Abstract
Medical horror includes autonomous changes in the body by natural or accidental occurrences—disease, injury, age, death—as well as interactions with medical institutions and their authorities. Kremmel argues that the figure of the physician and location of the medical space inherit many characteristics of the tyrant and the castle found in classic horror texts. These literary tropes become subsumed onto scientific settings and situations that shift horror from external supernatural threat to internal anatomical threat. Medical horror draws from and heightens fears of the body, as well as of medical institutions and authorities. Kremmel surveys a variety of medical horror texts from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, including focused discussions of authors Matthew Lewis, Samuel Warren, Mrs. Carver, Ira Levin, Robin Cook, and Catriona Ward.
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- 1.
An anonymous 1808 poem, “The Vaccine Phantasmagoria,” trivializes these fears by comparing them to fears of the supernatural, a comparison that uses the similarities between the two to discount fear rather than bolster it. Those spreading fear of vaccination employ “phantasmagorian talents,” performative strategies used to produce theatrical horror shows for entertainment (1808, p. 8).
- 2.
There are, of course, plenty of texts that focus on new medical technologies and techniques as a source of horror and villainy.
- 3.
The Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania advertises its medical collection as “disturbingly informative.” Surgeons Hall Museum in Edinburgh, Scotland, combines fearful medical practices with humor in ads that say, “Are you brave enough to face amputation without anaesthetic? Before 1847, you didn’t have a choice,” “Dr. Simpson’s guests would often nod off in his company. With a little assistance,” and “When it comes to medical history we’ve got it sewn up preserved and placed in a jar.”
- 4.
See Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s foundational 1979 text, The Madwoman in the Attic, and the critical responses it has inspired.
- 5.
Don Shelton convincingly argues that Mrs. Carver is the pen name for surgeon Anthony Carlisle (Shelton 2009).
- 6.
In 1828, William Burke and William Hare killed sixteen people in Edinburgh to sell their bodies for dissection.
- 7.
Full title: Thesaurus of Horror; or, the Charnel-house Explored!! Being an Historical and Philanthropical Inquisition made for the Quondam-blood of its inhabitants! By a contemplative descent into the untimely grave! shewing, by a number of awful facts that have transpired as well as from philosophical inquiry, the re-animating power of fresh earth in cases of syncope, &c. And the extreme criminality of hasty funerals: with the surest methods of escaping the ineffable horrors of premature interment!! The frightful mysteries of the Dark Ages Laid Open, which not only deluged the Roman Empire, but Triumphed over All Christendom for a Thousand Years! Entombing the sciences, and subsequently reviving all the ignorance and superstition of Gothic Barbarity! (Snart 1817).
- 8.
In fact, Shelley’s characters read Brown’s novel within the text to prepare themselves for the plague as it spreads toward them.
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Kremmel, L.R. (2018). “And Send Her Well-Dos’d to the Grave”: Literary Medical Horror. In: Corstorphine, K., Kremmel, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_24
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