Random film of the day — Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985): medical student Herbert West revives the dead with a fluorescent green serum, and it all starts innocently — with a dead cat. Cult horror classic based on Lovecraft's story. Seemed like a banal hook: here, they say, some guy wrote horror stories about reanimating corpses.
But verification turned up something far more interesting. In the same era when Lovecraft was churning out his story (1921–1922), real science — literally in parallel — was trying to revive the dead for real. The heart of a dead child, brought back to beating with saline in Tomsk. A dog's head, fed by pumped blood in Moscow. A dog rocked on a seesaw board in California. And these weren't the ravings of lone cranks, but a chain of work that ultimately led to modern resuscitation science — the very field that brings people back from the other side by the tens of thousands each year.
By 1921, Lovecraft was a known figure in amateur press, but had never received a professional fee. Then his friend George Julian Houtain — a comedian famous in amateur circles — was launching his own magazine Home Brew and proposed a paying gig: write a serialized horror story, five dollars per installment. Six installments, February–July 1922 — thirty dollars total.
"Herbert West—Reanimator" became Lovecraft's first professional sale, and he hated it. Wrote in haste, to a forced format, with recaps of previous episodes at the start of each part (in the magazine the series ran under the banner "Grewsome Tales" with separate titles like "The Plague Demon" and "The Scream of the Dead"). The magazine leaned toward black humor, and Lovecraft was wringing out plausible pseudo-scientific presentation — and later called the story "wretched," and simply ignored editorial demands to retype the manuscript double-spaced.
The paradox is that this very "hack work" left two eternal marks on culture. First, here appears for the first time Miskatonic University — an architectural element of Lovecraft's entire mythology. Second, West became the archetype of the materialist scientist, for whom the body is a "chemical machine" that can be restarted. Lovecraft himself was ashamed of this work; readers — and especially Stuart Gordon, who made it into a film in 1985 — disposed of it differently.
By the way, the film itself went through a curious evolution: Gordon from Chicago's Organic Theater conceived it as a TV series — six half-hour episodes from six Lovecraft stories, then an hour-long pilot, and only when producer Brian Yuzna suggested "using all six stories at once" did the project become feature-length. Budget — $900 thousand to $1.3 million, box office — around $2 million: modest in numbers, but the film collected rave reviews from Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert and spawned an entire franchise.
To understand the atmosphere in which the story was born, remember: in the nineteenth century the boundary between life and death was technically blurred. Catalepsy, apoplexy, hypothermia could mimic death indistinguishably; burials happened quickly — especially during cholera epidemics, when fear of contagion forced people not to figure out who had died and who was still dying. A mirror at the lips — that was the whole diagnosis. The fear of waking in a coffin became so massive that Italian psychiatrist Enrico Morselli in 1891 gave it a clinical name — taphophobia.
An entire industry worked on this fear. Inventors patented "safety coffins": an air tube, a cord from the deceased's finger to a bell on the surface, in later versions — battery-powered alarm, pump, and rising flag. In Germany alone at the end of the nineteenth century more than thirty such designs were patented. The first documented case — Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick, who ordered in 1792 a coffin made with a window, air tube, and lock: the lid wasn't nailed shut, the keys to the coffin and crypt lay with him in his shroud, in a special pocket. In Europe there existed "waiting mortuaries" — special buildings where bodies were stored for days and weeks before burial, awaiting unambiguous signs of decomposition.
Tellingly, however, not one of the patented mechanisms saved a single person — there's no documented case of a "deceased" person pulling the bell cord. All real "revivals" happened before burial. But the sheer density of inventive panic — and the fear was stoked by literature too, from Edgar Allan Poe with his "The Premature Burial" to newspaper stories about screams from fresh graves — speaks to how tenuous was then the boundary that Herbert West intended to step across.
The first breakthrough didn't happen in Europe or America. Alexei Kulyabko — a physiologist who started in Sechenov's laboratories, future head of the department of normal physiology at Tomsk University — experimented with isolated hearts, flushing them with warm oxygenated saline. A series of failures, and then one day — by chance: hearts left on a homemade frame began contracting one after another. In 1902 Kulyabko did something that before had been plot material only for gothic novels: he restored the beating of the heart of a three-month-old child who had died from pneumonia 19 hours earlier. Outside the body, through perfusion, the heart beat for an hour.
Kulyabko himself emphasized cautiously: this was not yet "revival of a human," but the boundary between life and death — not an instant barrier, but a process that could be reversed. His work became the foundation for what followed: in 1926 Kulyabko's students and successors — among them Sergei Brukhonenko — created the prototype of the modern heart-lung machine. The schematic of his apparatus — a bottle with saline solution, steel tank with compressed oxygen, coil for heating — reads today as the blueprint for the progenitor of the ECMO machine, on which patients with failed lungs are kept alive in intensive care.
Sergei Brukhonenko — "student and successor" from that very Tomsk line — took it to a limit that shocked the world. His autojector — a pair of membrane pumps, venous and arterial, with oxygenation through a water reservoir — in 1925 was shown to the Second Congress of Russian Pathologists in Moscow: the machine kept an isolated dog's head alive for one hour and forty minutes, and the head demonstrated reflexes, reacting to external stimuli. In 1926 — a new report in Leningrad, at the congress of Soviet physiologists.
These experiments gained world fame through the film Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (1940), shot at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy in Moscow: a dog is brought to clinical death, blood loss, cardiac arrest — and the machine starts. The English version opened with J. B. S. Haldane, one of the century's greatest biologists, recounting that he personally saw part of the experiments at a physiology congress.
How honest all this was — the question is still open. The experiments overall are considered to have occurred, but the legitimacy of the film itself is disputed: some commentators believe we saw a reconstruction, more modest than the actual experiments; according to institute records, dogs after full revival lived a matter of days, not years, as the film hinted. But the technology — not a reconstruction: the autojector, adapted for humans, gave birth to operations on heart valves, and its design is directly compared to modern ECMO machines and hemodialysis apparatus. The device now stands in the Museum of Cardiovascular Surgery at the Bakulev Center in Moscow. The irony is that Brukhonenko's posthumous Lenin Prize — an award for science that began with images indistinguishable from mad-scientist horror.
And here's where distances compressed: between the last installment of the story (July 1922) and the demonstration of the "revived" head at the pathologists' congress (1925) — only three years. Fiction and science this time didn't follow one another — they ran parallel courses.
The third plot — the strangest and most applied. Robert Cornish, wunderkind from Berkeley (graduated with honors at 18, doctorate by 22), in 1932 took up the question of whether life could be returned to the dead. His method sounded like a circus act: the body of a dog dead from asphyxiation by ether and nitrogen was laid on a teeter board and rhythmically rocked to push the blood around, while into the femoral vein was poured a mixture of oxygen-saturated saline, adrenaline, heparin, and dog blood without fibrin. An assistant blew into the dog's muzzle and rubbed the body.
Archival issues of Time paint the detailed protocol. "Lazarus II": six minutes after the last heartbeat — machine started, heart began working "at first sluggishly, then like a jackhammer." The dog lived after this eight hours thirteen minutes in a coma — and died a second time, from a clot after a glucose injection. "Dog No. 3" (April 1935): after four minutes of complete death — no heart and no breathing — the animal returned and lived day by day, but spent twelve days semiconscious; on the 15th day Cornish described its state as "a man in deep intoxication" and confessed: "I'm afraid the dog will remain an idiot for the rest of its days." In total about twenty dogs passed through his hands — Lazarus I through Lazarus XX; only a few survived stably.
Cornish, essentially, felt out both cornerstones of future resuscitation science: clinical death is reversible, but the brain is on a timer of minutes, and winning in the body can cost the loss of personality. The publicity of these experiments was such that in 1935 he played himself in the Hollywood film Life Returns. And in 1947 the story reached the ultimate plot twist: death row murderer Thomas McMonigle himself offered Cornish his body after execution. Cornish filed a petition with the state of California — and received refusal for a reason that sounds like a lawyer joke: if the executed man could be revived, executing him again would be impossible — double jeopardy protection applies. The revived man would have to be released. McMonigle was executed in the gas chamber February 20, 1948, without Cornish.
An important distinction: Cornish's seesaw and Brukhonenko's autojector — not historical curiosities, but direct ancestors of what today is called CPR. The line from them is short and well documented. In 1958 Peter Safar and James Elam showed in the New England Journal of Medicine that mouth-to-mouth breathing provides adequate ventilation — better than all the mechanical methods of the nineteenth century. In 1960 William Kouwenhoven from Johns Hopkins University published work on closed-chest cardiac massage — discovered, ironically, by accident: heavy defibrillator electrodes that pressed down on a dog's chest raised its blood pressure, and from this emerged the technique of rhythmic compression of the sternum — 36 kilograms of pressure every second, hundreds of dogs, survival with fibrillation up to thirty minutes. Kouwenhoven's formula — "all that is needed are two hands" — turned resuscitation from laboratory art into a skill taught to schoolchildren.
The electrical line by then was also ready: in 1947 Claude Beck in Cleveland defibrillated a human heart right on the operating table — after 35 minutes of massage, of which ten the heart was already in fibrillation. They thought it through conceptually too: in 1968 an ad hoc committee of Harvard Medical School published in JAMA "A Definition of Irreversible Coma" — the first systematic criteria for brain death. From this moment death officially ceased to be one event and became a process with measurable stages — that very distinction between "clinical" and "biological" death over which Lovecraft's and Cornish's heroes struggled.
Worth keeping in mind the long trail behind: experimental resuscitation — not an invention of the twentieth century at all. In 1744 Scottish surgeon William Tossach reported to the Edinburgh Medical Society on reviving a miner poisoned by mine gas — by simple air insufflation; the Dutch responded by creating the first "Society for Recovery of Drowned Persons," and in 1792 James Currie for the first time put the distinction between apparent and true death on a scientific basis — and recorded two cases of reviving a person with an electrical discharge through the chest, a century and a half before clinical defibrillation. Resuscitation science didn't open something new for a long time — it recovered the forgotten.
And now — about what happened literally yesterday by the standards of this history. In April 2019 Nenad Sestan's group at Yale published in Nature work on the BrainEx system. Pig brains obtained from a slaughterhouse lay dead for four hours — and after that were connected to perfusion with a specially developed cell-free solution with cytoprotectors. Result: microcirculation restored, cell death blunted, fine tissue architecture preserved, spontaneous synaptic activity noted and active metabolism. Individual neurons and glial cells responded to stimulation.
But the main result — not that "the brain came alive," but that it didn't come alive: global electrical activity, a sign of perception or consciousness, was absent at every moment. "Clinically this is not a living brain, but it is a cellularly active brain," formulated co-author Zvonimir Vrselja. The team agreed in advance: at any signs of organized activity experiments stop, and ethical oversight is mandatory — the question "what if it feels something" moved from philosophical to engineering.
Here the circle closes. West from the story — note, from the story, not from the film — never brought back personalities: the revived bodies only twitched and snarled, cellular life without consciousness. The Yale system — the first device to do literally the same thing: extending the cellular life of the brain beyond the death of the body. Almost a century — 97 years between Home Brew and Nature — was needed for the zero-version of "West's serum" to stop being fantasy. The mystifier from Providence, who despised his own "hack work" for thirty dollars, turned out more accurate than he himself thought: he didn't describe future medicine — he described its first step.