This story is set in the republic of Geneva in 1792: when his beloved mother suffers a slow and agonising death, young Victor Frankenstein pledges himself to become death's implacable enemy. So begins a medical and scientific pilgrimage that takes Victor from his childhood home to the University of Ingolstadt in Balvaria, and into the electrical clinics and bloody dissection rooms of London. As a military surgeon with Napoleon's army on the Danube, he is present at the seige of Ulm and attends to the wounded and dying on the killing fields of Austerlitz. Eventually his researches take him to Scotland where, with the anatomists of Edinburgh, he practises his skills as a surgeon, electrician and apprentice bodysnatcher. It is here he witnesses a startling experiment on the body of a hanged man which leads to the culmination of his work - the defeat of death itself.