The Galvanic Ward at Midnight
A Novel of Electricity and Anatomy

About this book:

In the soot-choked undercroft of St. Jude’s Hospital, seventeen-year-old Cora Finch scrubs blood from surgeon’s aprons for fourpence a day, her hands raw from lye and her lungs heavy with carbolic. But when a hanged man’s corpse is smuggled through the coal vaults at midnight—not for burial, but for the private theatre of the enigmatic Dr. Aldridge—Cora witnesses a science that defies nature. In a chamber lit by hissing arc lamps and humming with forty galvanic vats, the dead are made to leap, to breathe, to *stare*—and Cora becomes the sole witness to an experiment that blurs the line between resurrection and abomination.

Victorian London’s Anatomy Act has turned the poor’s corpses into legal currency, but Aldridge’s work goes beyond the anatomist’s knife. He is wiring the freshly hanged into batteries of copper and zinc, chasing a spark that might rewrite the very law of death. As fog clings to the Thames and the hospital’s great bell tolls the night shift, Cora is drawn deeper into a conspiracy that reaches from the dissection tables of Southwark to the gentlemen’s clubs of the Royal College—where the price of immortality is paid in stolen bodies and silenced girls.

Atmospheric, visceral, and crackling with historical dread, *The Galvanic Ward at Midnight* plunges readers into the damp brick veins of a hospital where electricity is the new scalpel, and the night staff know too much. For fans of *The Alienist* and *Frankenstein*, this is gothic historical fiction at its most electric: a tale of class, conscience, and the terrible voltage that arcs between science and sin.