#gothic science

[gentlemanemotions]

Radium (Ra) – Atomic number 88. 🔮✨

Born from pitchblende and discovered in the shadows of Marie Curie’s lab, Radium is an element that carries its own ghostly luminescence. A beautiful, dangerous glow that refuses to be hidden, defying the dark until it slowly decays over millennia. Some secrets are meant to burn bright. 🖤

[weirdletter]

Dracula for Doctors: Medical Facts and Gothic Fantasies, by Fiona Subotsky, Royal College of Psychiatrists Publications/Cambridge University Press, 2019. Info: cambridge.org.

Exploring how medicine and psychiatry are portrayed in gothic literature, this engaging book illustrates how Stoker's famous work was influenced by nineteenth-century attitudes to disease and medicine and reveals many previously unknown links. Extracts from many sensational stories of the time are presented, and the role of doctors and their appearance and contribution to gothic fiction is investigated. The book covers topics such as asylums, their purpose, practice and patients, deadly diseases echoing the symptoms of vampirism, and the otherworldly allure of the undead. Dracula for Doctors is an entertaining and informative examination of how Victorian medical knowledge and culture informed Stoker's gothic masterpiece. This book suggests that Stoker, who had many medical connections, was able to link lurid stories of operations and asylums with fictional horror and suspense. Fans of gothic literature, as well as those of medical history and the supernatural, will find this an enjoyable read.

Contents: Preface Foreword 1. Body and mind 2. Medico-gothic 3. Stoker medical circles 4. Asylum doctors 5. The gothic asylum 6. Renfield, the pet lunatic 7. The other patients 8. Diagnosing Dracula 9. Dread, disease and the asylum 10. Occult blood 11. Holes in the skull 12. Dead, alive or undead 13. Therapeutic armamentarium 14. Compelling eyes 15. Beastliness 16. Vivisection or animal torture? 17. Demons and doctors 18. Scientists and the supernatural 19. And Dracula for dentists … 20. Sex and death Index

[weirdletter]

Gothic Science: The Era of Ingenuity & the Making of Frankenstein, by Joel Levy, Andre Deutsch Ltd, 2019. Info: carltonbooks.co.uk.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was conceived against the backdrop of rapid change in the scientific world. And the science that inspired it is almost as strange as the novel itself. Shelley grew up surrounded by several of Europe’s prominent scientific thinkers and was familiar with experimentation into reanimation of corpses as well as the heated debate over “the elixir of life”. She was a frequent visitor to St Bart’s operating theatre, where spectators witnessed surgery performed without anaesthetic. Her monster was born in an era of bodysnatching, dissections and the philosophy of Vitalism. This book offers an engrossing insight into the world of science in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Europe, through the prism of the seminal science fiction novel. Illustrated with line drawings and colour plates, it reveals how the monster was conceived, suggests the real-life basis for Victor Frankenstein and describes in vivid detail the experiments that might have led to the Creature’s birth. It also looks at incarnations of the monster since the book was published and modern interpretations of the “mad scientist”, as well as looking ahead to permanent bionic limbs, implants and other wonders.

Contents: Introduction Chapter One. Chemical Revolution: Getting High and Losing Your Head Chapter Two. Electric Fluids and Animal Spirits: Galvanism, Voltaic Piles, Electrochemistry and the Start of a New Era Chapter Three. The Right Stuff:  Vitalism, Spontaneous Generation and the Meaning of “Life” Chapter Four. Of Man and Monster: Frankenstein and the Science of the Mind Chapter Five. Anatomy of Horror: Dissection, Murder and Resurrection in the Romantic Era Chapter Six. To the Ends of the Earth: Polar Exploration and the Frozen Wastes Chapter Seven. Before and After: The Painful Birth and Dreadful Afterlife of Frankenstein and His Monster Further Readings Index and Credits

[weirdletter]

Promethean Horrors: Classic Tales of Mad Science (British Library Tales of the Weird), edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, British Library Publishing, 2019. Cover art and frontispiece illustration by Enrique Bernardou, info: www.bl.uk.

An exploration of the origins of the ‘mad scientist’ character in fiction, with introduction and notes. Including the original stories which inspired films such as The Fly and the many versions of Frankenstein, this title features never-before-republished material from the Library’s collection. From the imaginations of Gothic short-story writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley and H.P. Lovecraft came one of the most complex of villains – the mad scientist. Promethean Horrors presents some of the greatest mad scientists ever created, as each cautionary tale explores the consequences of pushing nature too far. These savants take many forms: there are malcontents who strive to create poisonous humans; technologists obsessed with genetic splicing; mesmerists interested in the way consciousness operates after death and inventors who believe in a hidden reality. United by an unhealthy obsession with wanting to reach beyond their circumstances, these mad scientists are marked by their magical capacity to alter the present, a gift that always comes at a price...

Contents: Introduction – Xavier Aldana Reyes Acknowledgements The Sandman (1816) – E.T.A. Hoffmann The Mortal Immortal (1833) – Mary Shelley Rappaccini’s Daughter (1844) – Nathaniel Hawthorne The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar (1845) – Edgar Allan Poe The Secret of the Scaffold (1883) – Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam The Body Snatcher (1884) – Robert Lewis Stevenson The Blue Laboratory (1897) – L.T. Meade The Five Senses (1909) – E. Nesbit From Beyond (1934) – H.P. Lovecraft The Fly (1957) – George Langelaan

[weirdletter]

Gothic Remains: Corpses, Terror and Anatomical Culture, 1764–1897 (Gothic Literary Studies), by Laurence Talairach, University of Wales Press, 2019. Cover image by Hablot Knight Browne, info: uwp.co.uk.

The Gothic has always been fascinated with objects carrying with them a sense of horror – the decomposing body, the rigid corpse, the bleeding statue, the spectral skeleton – capable of creating a sublime form of beauty. Gothic Remains: Corpses, Terror and Anatomical Culture, 1764–1897 offers an exploration of those Gothic tropes and conventions that were most thoroughly steeped in the anatomical culture of the period  – from skeletons, used to understand human anatomy, to pathological human remains exhibited in medical museums; from bodysnatching aimed at providing dissection subjects, to live-burials resulting from medical misdiagnoses and pointing to contemporary research into the signs of death. The historicist reading of canonical and less-known Gothic texts proposed throughout Gothic Remains, explored through the prism of anatomy, seeks to offer new insights into the ways in which medical practice and the medical sciences informed the aesthetics of pain and death typically read therein, and the two-way traffic that emerged between medical literature and literary texts.

Contents: Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Rattling Bones: The Skeleton in the Trunk 2. The Chamber of Horrors: Anatomical Models and the Gothic 3. Body-snatching 4. The Pandemonium of Chimeras: The Medical Museum 5. Death Misdiagnosed: Gothic Live Burials Epilogue Notes Select Bibliography Index