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In his work Maladies and Remedies of the Life of the Flesh, published in Leiden under the pseudonym Christianus Democritus, he claimed to have discovered the Elixir of Life—a liquid counterpart to the Philosopher’s Stone—which would heal any ailment and grant eternal life to the person who drank it. He tried, but failed, to exchange the formula for the deed to Frankenstein Castle, and the only use he ever made of his potion—a mixture of decomposing blood, bones, antlers, horns and hooves—was as an insecticide, due to its incomparable stench. This same quality led the German troops to employ the tarry, viscous fluid as a non-lethal chemical weapon (therefore exempt from the Geneva Convention), pouring it into wells in North Africa to slow the advance of General Patton and his men, whose tanks pursued them across the desert sands. An ingredient in Dippel’s elixir would eventually produce the blue that shines not only in Van Gogh’s Starry Night and in the waters of Hokusai’s Great Wave, but also on the uniforms of the infantrymen of the Prussian army, as though something in the colour’s chemical structure invoked violence: a fault, a shadow, an existential stain passed down from those experiments in which the alchemist dismembered living animals to create it, assembling their broken bodies in dreadful chimeras he tried to reanimate with electrical charges, the very same monsters that inspired Mary Shelley to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in whose pages she warned of the risk of the blind advancement of science, to her the most dangerous of all human arts.
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