Medical Science and the Romantic Doctor: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Abstract

The focus of this study is to examine and establish the significant yet under-examined relation between
the the birth of biological criticism and Romanticism in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This article seeks to
understand how Mary Shelley’s first novel draws on the contemporary medical experimentations and
writings on the vitalist debate and the evolutionary biology. It also attempts to surmise, by drawing on
contemporary the pathological experimentations of the sick/ dead body, the post-mortem process and
the Foucauldian idea of the medical gaze, how the late 18th and early 19th century relation between the
experimenting doctor in his clinic and the sick patient is manifested in the symbolic relation between
Frankenstein and his monstrous creation. In this study, by briefly discussing the concepts of race,
colonialism and slave trade, I will also attempt to analyse the significant interface between the late
eighteenth century imperial-experiences and the new medical enterprises on disease, sick/ medicalised
body and death by the experimenting doctors.