Doctors misusing science is a popular theme in fiction, underpinned by such classics as Frankenstein (1831), and The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1885). These books were part of a gothic revival in literature in the 1800’s. Some people see this as a nostalgic yearning for earlier times: despite their dank castles, ghosts and dungeons there was no vast industrial revolution polluting the atmosphere and enslaving workers. The medical novels relate to the newest fears of mankind raised by technology combined with the revelations of Darwin, Mendel and the other early geneticists.

The Island of Doctor Moreau was written in 1896, by which time Darwin’s ideas had spread around the globe, which was populated with thousands of expatriate European amateur scientists reporting on every life-form they could find. Naturally, because of the global reach of the European empire, anthropology became of great interest. Sir James Fraser’s The Golden Bough (1913) was a 13-volume summary of the interrelated customs, beliefs, and myths of the human race that is a reference book today. By the time it was compiled and published primitive art had become of great interest, as was the question it posed: what is it to be ‘civilised’. Phrenology, the ‘science’ of determining personality by detailed examination of the contours of the skull, was becoming popular, and in the eastern United States eugenics programs were commenced- the forced incarceration and sterilisation of variously deficient genes as expressed by individuals. By the 1920’s the Nazis were sending scientific advisors to America to study their racial improvement programs. Though the story of evil doctors is not over, perhaps the worst of the 20^th century was the Nazi Josef Mengele. 

Vivisection, or vividissection, means ‘live cutting’. The technique as physiological, scientific experiment is recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1707, and evidently by 1711 was common practice on dogs. Surgery and science were growing, and knowledge had to be had at whatever cost for the sake of human progress. As time went by, and public social conscience began to be expressed in areas such as worker’s conditions and prisoner’s basic rights, concern for animal suffering rose in some quarters. In recent times, in Australia as well as abroad, animal liberationists have adopted increasingly aggressive tactics to stop vivisection. Indeed, they have been accused of terrorist action, notably in the UK. Together with the IRA and anti-capitalists these groups give the lie to the Bush administration’s anti-Muslim approach. 

Back in 1896, Dr Moreau is doing vivisection on a wide variety of species on his uninhabited island somewhere in the Atlantic. A shipwrecked man with an undergraduate biology background is begrudgingly rescued. HG Wells has this man quite revolted by Moreau’s experiments on a puma “so cut and mutilated as I pray I may never see living flesh again”. The animal’s horrible screams pierce the deep black night. Moreau eventually explains himself: 

‘These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes. To that- to the study of the plasticity of living forms- my life has been devoted. I have studied for years, gaining in knowledge as I go. I see you look horrified, and yet I am telling you nothing new. It all lay in the surface of practical anatomy years ago, but no-one had the temerity to touch it…

…You begin to see that it is a possible thing to transplant tissue from one part of an animal to another, or from one animal to another, to alter its chemical reactions and methods of growth, to modify the articulations of its limbs, and indeed to change it in its most intimate structure.’ (p78) 

‘I took another sheep and made a thing of pain and fear, and left it bound up to heal. It looked quite human to me when I had finished it, but when I went to it I was discontented with it; it remembered me and was terrified beyond imagination, and it had no more than the wits of a sheep. The more I looked at it the clumsier it seemed, until at last I put the monster out of its misery. These animals without courage, these fear-haunted, pain-driven things, without a spark of pugnacious energy to face torment-they are no good for man-making. 

Then I took a gorilla I had, and upon that, working with infinite care, and mastering difficulty after difficulty, I made my first man. With him it was chiefly the brain that needed moulding; much had to be added, much changed…’ (p82) 

Needless to say, things go wrong for Dr Moreau, who tells the narrator about ‘the stubborn beast flesh’ not long before it gets him.

To think about: The theme of the inventor being killed by his own work (which is a presumption against God) goes back at least to the tale of Icarus. What are the implications for following the fads of medical science today?

 

Eventually the narrator is left on the island with the vivisected animal-humans. They have been inculcated by fear with a basic law of civilisation, which begins to break down when punishment is removed:

‘…They were reverting, and reverting very rapidly.

Some of them- the pioneers, I noticed with some surprise, were all females- began to disregard the injunction of decency- deliberately for the most part. Others even attempted public outrages upon the institution of monogamy. The tradition of the Law was clearly losing its force. I cannot pursue this disagreeable subject. My dog man imperceptibly slipped back to the dog again; day by day he became dumb, quadripedal, hairy… 

It would be impossible to detail every step of the lapsing of those monsters; to tell how, day by day, the human semblance left them; how they gave up bandagings and wrappings, abandoned at last every stitch of clothing; how the hair began to spread over the exposed limbs; how their foreheads fell away and their faces projected; how the quasi-human intimacy I had permitted myself with some of them in the first month of my loneliness became a horror to recall.’ 

Consider: Wells writes about the female lapsarians in three sentences, and concludes that ‘I cannot pursue this disagreeable subject’. This stimulates our imagination and obeys Shakespeare’s injunction that brevity is the soul of wit. It is a device apparently lost on many Hollywood-style scriptwriters. How in film would they portray this part of the story? 

How does modern genetics fit into this scenario? 

References and Firther Reading 

Darwin Charles (1859) The Origin of Species 

Fraser, Sir James (1913) The Golden Bough 13 vols  MacMillan 

Lifton Robert (1986/2000) The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide  Basic Books 

Shelly Mary Wollstonecraft (1797-1851)  (1831) Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus 

Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850–1894)  (1885) The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 

Wells, Herbert George (1866-1946)  (1896) The Island of Doctor Moreau