Johann Dippel: An actual inhabitant of Castle Frankenstein, Dippel is believed by many to be an inspiration for Shelley’s story. His life’s work was to discover the Elixir of Life, which would make anyone immortal, and created "Dippel’s Oil," an elixir made from bones, blood, and other bodily fluids and widely used as a neurostimulant. He was also rumored to have been an ardent vivisectionalist, frequently stealing corpses from the local graveyard.

Andrew Ure: Ure was also looking for the secrets of life in human corpses. He obtained and experimented on the body of John Clydesdale, a criminal who had been executed by hanging. Ure caused a stir among the scientific community when he revealed the nature of his experiements. He claimed that men who had died of suffocation, drowning, or hanging could be restored to life through the stimulation of the phrenic nerve.

Giovanni Aldini: Luigi Aldini discovered that a frog’s legs would kick as electricity traveled through the muscles. His nephew Giovanni took the discovery a step further. He studied the effects of galvanizing human and animal bodies. He publicly electrified a recently severed dog’s head, giving it the appearance of life. He also performed experiments on recently deceased criminals, churning electricity through them to achieve momentary reanimation. His corpses convulsed, grimaced, and even raised their limbs, much to the shock of onlookers. Aldini was also the first to use electric shocks to the brain in the treatment of neurological disorders, a practice still in use today.

Gabriel Beaurieux: France’s use of the guillotine led to Beaurieux’s fascination with severed heads. He examined heads immediately after decapitation and noted that the heads would open their eyes, fix their pupils on the objects before them, and even respond to their own names for several seconds before appearing to completely lose consciousness.

Robert Cornish: Building on the work of George Washington Crile, who pioneered the blood transfusion, Cornish worked in resuscitating dead animals. After asphyxiating dogs in a lab, Cornish would place the bodies on a teeterboard while infusing them with saline, oxygen, and adrenalin. The fourth and fifth dogs in the experiment (named Lazarus, as were their less fortunate predecessors) were successfully revived, although they never fully recovered. Cornish went on to play himself in Life Returns a film about a doctor who works to revive the dead.

Sergei Bryukhonenko: We have mentioned Soviet scientist Sergei Bryukhonenko before. Another fan of canine experimentation, Bryukhonenko invented the autojektor, a heart and lung machine, and proved its efficacy by attaching it to a severed dog’s head, which stayed alive, eating and drinking.

Vladimir Demikhov: We can credit Demikhov with many modern advances in organ transplants, but he is perhaps best remembered for his work in two-headed dogs. Demikhov transplanted the head and front legs of one dog onto a second dog’s body. Both dogs were awake, aware, and hungry. He made 20 of these two-headed creatures, but, tragically, due to tissue rejection, none of them lived longer than a month.

Robert White: Following the revelation of the Soviet Union’s two-headed dog program, the United States began working on some mad transplant programs of its own. During the 1970s, surgeon Robert White successfully transplanted the head of one monkey onto the body of another. Because he was unable to repair the resulting nerve damage, the monkeys were paralyzed from the neck down, but the heads themselves could see, taste, think, and feel. It was believed the monkeys could survived this way indefinitely, although they were ultimately euthanized.

Doctors estimate that nerves grow about 1 mm every day. The BBC reports: The patient cannot move his new arms . . . it could be two years before the patient can manipulate his new hands. Hans-Guenther Machens, director of hand and plastic surgery at the Klinikum rechts der Isar clinic, said: "The regeneration process will take a long time." UK transplant expert Nadey Hakim, head of the transplant unit at London's Hammersmith Hospital, said the higher up an amputation on the arms, the easier it was to connect new limbs, as there were fewer nerves and only one bone to connect.

The man may never have proper sensation in his arms and hands, even if he is able to move them. Though it is easier to connect new limbs the higher the amputation is, the opposite is true for establishing sensation. The higher the amputation, the less likely it is that a transplant recipient will feel anything in his or her hands. Several successful hand transplants have been performed over the past 7 years, and their recipients can control their hands and experience hot and cold sensations.

Farmer Has Double Arm Transplant [via BBC News]

According to the Hollywood Reporter, The Transplants will be "a four-quadrant ensemble superhero story with a comedic bent," written by Adam Jay Epstein and Andrew Jacobson, the writers behind Not Another Teen Movie and the short American Pi, who had originally planned to produce the idea as a comic book before Lady Hollywood stepped in with her large, large checkbook.

With details about the movie's plot and crew still under wraps - Raimi has signed on to produce the movie for The Mouse, with no directors or cast announced - it's up to blind speculation as to what kind of transplanting the title may refer to. Are we going to see four superheroes in a hilarious story about them moving from New York to San Francisco? Is it going to be the tale of four plants who aren't sure about their gender? Or, as I'm convinced for no reason at all, the story of four people who get organ transplants from a superhero and gain superpowers as a result?

(Please note: If that last one isn't the plot of the movie, all Hollywood people, consider that a quick pitch. You can offer me millions of dollars for the rights via the email address on the left side of the page.)

Sam Raimi, Disney team for 'Transplants' [Hollywood Reporter]