which is
a sought after ingredient by alchemist to grant the user immortality and the means to
exorcise demons through potions that he concocted from boiled animals and flesh. He also
said in an essay that souls could be transferred from one corpse to another by using a
funnel. If he sounds vaguely familiar, our subject in question bears a striking similarity to
Dr. Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s work Frankenstein. In that book, our eccentric doctor
creates a grotesque creature from unorthodox scientific experiment. The monster is 8 feet
tall and composed of cadaver limbs.
Shelley got the idea not just cooked up out of her imagination, but when she wrote her book
in the early 1800’s, there were other scientists who gave public demonstrations trying to
reanimate human flesh through electric galvanism which is whenever you get electrical
shock and your arm jerks, some scientists thought that that was some sort of
misunderstood mechanism that could actually be the staff of life, and if we can control it, we
could bring dead things back to life. Well, it didn’t work but it was a theory that inspired a
lot of people such as our subject under discussion, Dr. Dippel. He wanted to create chemical
means to extend the human life span, and Shelley just took his processes to a horrific
extension in her work of fiction.
Johann Dippel was born at Castle Frankenstein near Darmstadt and studied theology,
philosophy and alchemy at the University of Giessen. This was in 1693 and alchemy had
not yet been disproven or considered a pseudoscience by then. He was a controversial
theologian and believed that the return of Christ was imminent and through pseudoscientific
means could actually be predicted. He was a very charismatic person who managed to
convince people of his unorthodox religious teachings. However, this soon ran him afoul
with the law and he was convicted of heresy and spent seven years in prison.
As he was a theologian, he also did a lot of scientific experimentation trying to achieve the
alchemist’s dream of the philosopher’s stone which was a substance believed to be able to
transmute base metals into gold. He also created an animal oil known as Dippel’s oil which
he thought was the elixir of life. Fortunate for him, some of his crackpot experiments
actually turned out to work, although not in the way they expected. For example, by
accident, he created Prussian blue which is a dark pigment with a complex chemical formula
that is one of the first synthetic pigments and it is used in paint and the traditional blue in
blueprints today. It’s also an anecdote for certain types of heavy metal poisoning.
HFM 027 –
The Real Life Dr. Frankenstein:
Johann Conrad Dippel (1673-1734)
During his stay at Castle Frankenstein, he continued to practice alchemy which was a crude
form of chemistry. He worked with a basic form of nitroglycerin which unfortunately he
misused and it led to an explosion at one of the towers at Castle Frankenstein. He soon
developed a notorious reputation by the townspeople when some accused him of grave
robbing and digging up cadavers in order to continue his experiments. One minister
accused him of this and even keeping company with the devil. The idea of a pitchfork mob
stowing his castle that we see in the old Frankenstein movies come from this folklore,
although there is not good evidence that he did some of his most notorious things but
probably just cooked up because he was a shut-in that allowed people to let their
imaginations run wild about what on earth he was actually doing up in his castle.
He died at Wittgenstein Castle most likely from a stroke, although it could have resulted to
exposure from the many chemicals and poisons that he kept in his crude laboratory. It’s
easy to dismiss Dippel as a crackpot who is a sort of a mad scientist and out of step with
the rest of the world. But it’s actually quite to the contrary.
He represented a transitional figure between the renaissance and the modern period of
science and in between the times when alchemy was still popular and the modern scientific
method had not yet fully developed. We often think of science in a very linear form that
during the Middle Ages there was no concept of the scientific method and only crude
experimentation. Then with the glories of the renaissance and the diminishing of the power
of the church that kept down figures such as Galileo and Copernicus, science was able to
usher in and erase superstition completely. Well, the history is much messier and less linear
that that.
Alchemy actually remained as a viable scientific concept well into the early 1800’s. Alchemy
isn’t a science in the modern sense of the word, but the modern biological sciences that we
have today owe a lot to it. It was an ancient tradition that was established many important
thoughts of conventions like the use of procedures, equipment and terminology that helped
to form the paradigm of modern chemistry. Even famous scientists that we consider to
have totally rejected superstition of the past still adhere to these methods. Probably one of
the best examples of a person whom we all think to have increased science and decreased
the superstition of the past but wasn’t actually the case is Sir Isaac Newton. Although we
have him to thank for the revolution in calculus and the development of modern physics,
there’s a lot about him that really doesn’t match up to our modern ideas about him.
Newton was obsessed with the occult which is a searching for knowledge of the hidden and
information about the paranormal. He worked through the Bible to determine tabulations
about when Christ would return and decided they wouldn’t be at any time before the year
2060. So if you’re worried about the apocalypse now, you can at least take a breath of
relief for a few decades. He also looked through ancient texts in the Old Testament and
looked at structures like the temple of Solomon to see if there was hidden knowledge locked
away in the architectural structure. He looked at the golden sections, conic sections,
spirals, and orthographic projection of the geometry of Solomon’s temple and he believed
that all these dimensions and proportions represented secret measurements and clues to
the mathematical structure of the universe that God had hidden away in the building’s
designs.
HFM 027 –
The Real Life Dr. Frankenstein:
Johann Conrad Dippel (1673-1734)
Newton also wasn’t just a crackpot being locked away and believing these things. At the
time, there were a lot of other scientists who had a great interest in the temple of Solomon
in Europe in addition to a lot of other ancient structures. So ideas of books like the Da Vinci
Code where clues to the structure of the universe are hidden away in old buildings isn’t a
new one at all, so that’s yet another sign of Dan Brown’s complete and utter originality in all
the things that he does.
So going back to our friend, Johann Dippel here, although his methods were very
unorthodox and he was condemned by those around him, we have him to thank in a way for
how modern science were. Experimenting on cadavers was still a bit frowned upon, but
exploring through cadavers and systematizing the structure of human anatomy is the
reason that our medical science is as advanced as it is today. Ask any first year medical
student and they’ll tell you that they spend several months becoming good friends with their
cadaver as they take it apart piece by piece to understand the full extent of human
anatomy. If it weren’t for some of the eccentric experimentation of Dippel, then our
knowledge of medicine and science probably wouldn’t be where it is today.
For more history like this that is offbeat, obscure, but most of all not boring, come check out
my website at www.michaelrank.net. There, you can find podcasts and blog posts like this.
I’ll even throw in a free history Ebook that you can grab right now at
www.michaelrank.net\freebook. Have a good day!