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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 joining us on this Saturday. 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