The new brain that Fritz steals from the laboratory of Henry’s former professor, Dr. Waldman, is in a jar labeled “abnormal.”
Waldman had explained that the “scarcity of convolutions on the frontal lobe” and the “distinct degeneration of the middle frontal lobe” corresponded exactly with its owner’s life “of brutality, violence, and murder.” Without noticing its anatomical flaws, Henry uses the brain for his creature and urges a bewildered Fritz to “think of it: the brain of a dead man, waiting to live again in a body I made with my own hands!”
Frankenstein highlights the ontological function of the brain. Unless the brain lives, the person doesn’t.
The film certainly illustrates how natural it was in the 1920s to think of a person’s inclinations as determined by the brain and to believe that a diagnosis could be established by observing cortical morphology with the naked eye.
James Whale, film director, on the set of Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Inspired by the homonymous book by Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, this timespace presents the authors' genealogy of the cerebral subject and the influence of the neurological discourse in human sciences, mental health and culture.