I am discussing some of the most enduring monsters of nineteenth-century fiction in contemporary medical terms and revealing the relevant scientific events behind the texts.

Part One: Frankenstein

Firstly, Frankenstein written in 1818 by Mary Shelley, wife of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The idea for this novel famously came about when the Shelleys, along with Byron and his doctor Polidori, were at Lake Geneva and one dark stormy night challenged each other to write a ghost story. Polidori’s novel The Vampyre also came out of this literary experiment. Read more…