I was wondering if someone might help fill a curious gap in my knowledge…that is, what was the earliest instance of a “brain transplant” (or “full-body transplant,” to be technically accurate) in fiction?
Just from my own research or off the top of my head, Burroughs’ “The Master Mind of Mars” from 1927 featured several brain transplants.
From 1879, Edward Page Mitchell’s “The Ablest Man In The World” might technically qualify, but it’s really more about a somewhat novel form of cyborg.
And of course, Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein”—which, aside from the issue of whether assembling a being from disparate parts counts as a “transplant,” was actually pretty vague about the technical details of the process of the monster’s creation, let alone how the brain was acquired, created, and/or implanted.
So, I ask…is there anything earlier, that I’m not remembering? Can anyone take a load off my mind?
The “Brain in a Jar/Aquarium” idea seems to come from the 1930s (I did a Teemings piece on this, which is, alas, no longer online), which is certainly a related trope. I think that “The Master Mind of Mars” is about the earliest example – it’s the one I thought of when I read the thread title.
As for Frankenstein, one thing I keep pointing out is that Shelley did NOT have Frankenstein assembling his monster from stitched-together body parts, as in the movies. She gives the impression that Frankenstein built it up from basic tissues, a la Clark Ashton-Smith’s “The Colossus of Ylornge”. There wasn’t a brain to be transplanted into a body – it wasn’t anyone before, because it hadn’t been a functioning brain. She likely had something like Dr. Pretorius’ idea of a “brain grown from seeds” in the movie Bride of Frankenstein.
I could give more involved arguments, but my chief piece of evidence is that Frankenstein not only got his raw materials from graves and dissecting rooms, but also from slaughterhouses. He wasn’t building his body using horse parts.
The movies, though, assumed a corpse stitched together from other corpses, including a brain, so the monster would have “been” the person whose brain they got it from. The films have gone out of their way to try to explain that away – using an “Abnormal” brain in the 1831 Frankenstein (and in Young Frankenstein, of course). In Hammer’s 1957 Curse of Frankenstein the brain gets damaged, and broken glass falls into it. Even in Kenneth Branaugh’s Marry Shelley’s Frankenstein , if you look closely, you can see the head of the creature getting a severe blow during its creation scene.
Of course, the Universal sequels gave the impression that you could transplant someone’s brain into the creature’s body, and have it “be” them. Although they threatened to do this more than once, the only case where it actually happened was with Ygor’s brain being put into it at the end of Ghost of Frankenstein.
In other versions, the brain is clearly created "from scratch. Look at the 1910 Edison version, or the 1992 TV version.
Oh, I totally agree with you on the Frankenstein point—heck, the original text even only mentions the word “brain” once, and in a completely different context—I regret that I didn’t make it plain in the OP.
(But for true weirdness with Frankenstein adaptation brains, I’d go with “Frankenstein: The True Story.” I’m not entirely sure that script even understood what a brain does, let alone how they work. :smack:)
It’s perhaps worth noting that, in The Mastermind of Mars, it wasn’t even whole brains being transplanted, just portions. The resulting creature thus had a personality that was a blend of both of the original creatures. It’s explained that the transplanted tissue has more vigor than that which is left in place (not sure why; one would expect the other way around), and that the donor’s personality is thus usually the dominant one, but the other personality is still present and occasionally comes to the fore.
Half right…at least one creature got the fractional transplant you mention, but at least a couple of other characters explicitly got their entire brains transplanted. More than once, even.
