published in London in 1818. Authorship was left anonymous, and many
in that day assumed the book was written by Mary’s husband, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, or by her friend Lord Byron. It was published as an unrevised sec-
ond edition, now with Mary’s name as author, in 1823. The quoted passage
begins chapter 4 of the novel, but Mary Shelley stated in the introduction to
her 1831 third edition of Frankenstein that this was the first part of the book
she wrote. An excellent source for the original text and a wealth of supple-
mentary material is Shelley (1818/2012).
Hodgkin and Huxley’s original short publication on the measurement of ac-
tion potentials in axons: Hodgkin and Huxley (1939).
Detailed description of the neural membrane potential and action potential:
Kandel, Schwartz, Jessell, Siegelbaum, and Hudspeth (2013, chaps. 6-7).Chapter 6
An account of Otto Loewi’s literally dreaming up the experiment that led to
the discovery of chemical neurotransmission is given in a biographical essay
written by Henry Dale (1962), with whom Loewi shared the 1936 Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Detailed description of electrical synapses, ionotropic receptors, G-protein-
coupled receptors, and interneural signaling: Kandel et al. (2013, chaps. 8-
11).
Chapter 7
On drugs used to treat seizures: Goldenberg (2010).Chapter 8
The story of Paracelsus is told in Stillman (1920).
Resistance to tetrodotoxin in garter snakes: Geffeney et al. (2005).
Resistance to saxitoxin in clams: Bricelj et al. (2005).