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Vampires and Medical Science

2015; Wiley; Volume: 48; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/jpcu.12241

1540-5931

Mary Hallab,

Media Influence and Health

If, as many critics assert, vampires embody our “worst fears,” they also stand for our deepest wish—not to have to die. In their folklore origins, vampires were part of a folk science of disease and death. They have not lost this association. With the advent of modern medical science, vampires did not simply disappear but instead proliferated and evolved to fill varied and complex roles in popular literature, almost always related to their ability to defeat death. At the same time, popular belief in the inevitability of suffering and the necessity of death, based in a firm Christian, (usually) conservative fatalism, gradually faded to be replaced by an even firmer conviction in the power of medical science to prevent disease and prolong life expectancy. Doctors play a role in the escalating battle in much vampire literature between science and the occult—and not always on the side of science. Because vampires are human, and their longevity is a medical anomaly, they are, even in fiction, a natural object of medical curiosity and speculation. In vampire literature, doctors frequently accompany vampires as commentators, antagonists, or observers, representing science and its transformations and accomplishments for good or evil, enacted in the vampire. Paradoxically, the doctor figures both assert the positive and curative value of science, while at the same time casting doubt on the power of science in a world controlled by mysterious occult forces. Where there was no medicine or no doctors to explain death, or prevent it, rural people relied on their own traditional medicine, which included both natural and supernatural elements—warding off vampires with garlic or crosses, for example. Hungarian folklorist Tekla Domotor (1981) says that for rural people, “taking a keen interest in the supernatural was in reality also a means of conducting scientific inquiry” (14–15).1 It is not entirely unreasonable, as Paul Barber points out, that this inquiry included blaming death on the dead, especially in the case of contagious diseases (3). In Eastern Europe or Greece, when a vampire was said to be killing people or causing other calamities, a self-appointed vampire expert could, often for a fee, prevent or stop these depredations according to traditional methods. But one vampire event in the 1700s reveals—indeed, plays a role in—how a whole worldview was changing, as superstitious or religious explanations were replaced by rational scientific investigation. In a Serbian village, villagers accused deceased soldier Arnold Paul (who had claimed to have been bitten by a vampire in earlier years) of coming out of his own grave, attacking villagers, and spreading a vampire epidemic. He did so in a manner wholly in accord with traditional expectations and was eventually dispatched with the prescribed methods. Two waves of vampire scares devolved from this circumstance. In both cases (3 weeks later and 40 days later), the body was disinterred and surgeons present attested, according to the obvious symptoms, that Paul was indeed a vampire. In the second case, one of the surgeons, an Austrian Field Surgeon Johannes Fluckinger, issued an official report in 1732 that created a media sensation all over Western Europe (Melton 518–19). In his study Vampire Forensics: Uncovering the Origin of an Enduring Legend (2010), Mark Collins Jenkins speculates that, whereas tales from the East about revenants were fairly common, this one report of “scientific observations” attracted Enlightenment scholars because a conclusion by a reputable doctor seemed to acknowledge that vampires might actually exist: It kindled “a fierce debate throughout the German academic and medical establishment” as to the reality of such fantastic beings who could defeat death (Calmet 237–40; Jenkins 111). These accounts of vampires, that sent shockwaves in the West, were not myths or tales of yore like the Greek stories of lamiae or Goethe's “The Bride of Corinth” (1797), but were accounts of real people, known in their communities, with families, and names—who might really have come out of their graves. Ironically, Arnold Paul's case among others brought these “real” vampires into modern medical science—and killed them. Even the Church-appointed vampire investigators Dom Augustine Calmet and Giuseppe Davanzati, looking at this and similar cases, were inclined to regard vampires as a generally harmless superstition. (Otherwise, they would present a serious theological conundrum.) In 1749, Pope Benedict rejected vampires as “fantasy.” And, in a triumph for natural science, after a survey by her personal physician Gerhard Van Sweiten in 1755 and 1756, the Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa condemned vampire belief as “superstition and fraud.” She removed the consideration of phenomena “not readily explainable in natural terms” from the authority of the clergy to that of government officers and decreed punishments for those who desecrated corpses (Frayling, 29–30; Jenkins 116–17). Debunked by medical science, vampires were demoted to mere superstition, but they did not go away. Instead they became literature. These fabled walking corpses inspired the literary vampires of Western Europe that became part of the fascination with decay, death, and the occult that we associate with the Romantic Movement. Although elevated in social status and appearance, the vampire retained from the past the ghastly and dangerous character of the grave. At the same time, the vampire's medical examiner or hunter or slayer slowly morphed into a more assured and competent expert, perhaps like the sorcerer in Raupach's “Wake Not the Dead” (1823),2 and soon, into an educated scientific physician like the sympathetic Dr. Heselius whose papers retell the story of Le Fanu's “Carmilla” (1872) and convince us to accept her account. Literary vampires are talkative and often quite intelligent, fully aware of the hardships of their problematical existence in the complexities of the real and ever-changing world in which they often find themselves waking. For vampires do have their problems: outcasts from society, caught between the actual and the supernatural, clinging to a human consciousness and sense of self, they yet feel themselves pulled toward the darkness of evil and death. Vampires are set off against, destroyed, or sometimes saved, by the solid, sensible, reliable presence of the doctor, whose job is to know about them and to tell us what we can expect from them. For our vampires now are part of our folklore that, with the help of their varying casts of victims, slayers, and doctors, change and develop into what we, their audience, need or want them to be—sexy, powerful, clever—and physiologically possible. So, although actual belief in vampires has never run high in Western Europe, these fanciful literary figures have “arisen” with science and scientific speculation—that, ironically, requires belief. Vampires provide a focus of speculation for the dreams that modern medicine has created for us. Much vampire literature is a kind of science fiction; hence, the doctor—with the vampire as his double or opposite—or even his victim—demonstrates, to some (admittedly rather vague) degree, our own evolving understanding of medical research and practice, our faith in it (or lack thereof), and our expectations for the future. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when news of vampires traveled to Western Europe, expectations of medical technology were already high. In her introduction to the third edition of Frankenstein (1831), Mary Shelley tells us about the inception of Doctor John Polidori's influential story “The Vampyre” (1819), along with her own novel about Doctor Frankenstein's monster, in the ideas that Byron and Shelley discussed on that famous stormy night in Geneva in 1816. These concerned the restoration of life through scientific endeavor, not through religion or magic, but by means of electricity, suspected by many to be the “Life Force” that pervaded the universe–a belief promoted by the pseudo-scientific electrical cures practiced by Anton Mesmer and his followers as well as more scientific experiments, for example, those of Luigi Galvani, recently popularized in a series of lectures by Sir Humphrey Davy at the Royal Society. But although both Shelley's Frankenstein and Polidori's Lord Ruthven suggest that making life from dead body parts, or bodies, may not be such a good idea, the fantasy has persisted and has had to be repeatedly crushed as impracticable or even immoral, as it is in so many works, from Raupach's “Wake Not the Dead,” to Stoker's Dracula (1897), to the rampaging dead in the movie Re-Animator (1985). Doctors, in and out of the literature, have been the inventers and popularizers of vampires. Dr. John Polidori, at the time the youngest doctor to graduate from Edinburgh Medical School, accompanied Byron to Geneva in 1816 as his personal physician. As David MacDonald depicts him, he was immature and vain and thought himself as great a poet as Byron, but his efforts to chummy up to Byron were rebuffed. His “Vampyre,” based on a fragment of a story begun by Byron, is clearly an attack on Byron in the character of the vampire Lord Ruthven. The popularity of Polidori's story established the Byronic Hero/Villain (Byron's own creation) as the archetype for thousands of vampires to come, from any number of nineteenth-century melodramatic villains or heroes to Lugosi to the present—Edward Cullen, for example, in Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series. So, ironically, two living doctors were responsible for the character of our vampire mythology: Dr. Fluckinger brought the vampire into Western Europe in the report of Arnold Paul, which was sensationalized in the press and discussed in such reputable studies as the work of Dom Augustin Calmet, Yet, we might also say that Doctor John Polidori, through his influential story, was the actual creator of the vampire as we know him—handsome, suave, sophisticated, and malign. Vampires often do bad things—kill people, for example. But the most shocking evil of these “monsters” is that they are supernatural humans resurrecting themselves, climbing out of the grave—defying the laws of God and Nature. In addition to their dangerous behavior and disconcerting presence, vampires (folkloric and fictional) seem evil to many because they obscure the forbidden boundary between soul and body, spirit and matter, and thus undermine “a sound predictable reality.” This, of course, is what the Romantics so admired. But according to Linda Bayer-Berenbaum, even in our day, Gothic beings like Brunhilda in “Wake Not the Dead” or Dracula, in cahoots with sorcery or science, blot out our neat Christian dualism between good and evil (35). Grisly, Gothic, unnatural medical investigations or treatments that seem to cross heretofore physically impassable boundaries, like stem cell research, cloning, or organ transplants, are repugnant to many as a prideful playing at God that will come to no good. According to W. Scott Poole, modern vampires (like Blade, for example, who needs constant medical attention) embody these anxieties that modern medical technology will make us into something unnatural, inhuman cyber-beings, robots, heartless and evil (Poole 221, 223). One kind of “unnatural” crossing of boundaries in the real world began in the seventeenth and continued through the nineteenth centuries (until even now)—in the mysterious cures of Anton Mesmer. Mesmer convinced many people that treatments with invisible forces like magnetism, that is, electricity (considered by many to be the “Life Force”) and with hypnotic trances would ultimately put an end to all illnesses and prolong life. Think of Poe's story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845), in which a corpse is hypnotized to remain sentient and whole (more or less) until the spell is broken. Eventually, Mesmeric healers used only their own “natural magnetism” conveyed to the patient by touch and suggestion to diagnose illnesses, to anesthetize even severe pain, and even to effect cures. According to Alison Winter in her book Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (1998), in the nineteenth century a rather unpleasant medical controversy arose: a number of researchers attempted to demonstrate through mesmerism that the mind, will, soul, and spirit were all just physical things—and others, with similar mesmeric carryings-on, demonstrated the opposite, that is, that the spirit determined the body's well being. In this kind of well-publicized medical context rose Rymer's hypnotic Varney the Vampire (1847), Le Fanu's “Carmilla” (1872), and Stoker's Dracula (1897).3 Dracula often behaves like a mesmerist controlling his victims with the power of his will—as does Dr. Van Helsing. Indeed, the battle of wills between Dracula and Van Helsing seems to reenact the kinds of roaring conflicts described by Winter, between the mesmerists who saw the practice as a kind of electrical projection or even mystical imposition of power from the stronger to the weaker and the more scientific view that the victim (or patient) willingly gave up her or his will to the dominance of another. This medical contest of wills plays out in any number of Dracula spin-offs, as the vampire mesmerizes the weaker characters—but not the strong-minded doctor, who will not relinquish his self-control. Thus, a medical phenomenon highly publicized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provides the “lore” of hypnotic or mind control powers—even mental telepathy—for modern vampires.4 Another medical mystery of mind (or soul) and body drawn on in vampire literature was, and still is, determining what death is—that is, when one might know for sure when a body is actually dead. Traditional vampire belief and modern vampire fiction depend on the survival of a more or less intact dead body moved by some sort of conscious animating force that is a fair representation of the living personality—and on someone's ability to detect if it is a vampire. According to Philippe Aries, by the eighteenth century, diagnoses of death (Is he really dead?) and discussions of its nature and its meaning for body and soul—the very essence of vampire literature—were increasingly the concern of doctors rather than clergy. And there was much debate among doctors about the point at which death actually occurs—that is, when does the soul leave the body? (Aries 353–60) This problem became even trickier in the nineteenth century when, because of the many epidemics and plagues suffered in Europe, fear of contagion from the dead led to stringent regulations about the prompt and secure burial of bodies. This in turn led to the fear of being buried alive that obsessed so many in the nineteenth century. Some scholars have speculated that the few “real” vampires reported in these years were simply the result of over-hasty burials like that of Poe's Madeline in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) (Jenkins 85–92). By the eighteenth century, dead bodies themselves became the object of serious scientific study. The medical profession regarded dissection as essential to valid medical research and paid highly for fresh corpses, discretely obtained. Grave robbing, or “body snatching,” or even murder for bodies became a lucrative business for some “resurrection men” like the infamous William Burke and William Hare (1827–1828; Jenkins, 76–78). This environment of sensational disappearing corpses provides a believable Gothic context for vampire fiction and its need for doctors. Doctors can stand as reliable witnesses to the vampire phenomenon because they are assumed to have useful factual knowledge about human bodies and their capabilities. In Varney the Vampire, Doctor Chillingworth is there to tell us that, no matter what he claims, Varney is not a vampire. Chillingworth knows this because he paid the hangman for Varney's supposed corpse for medical study, that he then galvanized into life. And besides, as a rational scientist, he knows that there are no such things as vampires. In contrast, Sheridan Le Fanu's “Carmilla” (1872) is made credible by being introduced by a Doctor Heselius. Bram Stoker's Dracula (and most of the Dracula spin-offs) grows out of this grim Victorian background, when Europe was still plagued by numerous endemic illnesses and epidemics whose nature and cure were yet unknown. One such chronic (but unknown) illness made Bram Stoker an invalid for much of his childhood. His mother told him grisly stories about the potato famine (1847) and the cholera epidemic in Sligo (1832) that ravaged Ireland. The effect of these tales appears in his own children's story “The Invisible Giant” in which a young child is given the task of warding off Death (the giant) as it threatens her city only by being very, very pious and good. Stoker's obsessive fear of death is the major impetus underlying this and other works such as The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), the inspiration for most of our mummy films. But Stoker makes it clear that there is not much hope from science: Even as Van Helsing tries to prove Dracula's magical immortality, he is busy undercutting it by exposing the vampire's many fatal weaknesses. No living thing is immune. Kendall R. Phillips regards Dracula as an unresolved battle between science and the occult, rationality and superstition (27), but who represents which of these is sometimes hard to decipher. Both Varney and Dracula are about scientific validity as it applies to humans—about what we can know and what we can do—and not do. A striking difference is their two views of scientific validity voiced by their doctors: In Varney, Doctor Chillingworth is a rational man of science (I: 38–40). A strict empiricist, he insists on factual, visible, measurable proof of Varney's supposed supernatural existence and “some scientific means of accounting for the phenomenon” (I:38). Stoker's Doctor Van Helsing, in contrast, takes the essence of science to be uncritical openness to any authoritative claims about the physical world. His misunderstanding expresses his and his century's high expectations and deep disappointment that empirical science had gone astray in failing to fulfill its early promise: to understand—and prevent—death. To Van Helsing, science had missed out because it had foolishly limited itself to what could be observed and measured, instead of leading us “to believe in things that you cannot,” to “have an open mind and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth.” Medical science could explain such mysteries as the vampire—and corporeal transference and astral bodies and hypnotism—if scientists were not so closed-minded (237–38). To Van Helsing, Dracula can be at once a friend of Satan and a natural being whose uncanny ability to survive death as reported will someday be accepted as natural fact. In his remarkable diatribe to Dr. Seward, Van Helsing proves the vampire's existence by reference to such things as an 800-year-old spider or to a plant that eats animals–but more important, to a popular scientific idea, “something magnetic or electric,” which he thinks might have played a role in the development of Dracula's powers; some strange or unknown “forces of nature,” or “some vital principle” that might have formed him without Satan's help (379). As he sees it, even Dracula's rumored sojourn with Satan at the Scholomance was a matter of learning to do things, albeit magic things, not to take on some supernatural demonic essence that only God could confer (a heresy that Stoker takes pains to avoid). In the end, Stoker's Dracula is not exorcised by a priest or by some noble spiritual gesture as in Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), or even by a doctor waving a crucifix, but is killed with a knife by the American Quincy Morris as a result of the mostly practical knowledge and actions of this sometimes confused but well informed doctor. For all his superstitions and holy wafers, like Chillingworth, Van Helsing too relies on science, on physical causes and effects—although heavily supported—just in case—by Christian prayer and even pagan magic.4 Stoker's Gothic Dracula and his magical doctors have continued to flourish and to inspire any number of remakes and imitations, many of them adding to and confirming the complex interaction and conflict of medical science and magical being, nature and the occult. Even without the well known name of Dracula, the presence of a doctor in a vampire movie or book prompts our acceptance and reminds us of the lessons preached by his predecessors—that, in spite of their peculiarities, vampires are human and belong to Nature, which may not always be rational and benign (as Chillingworth might argue), but which is often violent and cruel—and disconcertingly unpredictable and uncontainable (as in Underworld [2003], for example). Increasingly, natural evils—pollution, disease, and death—are the venue of vampires in film and literature, and the defeat of vampires becomes a defeat of these natural dangers—which can be overcome if only we know enough—and are good enough. Thus a confused amalgam of science and spirit, medicine and morality, is carried along even into our present-day films, and perchance explains their popularity. In the early movie Nosferatu (1922)—perhaps a response to the international flu epidemic of 1918–and in the 1979 remake, the vampire is literally the plague itself, which ends, however, not with pills and salves, but with the destruction of the vampire by the heroine's not-so-scientific self-sacrificing gesture and the symbolic purity of sunlight. But, in Tod Browning's Dracula (1931), as well as the numerous Hammer films, the vampire carries something like a virus that is contagious and that can be stopped by destruction of the host organism—according to the doctor's direction. Thus, Van Helsing's speculations in Stoker's novel establish the convention of vampires as natural beings that do not exist or act randomly but remain bound by rules and limitations and are subject to human understanding and control, exemplified in the calm, analytical representatives of the medical profession, as portrayed by Peter Cushing, for example, in the Hammer films.5 The pairing—or even identification—of vampire and doctor becomes more varied and complex as writers explore their mysterious shared ability to give and take life, their strange interactions, and ambiguous motives; for in future vampire literature, the relationship of good and evil, occult and reason, even life and death, begins to shift and become unclear. Some vampire literature reveals suspicion of science and doubts about doctors. For one thing, the madness and horrors of the two Great Wars may have convinced audiences that death and destruction lay not in supernatural enemies but in scientific achievements that killed more than they cured. Of course, even earlier vampires' doctors are not all dedicated healers. Chillingworth in Varney shows a rather chilling callousness toward the victims and the vampire he has created. After World War I, that horrific destroyer of faith in authority and tradition and human decency—or of any kind of scientific or religious absolutes—evil and untrustworthy doctors begin to appear in vampire literature. In the German Vampyre (1931), not indebted to Dracula, a greedy doctor misuses his profession and abuses the trust of his patients to provide victims for the old lady vampire, who is like Death herself. A post-World War II era example of distrust in doctors and medical science is The Return of the Vampire (1944). The caring and dedicated (but naïve and uninformed) doctor is a woman, Lady Jane Ainsley. But another doctor appears, Dr. Hugo Bruckner, who is in reality Dr. Armand Tesla, once a decent man, who, as the result of an “insane desire for knowledge,” has made himself into a wicked vampire (so much for the value of learning). In the end, Lady Jane does not call on medical science to destroy this vampire (although a German bomb proves helpful) but the “goodness” that she has placed in the heart of his werewolf servant Andreas who, finally, refuses to come to Tesla's aid. The vampire's evil, like that of “the jerries,” is “far beyond science,” that is, of natural remedies, which can also be ruthless and destructive, and empty of spiritual values—and, no doubt, far inferior to goodness in preventing wars. However untrustworthy, a doctor remains useful to provide a testimony to this vampire's traditional abilities and limitations, the vampire “lore”–as well as to introduce any novelties that this author has injected into the tradition: Dracula must sleep in the soil of his homeland, for example; Nosferatu cannot tolerate sunlight. More important, the doctor continues to integrate contemporary scientific developments into the tradition, for in the twentieth century, the vampire may have been transformed, not by Satan, but by a virus or a genetic mutation—maybe caused by nuclear war or careless experimentation, as in Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend and its movie spin-offs or by the vicious experiments of an insane doctor as in Justin Cronin's recent novel The Passage. Widespread epidemics like polio in the fifties or fear of nuclear disaster or foreign invasion related to the Cold War result in the multiplication of diseased or mutated movie vampires into vast, destructive, and hungry masses—which even modern medical advances cannot stop. New research is called for. Of course, most people go to vampire movies not for a science lesson (or moral), but for the frisson, the chills, even the horror that the fear of the unknown arouses. Many vampire movies manage to combine the thrill of the old-fashioned Gothic supernatural with something like medical science fiction. The Hammer series of vampire movies provides an interesting progression of variations respecting the value of medical science versus crosses and prayer, starting with The Horror of Dracula (1958). Although luridly Gothic, with Christopher Lee's imposing and satanic Dracula, this movie seems to favor the scientific solution, with Peter Cushing as a cool, methodical Van Helsing, who is not intimidated by tombs and screeching bats and who takes the vampires' inexplicable responses to sunlight and garlic to be ordinary allergies. But in the following Hammer productions, the line between hard-edged science and mystical magic becomes blurred—as in Kiss of the Vampire (1963), in which a scholar-sorcerer Dr. Zimmer calls up hordes of bats to destroy the evil vampire Dr. Ravna and his “cult.” In Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1965), Christian believing (and that alone) becomes the key to destroying the Satanic vampire, finally impaled on a cross. In contrast, at the end of the series, in The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), Dracula co-opts medical research to manufacture a plague virus with the idea of taking over the world—starting on the “Sabbat of the Undead”—only to be staked again by Dr. Van Helsing with a fence post. Why would the Hammer filmmakers decide to downplay (even disparage) the medical angle in the sixties and seventies at the same time that science fiction was becoming so popular? In the first place, their products are remakes or imitations of Stoker's work, and their science is a similarly doubtful hodgepodge of vague allusions to electricity, hypnotism, pop psychology, disease, magical cures, spiritualism, and Satanic curses—the science of the nineteenth century as Van Helsing might have known it. It is the same hodgepodge we so often see in the public media today presented to us as science, like ghost hunts in abandoned churches or psychic detectives. Possibly it also reflects our own confusion about what to consider natural (and the proper object of scientific study) and what supernatural. It presents the kind of occult “science” that many fans have come to expect, the uncanniness and horror of the Great Unknown and the thrill of the Spirit World—without having to think too much about it. Jason Colavito says of horror literature in general that it offers “the thrill of experiencing a lifting of the constrictions scientific understanding imposes on how we view the world” (414). Indeed, he says, much horror literature of the past “told stories of encounters with the supernatural that defied science, cast doubt on the utility of human knowledge, and held out hope that science was wrong and that there were other… ways of knowing of equal or greater validity.” It was, he says, rather naively, “the cri de coeur of traditional belief” (414). Yet possibly because of the millennium—that mysterious and mystical occurrence (as so many seemed to understand it)–these magical ways of doing and knowing continue to flourish. The huge popularity of literature of fantasy and the occult suggests that the general viewer is not ready to dispense with his hope for another world, however weird or frightening it may be. As the Hammer Draculas faded away in the 1970's, they were being replaced by Anne Rice's even darker and more mysterious Gothic vampires of New Orleans, whose presence is only vaguely associated with a yellow fever epidemic and is related, like Dracula's, to the encroachment of a malicious and insinuating outsider—the French Vampire Lestat de Lioncourt. But science has no place in these murky mysteries from Interview with the Vampire to Memnoch the Devil; no rational how or why is ever offered—not even by God. Francis Ford Coppola follows Stoker and Rice with his overblown Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), in which a slovenly Van Helsing, shouting and waving crosses, is almost more Gothic and horrifying than Dracula, who comes calling as a gigantic gargoyle. But Dracula transforms into a charming lover, and indeed, love conquers all. By this time, perhaps under the influence of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia (1949–1954), a lot of vampire literature (and f