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J R Soc Med. 2002 May; 95(5): 257–259. | PMCID: PMC1279684 |
Copyright © 2002, The Royal Society of Medicine The real Doctor Frankenstein? Christopher Goulding, MLitt Department of English Literature, Percy Building, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK Mary Shelley's novel
Frankenstein1
has become one of the most analysed literary texts of the modern age. Its
central theme provides a metaphor conducive to almost limitless
reinterpretation, drawn by different readings into the service of numerous
ideologies including marxist economics, radical feminism, green politics, and,
most recently, genetics and biotechnology. As Mary Shelley's concerns clearly lie with the moral and sociological
implications of her story, attempts to identify likely origins for the
scientific elements of the story have attracted less attention, and generally
refer only to the contemporaneous sources easily available to the educated
public 2.
Nevertheless, doubts exist concerning Mary Shelley's degree of specific
interest in, or knowledge of, scientific subjects. Accordingly, the level of
influence exerted in this field by her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley,
also remains open to debate. He maintained a keen interest in the world of
natural philosophy, and many critics have noted the significance of the
references to ‘Dr [Erasmus] Darwin and some of the physiological writers
of Germany’ in the novel's Preface, which was written by
him 3. But a closer
examination of the medical themes running throughout the novel strongly
suggests a more obscure influence at work, arising from Percy Shelley's
friendship with a Scots doctor whilst he was still a schoolboy at Eton. During his last two years at Eton in 1809-1810, Percy Shelley became the
friend of an elderly gentleman who was one of several people approved by the
school as suitable mentors for the boys. Dr James Lind MD FRS (1736-1812) was
a widower living in semi-retirement at nearby Windsor. Born and educated in
Edinburgh, he had travelled extensively as a ship's surgeon to Africa, India,
and China. Lind was also an accomplished astronomer and geologist, and had
accompanied Sir Joseph Banks of the Royal Society on a scientific expedition
to Iceland in 1772. This James Lind is not to be confused with his more famous
cousin and namesake (1716-1794), the ‘father of nautical medicine’
and author of A Treatise on the Scurvy. To polite society in Windsor, Lind appeared something of an eccentric. This
image was later confirmed by his son Alexander, who vividly evoked the
alchemic appearance of his father's study in the family home: ‘There
were telescopes, Galvanic Batteries, Daggers, Electrical Machines, and all the
divers apparatus which a philosopher is supposed to
possess’ 4. Lind was, in fact, a highly knowledgeable natural philosopher with a keen
interest in the latest developments in every emerging field of science that
was later to attract the young poet Shelley. He was a friend, acquaintance, or
correspondent of most of the great names of eighteenth century science,
philosophy, and technology, including Benjamin Franklin, William Herschel,
David Hume, Adam Smith and James
Watt 5,6,7.
In Mary Shelley's uncompleted and fragmentary posthumous biography of her
husband, she was later to state that at Eton he: ‘... became intimate also with a man whom he never mentioned except
in terms of the tenderest respect. This was Dr Lind, a name well known among
the professors of medical science... he has often said... “I owe that
man far—oh! Far more than I owe my father.”
’. 8
Shelley's friend Thomas Jefferson
Hogg 9 noted that
Lind ‘communicated to Shelley a taste for chemistry and chemical
experiments’. Hogg also remarked that in Shelley's rooms at Oxford there
was a confusion of clutter: ‘... An electrical machine, an air pump, the
galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and... a small glass retort above an
argand lamp’. Percy Shelley later immortalized Lind in verse as the character Zonoras,
the wise old teacher of Prince Athanase in the eponymously titled
poem: 10‘Prince Athanase had one beloved friend An old, old man, with hair of
silver white And lips where heavenly smiles would hang and blend With his wise
words; and eyes whose arrowy light Shone like the reflex of a thousand
minds.’
There can be little doubt that Mary Shelley owed much of what medical
knowledge she had to her husband's abiding interest, as inspired by Lind.
Before meeting his wife, the poet had read such medical works as Thomas
Trotter's A View of the Nervous Temperament (1812) and was familiar
with the extensively annotated scientific poetry expounding the observations,
theories, and predictions of the physician and natural philosopher Erasmus
Darwin 11. Recent
editors of Frankenstein have also noted that Percy Shelley could have
been aware of ‘the physiological writers of Germany’ via his
personal physician William Lawrence, who had translated Blumenbach's
Comparative Anatomy in
1807 12. Mary Shelley's journals painstakingly (though by no means exhaustively)
itemize her husband's systematic reading programme from the date of their
elopement in 1814. She also records an outing with him in London on 28
December that year to see a public lecture on galvanism and the medicinal uses
of electricity by André-Jacques
Garnerin 13. (Percy
Shelley went again the following evening with another friend, but found the
lecture hall closed.) Recent biography of Mary Shelley has suggested closer links between the
author herself and the purely medical aspects of her
novel 14. These
include her possible reading of
accounts 15 during
1814 of the restoration to consciousness of a sailor who had lain in a coma
for several months; the doctor concerned was Henry Cline, whose patient Mary
had once been. Also cited is an entry in Mary's journal for 19 March 1815,
shortly after the death of her first baby: ‘Dream that my little baby
came to life again—that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by
the fire & it
lived’ 13.
Another proposed link is one between Mary's father, the philosopher William
Godwin, and Luigi Galvani via a review in March 1800 by two of Godwin's
friends, the physicist William Nicholson and the surgeon Anthony Carlisle, of
a paper by Volta, who had previously challenged Galvani's theories of
‘animal electricity’. Mary Shelley was eighteen years old when she began her story whilst a guest
at Lord Byron's Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva during the summer
of 1816. Some detail of the novel's origins was later to emerge in her
introduction to the revised single-volume edition of
1831 16, where she
describes how she was a ‘silent listener’ to the long
philosophical discussions of her husband with Lord Byron: ‘They talked of the experiments of Dr Darwin... who preserved a piece
of vermicelli in a glass case till by some extraordinary means it began to
move with a voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given.
Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such
things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured,
brought together, and endued with vital warmth.’
She then notes how, inspired by the overheard conversations, her
imagination contrived the germ of the story: ‘I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing
he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and
then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with
an uneasy half-vital motion.’
In fact, the account in the novel of the creature's creation by Victor
Frankenstein provides only the vaguest detail, culminating in a rather subdued
account of its awakening: ‘It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the
accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I
collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of
being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the
morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was
nearly burnt out, when by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw
the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive
motion agitated its limbs.’
But a reassessment of certain other medical themes and
quasi-autobiographical events featured throughout Frankenstein might
now be said to suggest the influence of Lind's character and work, via his
pupil Percy Shelley. The description in the novel of Victor Frankenstein's medical studies at
the University of Ingolstadt has been recognized as an idealized version of
Percy Shelley's scientific education, with the character Waldman, the
chemistry lecturer, owing much to
Lind 17. But an
examination of Lind's own experiments reveals that he was even closer to the
world of Frankenstein than has hitherto been acknowledged. Between 1782 and
1809, Lind maintained a regular correspondence with the London-based Italian
physicist Tiberio
Cavallo 18. Cavallo
mentions Galvani's experiments on 10 June 1792, the year following publication
of Galvani's research. On 11 July he asks Lind: ‘Have you made any dead
frogs jump like living ones?’, and then on 15 August writes: ‘I am
glad to hear of your success in the new experiments on muscular motion, and
earnestly entreat you to prosecute them to the ne plus ultra of
possible means’. Lind also corresponded regularly with Sir Joseph Banks, President of the
Royal Society 19. On
28 October 1792 he thanks Banks for supplying frogs that have enabled him and
Cavallo to conduct experiments towards ‘the unravelling of that
extraordinary and as yet inexplicable phenomenon, Animal
Electricity’. Lind also notes how, the previous week, he had
demonstrated such an experiment to the King, Queen, and other members of the
royal family. In the same letter, he tells of a visit some five weeks earlier
of Dr Valli of Pisa, who spent a day with Lind demonstrating ‘... a more
perfect manner of preparing the frog by which I could employ both Crural
nerves at the same time instead of only part of one of them separated from the
thigh. The difference was astonishing’. He then mentions a letter Cavallo had received from Volta, contesting
Galvani's theories. In another letter to Banks dated 27 November 1788, written
during one of the King's periods of ‘insanity’, Lind discusses the
possibility of treatment by the application of electricity: ‘If we may
credit the accounts of the state of the Brain of insane persons found upon
dissection, I think there is great reason to believe that it may be of service
in that disorder and appears to me to merit a fair tryal’. Running alongside the novel's central plot concerning the creation of a
monster are parallel themes addressing contemporary perceptions of the
increasingly blurred boundary between life and death. These include an early
excerpt where Victor Frankenstein is dragged freezing and emaciated aboard a
ship from an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean: ‘We accordingly brought him back to the deck, and restored him to
animation by rubbing him with brandy, and forcing him to swallow a small
quantity. As soon as he showed signs of life, we wrapped him up in
blankets...’
Later, the creature attempts to resuscitate a young girl whose body he has
dragged from a river: ‘She was senseless; and I endeavoured, by every
means in my power, to restore animation...’. Such references recall
Lind's own medical education in Edinburgh under William Cullen, who was
instrumental in the early codification of procedures for the revival of
drowned or otherwise asphyxiated
persons 20. Cullen is, in fact, mentioned within this context in a medical work known
to have been ordered by Percy Shelley from his bookseller in July
1812 11. Robert
Thornton's Medical Extracts includes a lengthy passage on methods
suitable for persons being ‘recalled to life’ from ‘the
silent mansions of the tomb’, and mentions the theories of Cullen and
Boerhaave on the causes of death from asphyxiation by
hanging 21.
Interestingly, another Shelley critic has noted that Waldman's assessment in
Frankenstein of modern philosophers as the successors to the
alchemists bears similarities to comments appearing elsewhere in Thornton's
book 17. The influence of Lind's medical pursuits extends beyond
Frankenstein, and is most reflected in Percy Shelley's own works.
Examples include the likely effect of Lind's interest in forensic
medicine 22 as the
inspiration for Percy Shelley's creation of perhaps the earliest example of
ratiocinative detective drama in his play The
Cenci23. Notwithstanding Mary Shelley's own literary talent, and her night of
inspiration in 1816, we might now give some credit to the time spent six years
previously by her husband-to-be in the study of a retired Scots physician in
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1995;34:
227-53. 3. Butler M, ed. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, or The Modern
Prometheus: The 1818 Text. London: Pickering,
1993. 4. Bebbington WG. A friend of Shelley: Dr James Lind. Notes
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83-93. 5. King-Hele D. Shelley and Dr Lind. Keats—Shelley
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Seemingly Dead. Edinburgh: Charles Elliot,
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