Ethics and natural philosophy in the public representation of the scientific experiment: A reading of Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) in the light of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Christophe Boucherie

Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting of the Air Pump has often been described as a representation of the scientific enquiry and natural philosophy of the Enlightenment, whereby an itinerant scientist-philosopher lectures a family about the functioning of a well-known scientific instrument, the air pump, and enlightens them about its associated phenomena. This article proposes an alternative philosophical and moral reading of this powerful visual artefact by comparing it to the famous horror experiment of Mary Shelley’s gothic novel Frankenstein. When realism crosses fiction: the representation of the ethical boundaries of science in the life and death experiment.