I recently visited the Frankenstein Castle in Darmstadt in the Rhine River Valley, where Mary Shelley may have encountered the Johann Konrad Dippel story and his Dippel’s Oil pregnancy remedy, which is a thematic feature in my book the Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley.  It long been thought by a number of researchers that Mary may have heard of Dippel’s reputation for digging up dead bodies for his experiments.