The Scientist Who Tried To Resurrect The Dead
Dr. Robert E. Cornish was a scientist from California who was best known for his efforts to bring back the dead. His attempts to defy death were very ambitious and controversial, particularly his experiments to resurrect dogs in the 1930s.
He wanted to try something similar on humans, but of course, he was short on volunteers. Then, a death row inmate volunteered, so Cornish petitioned the state of California to allow him to play God.
Cornish was born in San Francisco. He finished high school at 15-years-old and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley three years later.
When he was 21, he was licensed to practice medicine. He returned to Berkeley in his mid-20s as a researcher, where he worked on multiple projects.
However, his main interest was the resuscitation of humans and animals after they had died. He believed it was possible to bring them back to life again. By 1933, he had developed his own method of reanimation.
He strapped cadavers to a teeterboard and injected them with adrenaline and heparin to thin the blood. Then, he rocked the bodies back and forth on the large board to get their blood flowing.
Cornish performed the experiment on several bodies. It was unsuccessful, but he concluded that too much time had passed since death for the reanimation to work.
In 1934 and 1935, Cornish reported two successful revivifications of dead dogs. He conducted his experiment on five fox terriers that were all named Lazarus.
Three of them stayed dead, while two dogs were restored to life, although both were blind and could not function very well.
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In 1935, Cornish found a willing human participant for his procedure. That person was Thomas McMonigle, a death row inmate at California’s San Quentin State Prison.
McMonigle was on death row for the kidnapping and murder of 14-year-old Thora Chamberlain. He also reportedly confessed to a second murder.
In 1947, Cornish petitioned the California Department of Corrections to let him try reviving McMonigle after he was executed in the gas chamber. The warden of San Quentin at the time, Clinton Duffy, denied his request.
It took half an hour to clear the fumes from the gas chamber following an execution. And then, the body had to stay in the chamber for at least an hour just to be safe.
Cornish appealed Duffy’s decision, but the courts still did not approve. So, McMonigle was executed on February 20th, 1948, without any hope of returning to life.
Cornish retired from medical research by the late 1950s and began marketing his own product—”Dr. Cornish’s Tooth Powder with Vitamin D and Fluoride.”
Overall, Cornish’s attempts at resurrection pushed science into a new and unsettling territory that messed with the essence of life itself.
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