The Science of Lazarus

To refer to Robert E. Cornish as a scientific child prodigy would be a slight exaggeration, but only just. Born in San Francisco, California, United States in 1903, he had completed high school by the age of 15 and went on to graduate from Berkley just three years later. By the age of 21 he was a practising physician. His true passion however was research, and so it was that in his mid-twenties he returned to Berkley to immerse himself once more in the world of academia. Projects he engaged in ranged from objective experimentation such as the isolation of heavy water, to rather eccentric notions such as the development of special lenses to enable newspapers to be read underwater.

Cornish was widely regarded as an exceptional talent, occasionally given over to idiosyncratic tendencies. However, young Robert was soon to earn himself a degree of notoriety, owing to a macabre obsession with death, or rather with its reversal. Yes, Cornish had decided to turn his extensive abilities to the not inconsiderable task of bringing the dead back to life. Not since Jesus Christ supposedly performed a miracle, by raising a man named Lazarus from the dead, approximately 2,000 years ago, is this feat known to have been achieved. I think I would have stuck to underwater lenses myself.

His process of reanimating the deceased involved the use of a teeterboard, which, whilst not unlike a two person see-saw, in his case involved only one participant; a dead one. In 1933, Cornish somehow managed to get hold of an unspecified number of human cadavers, which he would strap to the teeterboard, inject with adrenaline and heparin, and then vigorously teeter them back and forth in order to restore circulation. It didn’t work. However, Robert was undeterred, blaming the failures on the fact that his ‘patients’ had been dead for too long to enable resurrection to take place.

He needed fresh corpses. Finding very recently deceased humans in short supply, in 1934 Cornish turned his attention instead to dogs. So confident was he that he could bring dead dogs back to life, he organised a public demonstration. He duly arrived with five fox terriers in tow, each of which he had named Lazarus, after the corpse successfully reinvigorated by Jesus. Disconcertingly he then proceeded to euthanise each of the dogs, much to the discomfort and consternation of most of the onlookers. After the poor animals had been dead for five minutes he initiated his process of resurrection. They were strapped to the teeterboard, injected with a concoction of chemicals, and robustly rocked back and forth. Three of the dogs steadfastly refused to return from the afterlife, presumably preferring doggy heaven to being experimented on by a slightly unhinged doctor.

However, to the amazement of those present, two of the dogs were successfully restored to life. In one case the success was only partial, with the pitiful canine in a kind of vegetative state, apparently blind, unresponsive, and able only to wander about zombie-like, with no indication that it was even aware of its surroundings. The fifth dog however, was a different story. Initially it appeared also to have been reanimated to a zombified state, but it gradually recovered its faculties and returned to normal. Given that Robert Cornish demonstrated that he could indeed bring the dead back to life, his public experiment was considered to have been a remarkable success.

Whilst the unconventional doctor believed himself to be something of a pioneer in the field of reanimation of the dead, others were significantly less impressed. Many people expressed outrage at the killing of dogs for experimentation purposes, whilst others questioned the purpose of it all. He began to be regarded as something of a Dr. Frankenstein figure by the general public, and found himself ostracised by his colleagues, even losing his job as a consequence. Undeterred by the criticism however, Cornish was adamant that his procedure would work on humans, and in 1947 announced that he intended to carry out the resuscitation of a freshly deceased corpse, by applying his methodology to a prisoner who had just been executed by the state.

A report contemporaneous with his announcement went as follows: “Dr Cornish, elated at the sensational success of his experiments with dogs, wants to make the attempt on humans. He is now seeking permission to experiment with a criminal executed by poison gas. Given the body after physicians declare the man to be dead, he would strap the body to a teeterboard and attach electrical heating pads to the limbs. Next, a chemical known as methylene blue would be injected into the veins to neutralise the poisonous fumes that had caused death. Pure oxygen would then be pumped into the lungs through a mask and the teeterboard rocked slowly to keep the blood in circulation… Dr Cornish believes firmly that the dead man would live. He does not agree with other scientists that the brain of the man so revived would be hopelessly damaged.”

Hearing of Cornish’s proposal, a convicted child killer named Thomas McMonigle, who was on death row awaiting execution at San Quentin State Prison, reached out to the resurrectionist doctor to volunteer to be the subject of his experiment. After all, what had he got to lose? Cornish approached the California Department of Corrections for permission to carry out his procedure on the body of McGonigle, but his request was refused. Not only would such an attempt have been unethical, but they would have faced an additional problem had he succeeded. McMonigle, having been executed, would have technically served his sentence, and would have had to be freed. In addition, he would have been protected by the law of double jeopardy, which prevented a person from being tried for the same crime twice. Thus the authorities would have had not option but to free a convicted child killer with no prospect of being able to rearrest him. Thomas McMonigle was executed on 20^th February 1948, and with Cornish having been denied permission to intervene, he remained very dead indeed.

Having failed to obtain the necessary authorisation for his macabre experimentation, Cornish faded into obscurity, reduced to earning a living marketing his own product: “Dr Cornish’s Tooth Powder with Vitamin D and Fluoride”. Robert E. Cornish himself died on March 6^th 1963 at the age of 60, taking his life restoring secrets with him into the afterlife. Was he just a mad scientist, or had he really discovered a way of defeating death? What would have happened had he been allowed to try and revive McMonigle?  Unless someone else takes up his resurrectionist baton, we are unlikely ever to know. Probably just as well.

Sources:

alphahistory.com

mysteriousuniverse.org

wikipedia.org