November 16, 2019 • 26 mins
This 2012 episode from previous hosts Sarah and Deblina covers Johann Dippel. Originally a theology student, Dippel began dabbling in chemistry, medicine and alchemy. Today he's remembered for creating a panacea that was used on a variety of ailments.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday everyone. Something that we've mentioned on the show
before is that even after years of crawling through the
archive and listening to episodes by previous hosts, sometimes we
still stumble onto things that we didn't realize we had before.
Sometimes it's because the name was not a familiar one
until something we researched ourselves. And that's what happened this time.
(00:24):
I was scrolling through the list and a name rang
a bell thanks to a recent episode, and that was
Johann Dipple. And Johann Conrad Dipple came up in our
live podcast, The Mysteries of the Color Blue, and it
turned out previous host Sarah and de Blina did a
whole episode on him back in November. So enjoy. Welcome
(00:45):
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm to blame a Chuck reboarding and I'm
Sarah down and we're technically passed October and that spade
of spooky episodes that comes along with it. But the
(01:05):
subject of this episode, Johann Conrad Dipple, could really fit
right in with that batch. And honestly, I have to
confess here he probably would have been with that batch
if this book that I had ordered for two dollars
and fifty nine cents had come in time. A little
peek into our world. I know we're always um, I
(01:25):
don't want to say complaining. We're always telling telling people,
I guess especially people who write in about books that
we don't really have a research budget. Yeah, I'm on
the waiting list for this book at the library, waiting
for this cheap book to come from Amazon whatever it is. Yeah,
so we're kind of at the mercy of what's available
of time, just like every one time. Yeah, so if
(01:47):
we we take a while to do your request sometimes
this is why we're just we're just waiting to be
moved up on the waiting list. But back to our story.
Dipple story really straddles a line between spooky and science,
and I think that's why it makes a good non
Halloween episode two. I mean, we've really come to love
these science episodes that we've done and uh, and this
(02:10):
really fits in with that. Yeah, there are a lot
of fun they're popular with listeners and I don't know,
they're just a little outside of our our normal repertoire
almost But this guy really combines a lot more than
your typical scientific pursuit. He does in his life's work,
we find a mix of theology, science, alchemy, and medicine.
(02:32):
And if that's not interesting enough, there are also the
rumors that are involved in this tale. Rumors of mysterious
experiments involving the re animation of of we don't know
what something, maybe people, maybe animals, and also rumors of
body snatching. So if you didn't already guess it from
that description, there's a link here, or maybe just the
(02:54):
supposition of a link to Dr Frankenstein, the character from
Mary Shelley's famous novel. And that's probably the main reason
that Dipple is a frequent request from our listeners. Maybe
a lot of them believed that he was the inspiration
for that character. And of course, if this is starting
to sound kind of familiar, we already did an episode
last year called Who Is the Real Frankenstein? And it
(03:16):
was about Giovanni Aldini. But the character of Frankenstein is
kind of like the one of Indiana Jones. There are
several different historical figures that people believe could have been
possible inspirations, and we named a few of them in
that who was the real Frankenstein podcast. Maybe one reason
why we didn't explore that possibility more, though, is because
(03:37):
there are some legit sounding reasons cited as to why
Dipple couldn't have been the Frankenstein inspiration, which we're of
course going to mention later on. But the potential Frankenstein connection,
while it may have been the reason we heard about Dipple,
that's not the only reason that we became interested in
learning more about him. He was also just this rascally
(03:58):
controversial figure, and you know how we love those. He
also created a concoction that seems fit for some sci
fi horror story, but according to an article in medical
history by E. Einsley and W. A. Campbell, was really
included in pharmaceutical books as a sort of universal medicine
until the early nineteenth century, and this concoction was called
(04:19):
Dipple's oil, and Dipple thought it to be the elixir
of life. Okay, So one of the reasons why it's
so hard to know whether Dipple truly could have been
the inspiration for Frankenstein is that a lot of the
details of his life are pretty sketchy. According to Radu
Florescu in his book In Search of Frankenstein. This is
(04:39):
partly because a lot of primary sources related to Dipple's life,
including his doctoral dissertation, were destroyed during the Allied bombings
of Darmstadt and Geeson, which is where he studied, so
all these papers about his life are no longer with us. Unfortunately,
Florescu's own biographical sketch of Dipple is one that we
(05:00):
refer to a lot, and he put it together through
studying more than seventy works which Dipple composed, including one
that contained his autobiography, as well as Dipple biographies by
other writers, including Carl Voss. So one thing that most
accounts of Dipple's life really agree on is how it began.
He was born in August tenth, sixteen seventy three, at
(05:22):
and this is probably one of the biggest reasons that
people make the Mary Shelley Frankenstein connection. It's because he
was born at a place called Frankenstein Castle, about a
mile south of Darmstadt. So I'd say that's a pretty
big connection. So today this castle is basically a ruin
that overlooks the old involved, but it was once the
(05:43):
home of the barons Frankenstein or Frankenstein maybe more accurate, yeah,
and they were a German feudal family, but they had
vacated the place by the time Dipple was born, having
sold the place in sixteen sixty two. By the time
Dipple was born, in the castle, however, had become a
hospital for people who had been injured in the war
with France, and his parents, Anna Eleanora munch Meyer and
(06:07):
a Lutheran minister named Johann Philip Dipple were both refugees there.
According to that medical history article we mentioned, Dipple's father
wanted him to become a Lutheran minister too. He would
have been the fifth generation and his family to do so.
But Florescue notes that Dipple was always kind of a
strange kid. For one thing, he was kind of a loner.
(06:28):
The other kids gave him the nickname the Owl for
his tendencies to keep to himself and also to read
by candle light in one of the castle towers at night,
which sounds pretty brave for a young kid. He was
also considered kind of odd for the way he regarded himself.
He was really smart, and that seems pretty evident by
pretty much all accounts. Eins Ley and Campbell's article says
that at Dipple's secondary school, Darmstot Gymnauseum, his name was
(06:52):
first on the role of distinguished Old Boys. But Florescu
says that Dipple considered himself quote a superior individu jewel,
animated by a quote higher spirit who could figure out
the mysteries of the universe. So he basically thought that
his brilliance was limitless. Something that makes sense of his
later achievements in life. Yeah, and something that shows us
(07:15):
why maybe he wouldn't have been content with following his
father's footsteps as far as profession is concerned exactly. So.
Dipple enrolled at the University of Gieson in sixteen ninety one.
He was about seventeen years old and he was planning
on studying theology. Still, he registered under a different name
(07:35):
though from Dipple. He registered with the name Frankensteina, which
was another reason that the name is kind of stuck
with him throughout the years, and he earned a reputation
at school for being extremely intelligent, but also for being
really vocal about debating theological and scientific points with his professors.
He graduated in three years and apparently really shocked some
(07:57):
people with his dissertation which was entitled on Nothing, and
as such was considered to be a confession of skepticism,
like a classic college kid move. Though, doesn't it you
write your dissertation quote on nothing? Yes? It wasn't too
long after that that Dipple adopted the Lutheran pious point
of view, and at that time the Lutheran Church was
(08:19):
divided into Orthodox and Pious contingents, and the Orthodox camp
conformed to the Lutheran creeds and liturgy, and the Piotus
basically believed that the quote good life was more important
than sticking to a creed. So if that separation makes
sense to you, guys. According to Ainsley and Campbell's article,
(08:41):
the switcher rout may not have been that big of
a surprise either, since Dipple quote began to express doubts
about the Catechism at age nine, But Florescue asserts that
Dipple's tendency to change his stance seems to have had
(09:04):
more to do with him wanting to win a debate
than any sort of real desire to find a fundamental truth,
which I think is sort of interesting. It's like he
it was more about the argument itself than what he
was arguated, regardless of this wayverin stance, though he wrote
extensively on theology, and those works puzzled a lot of
people because he did kind of go back and forth.
(09:27):
Einsley and Campbell cite one professor who was really confused
by dipples theological work. He said, quote, a man must
have the gift of divination to be able to deduce
a regular and consistent system of doctrine from the various
productions of this incoherent and unintelligible writer who was a
chemist into the bargain, and whose brain seems to have
(09:48):
been heated to a high degree of fermentation by the
fire of the laboratory. I don't know about you, Deliana,
but this makes the editor in me just squirm. Oh.
I know, I'm imagining having to edit this guy. But
if you look up works about Dipple now, a lot
of what's out there focuses on his theological career. But
even after earning a degree in theology, he didn't really
(10:10):
stick to what he seemed to know best to lecturing
about just theology. He was somebody who, for whatever reason,
had a lot of confidence in lecturing about things that
he knew very little, if anything about. After graduating, he
didn't get a teaching position at the University of Geese,
and maybe because he had sort of rubbed folks the
(10:31):
wrong way with all of that Switcheru debating, he did so.
He moved on to the Imperial University of Strasbourg in
sixteen ninety four, where, according to Bob Curran's book Man
Made Monsters, he started lecturing for a short time on
alchemy and cairomancy, which is fortune telling, until his license
(10:52):
to teach there was revoked. That already gives you a
pretty good sense of this guy's diversity. If he's not
just talking about theology, he's talking about fortune telling. Yeah,
and at this point, I mean and alchemy too. And
at this point he hadn't really even studied alchemy that much.
And you kind of indicated that when you said that
he was always lecturing about things that he really didn't
know that much about. He just sort of felt confident
(11:14):
enough that he could teach other people even though he
didn't have expertise in these areas himself. But Florescu also
notes that Dipple didn't necessarily need to find an official
classroom to teach these things. While in Strasbourg, he became
known for lecturing in all kinds of spots, salons, taverns, churches,
or even just lecturing out in the street. And he
(11:35):
would lecture in all kinds of things too, though astrology
and kyromancy were probably the most popular. According to Einslee
and Campbell's article, a Dipple also practiced palmistry during this time.
I don't know. To me, an open air lecture on
palmistry sounds like it would be pretty entertaining. I would
go to that lunch time trying to get lunch, and
(11:56):
you'd see this guy lecturing. He stopped for a little while.
But some students, we're making him out to sound like
kind of a really weird guy who maybe nobody was
paying much attention to. But some students really looked up
to him. But I mean, remember he was brilliant. He
he was and he captivated people. But Florescu also points
out that chronicles from the time allude to some kind
(12:18):
of quote scandalous behavior on Dipple's part, and after living
where he was for a couple of years, he was
forced to flee, and exactly why he had to do
that is a bit unclear. Florescue says that he was
implicated in some body snatching incidents in a local cemetery.
Einsley and Campbell say that it's because Dipple killed an
(12:39):
opponent in a duel, so very different explanations. They're both
good reasons to get out of town. Regardless of why
he had to leave, Dipple did have to go and
lay low for a little while. According to Florescue, he
returned home for this period, and home at that time
was near Frankenstein Castle with his parents. So this is
(13:00):
about the time when Dipple began to really seriously study
and practice alchemy, and he got into it when a
Lutheran minister from geese And gave him a couple of
books on alchemy, and these books included Raymond Lilly's Experiments
and Gillam Pastel's Veil Raised on the Mysteries of the
Beginning of the World. He basically pushed these books on
Dipple because he supposedly believed that Dipple would be able
(13:23):
to understand them better than anyone else, so again kind
of a nod to his supposed intellect brilliance. And after
reading them, Dipple apparently decided that the whole making gold
thing that everybody was so interested in at the time
really didn't sound that tough after all. I mean, you
guys should go listen to our episode from last October
(13:45):
on alchemy if you want to see really how people
how much people were into this. He decided he wanted
to give it a shot, and he was so confident
that he would succeed that he bought an estate completely
on credit to set up his lab there. It cost
fifty thou guilders, but of course he didn't anticipate paying
(14:06):
the problem would be a problem because of course he
would be able to make gold and pay in that.
So in about or seventeen oh one, sometime in there,
he claimed that he had succeeded in finding the secret
formula for gold, but the crucible containing that broke into
the fire and was tragically lost. And according to legend,
(14:29):
alchemists weren't supposed to use the goal that they created
for personal gain. So you know, this idea of buying
a place on on credit and then you'd pay it
all back with the gold you can make not a
not legit for for real alchemists to be planning on
doing that. So maybe it was a little bit of
bad luck, a little curse like situation going on there.
(14:52):
But there are different accounts of what happened with Dipple
after this. According to that medical history article that we
were taking talking about, Dipple had to flee again to
escape angry creditors. Florescou, however, says that he tried unsuccessfully
to recreate this gold formula that he'd lost for three
years after that, and then started wandering. I have to wonder, Okay,
(15:14):
if you'd made the gold formula, didn't he write it
down well? And why it would take? What is it?
It's longer, It takes longer to try to recreate it,
doesn't it Then when he made it the first time.
It sounds like he was just messing around this stuff
the whole time. A pinch of this, a little of
that little philosopher's stone. Either way, Dipple began to wander
(15:36):
through other parts of Germany and through foreign lands too.
For a while, he settled in Berlin, which was at
the time the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia, and
while there he was under the protection of Count August
von Wittgenstein, who I think we've mentioned. The Wittgenstein family
and other episodes pop up from time to time. The
(16:01):
count convinced King Frederick the First to set Dipple up
with a mansion and a nice laboratory, and it's there
that he started experiments of a very different nature. He
set out to discover an elixir that would cure a
variety of conditions, kind of like a universal medicine. So
it sounds like something that we would all kind of want, right,
(16:22):
something to cure whatever ails. You only listen to how
he created it. So in order to create this wonder
product of his, he started experimenting with distilling animal parts,
namely blood first and then bones, which he would boil
to extract the fatty matter. And according to Florescue quote,
(16:46):
the product was conducted through iron condensing tubes and fed
into receivers where the crude bone oil collected. That doesn't
sound very good. That product, according to Ainsley and Campbell,
smelled and tasted pretty gross as you would imagine, But
it was used in medical practice to cure a number
of ailments, and for a while it had a good
(17:08):
reputation as a medicine until the end of the eighteenth century.
It was named Dipples oil or Dipples animal oil, and
it was said to stimulate the nervous system if you
took it internally. But I think people used to rub
it on the outside of their bodies as well to
consume it to I don't know if they didn't want to,
but that you didn't necessarily have to. I guess it
depended on what you were trying to treat. I think
(17:31):
I read that you could use it to treat spasms.
Maybe rub it on the miracle product. I mean, I
guess it works for just about anything. Although Dipple's animal
oil does not make it sound appealing, it doesn't. Maybe
just Dipple's oil would have been a better name. And
I think, you know, I've seen it both ways. I've
seen it as Dipples oil and Dipples animal oil. But
I think I would choose to partake of the Dipple's
(17:52):
oil before the animal oil, for sure. But through this
work and boiling animal parts, Fluorescu also points out that
Dipple at a very different kind of discovery. By boiling
animal parts and mixing and iron and some various other ingredients,
he apparently ended up with a chemical called potassium ferrocyanide,
and when that chemical was mixed with air, it became
(18:13):
this brilliant blue color that became known as Prussian blue
or Berlin blue. For some reason that discovery wasn't made
public until about seventy four, but that blue dye was
widely used by artists. You'll still see paint colors today.
It's a it's a color still Prussian blue. Right, And
just a side note here, since we've done some poison
(18:33):
podcasts recently, another German chemist took dipples chemical and diluted
it with sulfuric acid, which created hydrocyanic or prussic acid,
which Fluorescu calls one of the most potent poisons. So
all of this here, you know, we have this miracle drug.
And you'd think that Dipples oil and and Prussian blue,
(18:55):
the color, the paint, the pigment would have been enough
to earn Dipple some measure of wealth and respect, but
he kept getting implicated in various scandals. Florescue asserts that
this was a result of other scientists and alchemists being
jealous of him and thus making him the subject of
their intrigue. But regardless of the reason, Dipple had to
(19:17):
stay on the move pretty much most of his life,
according again to Florescue, another similarity to Shelley's Frankenstein, who,
as you remember from the book, is pretty much always
on the move um, although that's partly because there's a
there's a monster invault. That's true. He had motivation, he
had good reason to keep out, keep going, but um. Finally,
(19:41):
Dipple headed to Holland after Berlin, where he studied medicine
in Leiden and earned his degree by seventeen eleven or so.
And he was set by some to be a pretty
good physician, and according to Einslee and Campbell, he even
attempted to set up a medical practice outside of Amsterdam,
but again had to flee, this time to Denmark in
(20:02):
seventeen fourteen. And again the reason why he had to
get out of town and so fast seems to be unknown,
although Florescu does point out that after earning his medical degree,
Dipple was doing experiments with animals, taking them apart too,
just trying to find out how it all fit together,
And apparently at least one of Dipple's biographers suggests that
(20:24):
he was trying to understand the process. That quote and
gender's life itself another similarity to Shelley's character if it
is true, well, and this reminded me a little bit
too of of the blood Work episode. Trying to find
trying to find the root of the soul. I mean,
that's pretty similar to to trying to find the process
that in gender's life itself. These experiments going around are
(20:47):
going on kind of at the same time to find
what seems like unfindable things. So maybe these crazy experiments
that Dipple was doing had something to do with his flight.
But after going to Denmark, Dipple again got caught up
in a series of political intrigues that resulted in him
getting thrown into prison for seven years on the Danish
(21:08):
island of Borne Home. He was sentenced to life, but
was released at the request of the Queen of Denmark
in seventeen twenty six, who wanted him to be her physician.
So that shows that he must have had a pretty
good medical reputation at the time. I'd say, if you're
thinking get this prisoner out of jail, I need him
to be my doctor, and I'm the Queen of Denmark.
(21:29):
A year later, though, he ended up moving to Sweden,
where he worked as a physician in the court of
the Swedish King, so really a dramatic rise in fortunes
for him. He continued to encounter controversy there though as well,
and eventually returned home to Germany in seventeen twenty nine
after being gone for some twenty five years, and what
(21:49):
I've read about him, Florescu in his book talks a
lot about how Dipple was sort of drawn to home
his whole life. He he sort of kept in touch
with his family, his siblings there, and he was he
wanted to come home. So it makes you question even
more of these things that made him move from place
to place when it was and drawn to one place
in particular. Yeah, he returned to his family home near
(22:12):
Castle Frankenstein, the place where he was born, and Florescu
says that it's there at home that Dipple started working
on some kind of quote grand design, and citing a
document that most scholars ignore, this author says that Dipple
did claim to finally have achieved something of the sort,
some sort of chemical secret, and then he apparently offered
(22:33):
it to the local landowner near his family home in
exchange for ownership of Castle Frankenstein and it's domain. So
he's sort of focused on this place where he was born,
in the castle. He wanted it in exchange for a
grand design. The deal didn't work though, No, it fell through,
and it's still not clear what the secret he was
offering for the castle was, but Florescu thinks it has
(22:55):
something to do with the mysterious pamphlet that Dipple had
printed in a year after the deal fell through. In it,
he claims that he discovered a formula for prolonging his
own life until eighteen o one, at which point he
would have been one hundred and thirty five years old.
Apparently this came at a time when his enemies were
(23:16):
spreading rumors that he was going to die, so maybe
he sort of came up with us to counter that. Unfortunately,
though for Dipple, he ended up dying just a year
after making that prophecy. On April seventeen thirty four. He
was found in the palace of his old friend, the
Count von Wittgenstein, where he had a laboratory, and Dipple's
(23:37):
body was cold and rigid when it was found, but
he was also foaming at the mouth and the entire
right side of his face was blue. And the medical
history article that we've mentioned earlier says that the cause
of death was probably a stroke, but of course, especially
for a guy like this, people suggested that it could
have also been poison still other people and this has
(24:00):
got to be the best option on the table. I
think that he had been killed by the devil for
not keeping some sort of contract. That last theories definitely
fitting for a spooky tale like Shelley's. But there are
several reasons why people think that Dipple probably wasn't actually
the inspiration for Frankenstein. For one thing, many of the
(24:20):
traits that people attribute to him may actually post date
Mary Shelley's novel, so these are things that were sort
of retroactively put onto Dipple, maybe even after the movies
were made. Uh. There's also some doubt about how much
Shelley could have known about Dipple's life. She definitely traveled
(24:41):
in the area where Castle Frankenstein is, but who knows
if she actually heard about his story. And finally, of
course we just don't really know that much about Dipple's life.
Of course, Shelley might not have necessarily been at the
same disadvantage that modern scholars are, since she would have
been long before the World War Two bombings in the
(25:04):
places where all his records were. That's true, But another
thing I think of here is that even if she
had been interested in the things he was doing and
wanted to find out more about him. As you mentioned earlier,
I think there were a lot of people who were
doing these sorts of experiments at the time popular pastime, right,
So she could have just been inspired by that fact
(25:25):
rather than Dipple's specific story. But it's interesting to speculate
about and I'm glad to know a little bit more
about him. So, you know, good request from listeners here,
even though we had to go to some lengths to
find out more about him. Thank you so much for
(25:46):
joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an
email address or a Facebook you are l or something
similar over the course of today's episode, since it is
from the archive that might be out of date now,
you can email us at History podcast at how stuff
Works dot com, and you can find us all over
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I
(26:09):
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Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of
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my heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday everyone. Something that we've mentioned on the show
before is that even after years of crawling through the
archive and listening to episodes by previous hosts, sometimes we
still stumble onto things that we didn't realize we had before.
Sometimes it's because the name was not a familiar one
until something we researched ourselves. And that's what happened this time.
(00:24):
I was scrolling through the list and a name rang
a bell thanks to a recent episode, and that was
Johann Dipple. And Johann Conrad Dipple came up in our
live podcast, The Mysteries of the Color Blue, and it
turned out previous host Sarah and de Blina did a
whole episode on him back in November. So enjoy. Welcome
(00:45):
to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm to blame a Chuck reboarding and I'm
Sarah down and we're technically passed October and that spade
of spooky episodes that comes along with it. But the
(01:05):
subject of this episode, Johann Conrad Dipple, could really fit
right in with that batch. And honestly, I have to
confess here he probably would have been with that batch
if this book that I had ordered for two dollars
and fifty nine cents had come in time. A little
peek into our world. I know we're always um, I
(01:25):
don't want to say complaining. We're always telling telling people,
I guess especially people who write in about books that
we don't really have a research budget. Yeah, I'm on
the waiting list for this book at the library, waiting
for this cheap book to come from Amazon whatever it is. Yeah,
so we're kind of at the mercy of what's available
of time, just like every one time. Yeah, so if
(01:47):
we we take a while to do your request sometimes
this is why we're just we're just waiting to be
moved up on the waiting list. But back to our story.
Dipple story really straddles a line between spooky and science,
and I think that's why it makes a good non
Halloween episode two. I mean, we've really come to love
these science episodes that we've done and uh, and this
(02:10):
really fits in with that. Yeah, there are a lot
of fun they're popular with listeners and I don't know,
they're just a little outside of our our normal repertoire
almost But this guy really combines a lot more than
your typical scientific pursuit. He does in his life's work,
we find a mix of theology, science, alchemy, and medicine.
(02:32):
And if that's not interesting enough, there are also the
rumors that are involved in this tale. Rumors of mysterious
experiments involving the re animation of of we don't know
what something, maybe people, maybe animals, and also rumors of
body snatching. So if you didn't already guess it from
that description, there's a link here, or maybe just the
(02:54):
supposition of a link to Dr Frankenstein, the character from
Mary Shelley's famous novel. And that's probably the main reason
that Dipple is a frequent request from our listeners. Maybe
a lot of them believed that he was the inspiration
for that character. And of course, if this is starting
to sound kind of familiar, we already did an episode
last year called Who Is the Real Frankenstein? And it
(03:16):
was about Giovanni Aldini. But the character of Frankenstein is
kind of like the one of Indiana Jones. There are
several different historical figures that people believe could have been
possible inspirations, and we named a few of them in
that who was the real Frankenstein podcast. Maybe one reason
why we didn't explore that possibility more, though, is because
(03:37):
there are some legit sounding reasons cited as to why
Dipple couldn't have been the Frankenstein inspiration, which we're of
course going to mention later on. But the potential Frankenstein connection,
while it may have been the reason we heard about Dipple,
that's not the only reason that we became interested in
learning more about him. He was also just this rascally
(03:58):
controversial figure, and you know how we love those. He
also created a concoction that seems fit for some sci
fi horror story, but according to an article in medical
history by E. Einsley and W. A. Campbell, was really
included in pharmaceutical books as a sort of universal medicine
until the early nineteenth century, and this concoction was called
(04:19):
Dipple's oil, and Dipple thought it to be the elixir
of life. Okay, So one of the reasons why it's
so hard to know whether Dipple truly could have been
the inspiration for Frankenstein is that a lot of the
details of his life are pretty sketchy. According to Radu
Florescu in his book In Search of Frankenstein. This is
(04:39):
partly because a lot of primary sources related to Dipple's life,
including his doctoral dissertation, were destroyed during the Allied bombings
of Darmstadt and Geeson, which is where he studied, so
all these papers about his life are no longer with us. Unfortunately,
Florescu's own biographical sketch of Dipple is one that we
(05:00):
refer to a lot, and he put it together through
studying more than seventy works which Dipple composed, including one
that contained his autobiography, as well as Dipple biographies by
other writers, including Carl Voss. So one thing that most
accounts of Dipple's life really agree on is how it began.
He was born in August tenth, sixteen seventy three, at
(05:22):
and this is probably one of the biggest reasons that
people make the Mary Shelley Frankenstein connection. It's because he
was born at a place called Frankenstein Castle, about a
mile south of Darmstadt. So I'd say that's a pretty
big connection. So today this castle is basically a ruin
that overlooks the old involved, but it was once the
(05:43):
home of the barons Frankenstein or Frankenstein maybe more accurate, yeah,
and they were a German feudal family, but they had
vacated the place by the time Dipple was born, having
sold the place in sixteen sixty two. By the time
Dipple was born, in the castle, however, had become a
hospital for people who had been injured in the war
with France, and his parents, Anna Eleanora munch Meyer and
(06:07):
a Lutheran minister named Johann Philip Dipple were both refugees there.
According to that medical history article we mentioned, Dipple's father
wanted him to become a Lutheran minister too. He would
have been the fifth generation and his family to do so.
But Florescue notes that Dipple was always kind of a
strange kid. For one thing, he was kind of a loner.
(06:28):
The other kids gave him the nickname the Owl for
his tendencies to keep to himself and also to read
by candle light in one of the castle towers at night,
which sounds pretty brave for a young kid. He was
also considered kind of odd for the way he regarded himself.
He was really smart, and that seems pretty evident by
pretty much all accounts. Eins Ley and Campbell's article says
that at Dipple's secondary school, Darmstot Gymnauseum, his name was
(06:52):
first on the role of distinguished Old Boys. But Florescu
says that Dipple considered himself quote a superior individu jewel,
animated by a quote higher spirit who could figure out
the mysteries of the universe. So he basically thought that
his brilliance was limitless. Something that makes sense of his
later achievements in life. Yeah, and something that shows us
(07:15):
why maybe he wouldn't have been content with following his
father's footsteps as far as profession is concerned exactly. So.
Dipple enrolled at the University of Gieson in sixteen ninety one.
He was about seventeen years old and he was planning
on studying theology. Still, he registered under a different name
(07:35):
though from Dipple. He registered with the name Frankensteina, which
was another reason that the name is kind of stuck
with him throughout the years, and he earned a reputation
at school for being extremely intelligent, but also for being
really vocal about debating theological and scientific points with his professors.
He graduated in three years and apparently really shocked some
(07:57):
people with his dissertation which was entitled on Nothing, and
as such was considered to be a confession of skepticism,
like a classic college kid move. Though, doesn't it you
write your dissertation quote on nothing? Yes? It wasn't too
long after that that Dipple adopted the Lutheran pious point
of view, and at that time the Lutheran Church was
(08:19):
divided into Orthodox and Pious contingents, and the Orthodox camp
conformed to the Lutheran creeds and liturgy, and the Piotus
basically believed that the quote good life was more important
than sticking to a creed. So if that separation makes
sense to you, guys. According to Ainsley and Campbell's article,
(08:41):
the switcher rout may not have been that big of
a surprise either, since Dipple quote began to express doubts
about the Catechism at age nine, But Florescue asserts that
Dipple's tendency to change his stance seems to have had
(09:04):
more to do with him wanting to win a debate
than any sort of real desire to find a fundamental truth,
which I think is sort of interesting. It's like he
it was more about the argument itself than what he
was arguated, regardless of this wayverin stance, though he wrote
extensively on theology, and those works puzzled a lot of
people because he did kind of go back and forth.
(09:27):
Einsley and Campbell cite one professor who was really confused
by dipples theological work. He said, quote, a man must
have the gift of divination to be able to deduce
a regular and consistent system of doctrine from the various
productions of this incoherent and unintelligible writer who was a
chemist into the bargain, and whose brain seems to have
(09:48):
been heated to a high degree of fermentation by the
fire of the laboratory. I don't know about you, Deliana,
but this makes the editor in me just squirm. Oh.
I know, I'm imagining having to edit this guy. But
if you look up works about Dipple now, a lot
of what's out there focuses on his theological career. But
even after earning a degree in theology, he didn't really
(10:10):
stick to what he seemed to know best to lecturing
about just theology. He was somebody who, for whatever reason,
had a lot of confidence in lecturing about things that
he knew very little, if anything about. After graduating, he
didn't get a teaching position at the University of Geese,
and maybe because he had sort of rubbed folks the
(10:31):
wrong way with all of that Switcheru debating, he did so.
He moved on to the Imperial University of Strasbourg in
sixteen ninety four, where, according to Bob Curran's book Man
Made Monsters, he started lecturing for a short time on
alchemy and cairomancy, which is fortune telling, until his license
(10:52):
to teach there was revoked. That already gives you a
pretty good sense of this guy's diversity. If he's not
just talking about theology, he's talking about fortune telling. Yeah,
and at this point, I mean and alchemy too. And
at this point he hadn't really even studied alchemy that much.
And you kind of indicated that when you said that
he was always lecturing about things that he really didn't
know that much about. He just sort of felt confident
(11:14):
enough that he could teach other people even though he
didn't have expertise in these areas himself. But Florescu also
notes that Dipple didn't necessarily need to find an official
classroom to teach these things. While in Strasbourg, he became
known for lecturing in all kinds of spots, salons, taverns, churches,
or even just lecturing out in the street. And he
(11:35):
would lecture in all kinds of things too, though astrology
and kyromancy were probably the most popular. According to Einslee
and Campbell's article, a Dipple also practiced palmistry during this time.
I don't know. To me, an open air lecture on
palmistry sounds like it would be pretty entertaining. I would
go to that lunch time trying to get lunch, and
(11:56):
you'd see this guy lecturing. He stopped for a little while.
But some students, we're making him out to sound like
kind of a really weird guy who maybe nobody was
paying much attention to. But some students really looked up
to him. But I mean, remember he was brilliant. He
he was and he captivated people. But Florescu also points
out that chronicles from the time allude to some kind
(12:18):
of quote scandalous behavior on Dipple's part, and after living
where he was for a couple of years, he was
forced to flee, and exactly why he had to do
that is a bit unclear. Florescue says that he was
implicated in some body snatching incidents in a local cemetery.
Einsley and Campbell say that it's because Dipple killed an
(12:39):
opponent in a duel, so very different explanations. They're both
good reasons to get out of town. Regardless of why
he had to leave, Dipple did have to go and
lay low for a little while. According to Florescue, he
returned home for this period, and home at that time
was near Frankenstein Castle with his parents. So this is
(13:00):
about the time when Dipple began to really seriously study
and practice alchemy, and he got into it when a
Lutheran minister from geese And gave him a couple of
books on alchemy, and these books included Raymond Lilly's Experiments
and Gillam Pastel's Veil Raised on the Mysteries of the
Beginning of the World. He basically pushed these books on
Dipple because he supposedly believed that Dipple would be able
(13:23):
to understand them better than anyone else, so again kind
of a nod to his supposed intellect brilliance. And after
reading them, Dipple apparently decided that the whole making gold
thing that everybody was so interested in at the time
really didn't sound that tough after all. I mean, you
guys should go listen to our episode from last October
(13:45):
on alchemy if you want to see really how people
how much people were into this. He decided he wanted
to give it a shot, and he was so confident
that he would succeed that he bought an estate completely
on credit to set up his lab there. It cost
fifty thou guilders, but of course he didn't anticipate paying
(14:06):
the problem would be a problem because of course he
would be able to make gold and pay in that.
So in about or seventeen oh one, sometime in there,
he claimed that he had succeeded in finding the secret
formula for gold, but the crucible containing that broke into
the fire and was tragically lost. And according to legend,
(14:29):
alchemists weren't supposed to use the goal that they created
for personal gain. So you know, this idea of buying
a place on on credit and then you'd pay it
all back with the gold you can make not a
not legit for for real alchemists to be planning on
doing that. So maybe it was a little bit of
bad luck, a little curse like situation going on there.
(14:52):
But there are different accounts of what happened with Dipple
after this. According to that medical history article that we
were taking talking about, Dipple had to flee again to
escape angry creditors. Florescou, however, says that he tried unsuccessfully
to recreate this gold formula that he'd lost for three
years after that, and then started wandering. I have to wonder, Okay,
(15:14):
if you'd made the gold formula, didn't he write it
down well? And why it would take? What is it?
It's longer, It takes longer to try to recreate it,
doesn't it Then when he made it the first time.
It sounds like he was just messing around this stuff
the whole time. A pinch of this, a little of
that little philosopher's stone. Either way, Dipple began to wander
(15:36):
through other parts of Germany and through foreign lands too.
For a while, he settled in Berlin, which was at
the time the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia, and
while there he was under the protection of Count August
von Wittgenstein, who I think we've mentioned. The Wittgenstein family
and other episodes pop up from time to time. The
(16:01):
count convinced King Frederick the First to set Dipple up
with a mansion and a nice laboratory, and it's there
that he started experiments of a very different nature. He
set out to discover an elixir that would cure a
variety of conditions, kind of like a universal medicine. So
it sounds like something that we would all kind of want, right,
(16:22):
something to cure whatever ails. You only listen to how
he created it. So in order to create this wonder
product of his, he started experimenting with distilling animal parts,
namely blood first and then bones, which he would boil
to extract the fatty matter. And according to Florescue quote,
(16:46):
the product was conducted through iron condensing tubes and fed
into receivers where the crude bone oil collected. That doesn't
sound very good. That product, according to Ainsley and Campbell,
smelled and tasted pretty gross as you would imagine, But
it was used in medical practice to cure a number
of ailments, and for a while it had a good
(17:08):
reputation as a medicine until the end of the eighteenth century.
It was named Dipples oil or Dipples animal oil, and
it was said to stimulate the nervous system if you
took it internally. But I think people used to rub
it on the outside of their bodies as well to
consume it to I don't know if they didn't want to,
but that you didn't necessarily have to. I guess it
depended on what you were trying to treat. I think
(17:31):
I read that you could use it to treat spasms.
Maybe rub it on the miracle product. I mean, I
guess it works for just about anything. Although Dipple's animal
oil does not make it sound appealing, it doesn't. Maybe
just Dipple's oil would have been a better name. And
I think, you know, I've seen it both ways. I've
seen it as Dipples oil and Dipples animal oil. But
I think I would choose to partake of the Dipple's
(17:52):
oil before the animal oil, for sure. But through this
work and boiling animal parts, Fluorescu also points out that
Dipple at a very different kind of discovery. By boiling
animal parts and mixing and iron and some various other ingredients,
he apparently ended up with a chemical called potassium ferrocyanide,
and when that chemical was mixed with air, it became
(18:13):
this brilliant blue color that became known as Prussian blue
or Berlin blue. For some reason that discovery wasn't made
public until about seventy four, but that blue dye was
widely used by artists. You'll still see paint colors today.
It's a it's a color still Prussian blue. Right, And
just a side note here, since we've done some poison
(18:33):
podcasts recently, another German chemist took dipples chemical and diluted
it with sulfuric acid, which created hydrocyanic or prussic acid,
which Fluorescu calls one of the most potent poisons. So
all of this here, you know, we have this miracle drug.
And you'd think that Dipples oil and and Prussian blue,
(18:55):
the color, the paint, the pigment would have been enough
to earn Dipple some measure of wealth and respect, but
he kept getting implicated in various scandals. Florescue asserts that
this was a result of other scientists and alchemists being
jealous of him and thus making him the subject of
their intrigue. But regardless of the reason, Dipple had to
(19:17):
stay on the move pretty much most of his life,
according again to Florescue, another similarity to Shelley's Frankenstein, who,
as you remember from the book, is pretty much always
on the move um, although that's partly because there's a
there's a monster invault. That's true. He had motivation, he
had good reason to keep out, keep going, but um. Finally,
(19:41):
Dipple headed to Holland after Berlin, where he studied medicine
in Leiden and earned his degree by seventeen eleven or so.
And he was set by some to be a pretty
good physician, and according to Einslee and Campbell, he even
attempted to set up a medical practice outside of Amsterdam,
but again had to flee, this time to Denmark in
(20:02):
seventeen fourteen. And again the reason why he had to
get out of town and so fast seems to be unknown,
although Florescu does point out that after earning his medical degree,
Dipple was doing experiments with animals, taking them apart too,
just trying to find out how it all fit together,
And apparently at least one of Dipple's biographers suggests that
(20:24):
he was trying to understand the process. That quote and
gender's life itself another similarity to Shelley's character if it
is true, well, and this reminded me a little bit
too of of the blood Work episode. Trying to find
trying to find the root of the soul. I mean,
that's pretty similar to to trying to find the process
that in gender's life itself. These experiments going around are
(20:47):
going on kind of at the same time to find
what seems like unfindable things. So maybe these crazy experiments
that Dipple was doing had something to do with his flight.
But after going to Denmark, Dipple again got caught up
in a series of political intrigues that resulted in him
getting thrown into prison for seven years on the Danish
(21:08):
island of Borne Home. He was sentenced to life, but
was released at the request of the Queen of Denmark
in seventeen twenty six, who wanted him to be her physician.
So that shows that he must have had a pretty
good medical reputation at the time. I'd say, if you're
thinking get this prisoner out of jail, I need him
to be my doctor, and I'm the Queen of Denmark.
(21:29):
A year later, though, he ended up moving to Sweden,
where he worked as a physician in the court of
the Swedish King, so really a dramatic rise in fortunes
for him. He continued to encounter controversy there though as well,
and eventually returned home to Germany in seventeen twenty nine
after being gone for some twenty five years, and what
(21:49):
I've read about him, Florescu in his book talks a
lot about how Dipple was sort of drawn to home
his whole life. He he sort of kept in touch
with his family, his siblings there, and he was he
wanted to come home. So it makes you question even
more of these things that made him move from place
to place when it was and drawn to one place
in particular. Yeah, he returned to his family home near
(22:12):
Castle Frankenstein, the place where he was born, and Florescu
says that it's there at home that Dipple started working
on some kind of quote grand design, and citing a
document that most scholars ignore, this author says that Dipple
did claim to finally have achieved something of the sort,
some sort of chemical secret, and then he apparently offered
(22:33):
it to the local landowner near his family home in
exchange for ownership of Castle Frankenstein and it's domain. So
he's sort of focused on this place where he was born,
in the castle. He wanted it in exchange for a
grand design. The deal didn't work though, No, it fell through,
and it's still not clear what the secret he was
offering for the castle was, but Florescu thinks it has
(22:55):
something to do with the mysterious pamphlet that Dipple had
printed in a year after the deal fell through. In it,
he claims that he discovered a formula for prolonging his
own life until eighteen o one, at which point he
would have been one hundred and thirty five years old.
Apparently this came at a time when his enemies were
(23:16):
spreading rumors that he was going to die, so maybe
he sort of came up with us to counter that. Unfortunately,
though for Dipple, he ended up dying just a year
after making that prophecy. On April seventeen thirty four. He
was found in the palace of his old friend, the
Count von Wittgenstein, where he had a laboratory, and Dipple's
(23:37):
body was cold and rigid when it was found, but
he was also foaming at the mouth and the entire
right side of his face was blue. And the medical
history article that we've mentioned earlier says that the cause
of death was probably a stroke, but of course, especially
for a guy like this, people suggested that it could
have also been poison still other people and this has
(24:00):
got to be the best option on the table. I
think that he had been killed by the devil for
not keeping some sort of contract. That last theories definitely
fitting for a spooky tale like Shelley's. But there are
several reasons why people think that Dipple probably wasn't actually
the inspiration for Frankenstein. For one thing, many of the
(24:20):
traits that people attribute to him may actually post date
Mary Shelley's novel, so these are things that were sort
of retroactively put onto Dipple, maybe even after the movies
were made. Uh. There's also some doubt about how much
Shelley could have known about Dipple's life. She definitely traveled
(24:41):
in the area where Castle Frankenstein is, but who knows
if she actually heard about his story. And finally, of
course we just don't really know that much about Dipple's life.
Of course, Shelley might not have necessarily been at the
same disadvantage that modern scholars are, since she would have
been long before the World War Two bombings in the
(25:04):
places where all his records were. That's true, But another
thing I think of here is that even if she
had been interested in the things he was doing and
wanted to find out more about him. As you mentioned earlier,
I think there were a lot of people who were
doing these sorts of experiments at the time popular pastime, right,
So she could have just been inspired by that fact
(25:25):
rather than Dipple's specific story. But it's interesting to speculate
about and I'm glad to know a little bit more
about him. So, you know, good request from listeners here,
even though we had to go to some lengths to
find out more about him. Thank you so much for
(25:46):
joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an
email address or a Facebook you are l or something
similar over the course of today's episode, since it is
from the archive that might be out of date now,
you can email us at History podcast at how stuff
Works dot com, and you can find us all over
social media at missed in History and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I
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