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(music: shimmery pulsing)
Gretchen:
Hello everyone, this is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Gretchen, joined by my co-host, Nate and J.M. This episode is on the children of Frankenstein, covering works of some medical experimentation from the late 19th century. This specific segment discusses Ronald Ross's "The Vivisector" Vivisected. Check the previous segments for discussion on two H.G. Wells works "Under the Knife" and "The Island of Dr. Moreau".
Sir Ronald Ross is most known for his medical work, particularly his research into malaria and his discovery of its transmission by the mosquito, for which he won a Nobel Prize. However, Ross, a polymath, pursued various other interests such as mathematics, art, music, and, of course, literature. He was born on May 13, 1857 in Almora, India. He was educated in England, entering St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London in 1875.
In 1879, Ross took examinations for the Royal College of Surgeons of England and gained the position of ship surgeon before earning a license of the Society of Apothecaries. With this license, he returned to India, entering the Indian Medical Services in 1881. And also fighting in the Anglo-Burmese War in 1885. After a period of leave where he studied bacteriology in London, he began his investigation into malaria with the guidance of parasitologist and founder of the London School of Tropical Medicine, Patrick Manson. He carried out this research that indicated the mosquito's role in the spread of malaria between 1895 and 1897, at which point he published his findings in an article in the British Medical Journal.
In 1899, he joined the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine the same year he married Rosa Bexy Bloxham, with whom he would have four children. It was in 1902 that he earned the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He received various other honors for his research, including his knighthood in 1911, his election as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in England in 1901, an honorary MD in Stockholm in 1910, and in Belgium, the status of an officer in the Order of the Cruel and Blood Thirsty even by colonialism standards, Leopold II.
With talking about colonialism in our Moreau section, whether or not that would include vivisection, it definitely did under Leopold II.
Nate:
Yeah, he was one of the most brutal tyrants ever to live.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Throughout this period, he continued to publish various studies in books on malaria and the prevention of the disease, one of the most notable of which being his "Prevention of Malaria", published in 1911, which laid out mathematical models of the study of malaria's epidemiology. In 1926, the Ross Institute in Hospital for Tropical Diseases was established and Ross was its director-in-chief until 1932. He died on September 16th of that year after a long illness and a year after his wife had passed away.
While outside of his non-medical books and articles, Ross was better recognized for his poetic works and his pieces on mathematics he did, as mentioned, produce some works of prose fiction. The story we are covering by him tonight, "The Vivisector Vivisected", was published in 1932 just before his death. And this is one of the stories that was in "The Monster Makers" anthology.
Nate:
I'm always fascinated by this intersection of scientists and engineers and science fiction. There's always these odd quirks where they're writing, like there's some very strange things that happen in this story from a narrative point of view. Well, I'll mention it when we cover it. But it definitely feels very outsiderish at times. You could definitely tell that this was not his day job. But he had a very important day job. I mean, malaria is a pretty important thing to understand.
Gretchen:
Even though it does sometimes, as you said, read like, this isn't the typical work that he would write. I still think that there are some pretty tense moments in this. I think the atmosphere is still pretty interesting at some points during the story.
Nate:
There's definitely a lot of horrific imagery for sure.
JM:
There's also kind of comical.
Nate:
I'm not sure if that's intentional or not.
Gretchen:
Yeah, it definitely comes off as kind of absurd at some points.
Nate:
Yeah, and I think overall I like this one. I had fun with this one and the next one. I wouldn't say they're great stories, but they're entertaining 19th century horror stories with really, really over-the-top villains and a lot of fun moments like that. I don't think you're going to get anything too deep like you will with the Wells out of these, but I think at the point across quite well and they're both a fair amount of fun, I think.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Well, should I get into it?
Nate:
Yeah, why don't we find out what happens here?
Gretchen:
All right.
The narrator of "The Vivisector Vivisected" is a man who studied medicine in London then decided to travel the world, coming eventually to the United States, the land of experiment, which is where the tale is set. He comes to the city Snogginsville, where a renowned doctor, Dr. Silcutt, I do love that, where a renowned doctor, Dr. Silcutt, resides.
Meeting with the doctor, the narrator is shown his collection of medical curiosities, which includes a device that attracts his attention. It is a double pump with four tubes that appear to work through piston action, pushing down and pulling up without a lever. While Silcutt passes it, an older, demented man who lives with the doctor joins them and shouts, looking at this device. He begins to mimic working at one of its pumps and has a fit before Silcutt promises to let the narrator see a manuscript that explains his reaction. Upon receiving it, the story switches to this manuscript written by Silcutt.
Silcutt writes of being a medical student a few decades earlier at Snogginsville Infirmary, where a man named Patrick Maculligan, another pretty great name, Maculligan, who had immigrated from Ireland, was the resident medical officer. Enthusiastic about experimental physiological research, he often relied on Silcutt as an assistant. While questioning death and its cause, Maculligan proposed that blood, youthful, fresh blood, is the most essential to life and decided to test this theory by creating an artificial part to pump the fresh blood of an animal into a corpse and see whether this could resurrect it.
Of course, the two had to first wait for a subject to use in this experiment. Eventually though, on a stormy night, a patient arrived in the infirmary who had been stabbed during a drunken street fight and when he succumbed to his wound, the two men brought him to their laboratory and prepared their invention. Cutting down to the heart, they inserted the tubes of their artificial heart and both began to pump. In less than half an hour, the dead man began to breathe again and then he was soon able to talk, musing that his current surroundings might be a fitting punishment if he was dead.
The revived man explained that he himself was a physician and vivisectionist in Ireland before coming to America. Then he asked for Maculligan to stop pumping as it made his chest throb and realized that he really had died. He exclaimed he was in hell for his sins and Maculligan played along claiming to be a devil ready to perform various experiments on the man.
The man then recounted the loss of his medical reputation by taking a lost poodle that belonged to the vice-queen and experimenting on it, an action that led to him being imprisoned. Once out, he started drinking and left for the US. At this point, Silcutt noticed that the fresh blood being heated by a stove fire to reach the proper temperature was getting colder. The two took a quick break from pumping to put more coals in the stove during which the patient nearly passed out.
Silcutt called out Maculligan's name which immediately grabbed the disgraced physician's attention. He revealed that he is a Maculligan as well, Josephus Maculligan, turning out to be Patrick's brother.
Nate:
Yeah, this is like a crazy twist.
Gretchen:
Yeah. It feels very soap opera, you know?
JM:
What? Okay, yeah.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
This brother was responsible for a scar on Patrick's face, inflicted due to his jealousy at Patrick gaining all of the family inheritance. Josephus, still under the impression this is hell, wondered if Patrick was sent to torment him, but Patrick told him he was a surgeon and Josephus was the subject of an experiment of his, that if he and Silcutt stopped pumping, his blood would clot and he'd die. Josephus started to scream for help and hurled insults at Patrick, but Patrick, to Silcutt's concern, became entirely expressionless, focusing intently on the pump.
He then stated that Josephus had wronged him for striking him and causing the scar, which is what drove away his love, Lucy Hagan. When she told him she was marrying Josephus, instead, Patrick murdered her. So that's another gruesome aspect of this.
Nate:
Yeah, and again, very soap opera.
Gretchen:
Very soap opera.
Josephus started to complain of being hot, and Silcutt noticed that the coals he'd thrown in the stove had raised the blood's temperature slightly higher than it was supposed to be. When trying to pour some cool water to lower the heat, they realized the pipe was broken during the storm, causing the blood to get even hotter. Josephus confessed, as Patrick had, to murder, revealing he had poisoned their father, and remarks that the agony he was in should be enough to not send him to hell when he died. In an instant, Patrick yelled and collapsed beside the pump. Josephus, having been struggling in pain, got his arms loose from the straps on the table and clutched at his throat, and the storm caused a window to crash, knocking out Silcutt.
Silcutt closes the manuscript by saying he woke to find Josephus dead and that the man living with him is Patrick. The narrator tells the story because both Silcutt and Patrick are dead, and he claims the story instilled in him a deep disgust of vivisection, so much so that he had it told to the club for the total evolution of vivisection. He concludes, "I am sure that the reader who believes this atrocious and fearful tale cannot become anything but a total anti vivisectionist".
Nate:
Yeah, great ending.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
Put on a Dropdead record after this one, have a good time. There's some, yeah, ridiculous parts in this one, though, that two brothers talking together in Irish brogue, which he writes in vernacular, and then he just stops doing and gives us, like, an in-text reason, like, they're just sick of talking like that.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
It's absurd.
JM:
Yeah, it sounds very over the top and weird.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
Nate:
But I think one thing that really is cool is we do get a data dump on how the heart works.
JM:
Yeah, I enjoyed that.
Nate:
And the construction of this artificial heart pump system, which really isn't that far off from how an actual artificial heart works, even though those would come decades later. Interesting foresight here, which I guess is appropriate from a guy who won the Nobel Prize in medicine.
JM:
Yeah, which is really funny, like, in contrast to, like, Valdemar from Poe, is that this guy is, like, working away on a pump the entire time, like, sweating and struggling. It's hard work pumping all this stuff into the circulatory system. Yeah, it eventually gets the better of him, and he breaks down and starts having seizures and stuff. He can't take it anymore. Gretchen, this was before you were on the podcast, and I've been not suggesting you put that much into finding out what it's like, but Nate, didn't you get "New Steam Man" flashbacks?
Nate:
Not really. Well, I guess with the Irish brogue.
JM:
The Irish! Yeah. Dude, that was horrible. Come on. I hated that.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah, I'd guess it made me think of the "Dry Calculator" story, which had the Western vernacular or whatever it was, which was equally silly. I don't know. I don't really like the Irish brogue stuff.
JM:
I don't know. It can work sometimes. Yeah. I definitely thought of "New Steam Man" reading those parts.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I mean, you know, if he was going to give up halfway through, he shouldn't have started it. He should have just cut it out.
Nate:
Yeah, that's the logical solution.
JM:
Bejabbers!
Nate:
Yeah, no, "New Steam Man" was awful. This one was definitely not bad, but it was not the greatest we've done either. I had fun with it, though. A couple of odd things where they used the donkey's blood to circulate through a system, which first seems like a very odd choice. I guess there's ethical concerns with using a human there, but I don't know, a donkey. Yeah. I don't know.
Gretchen:
I mean, they're already getting into what some might consider ethical murky waters.
Nate:
Exactly, yeah.
Gretchen:
I don't know why they wouldn't add that to the list.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
Yeah, I definitely agree with what you said, Nate, about there being this outsider quality that makes it kind of interesting. But yeah, I mean, again, the description of the lab and stuff like that was really good. And there was certain, I guess you could... I mean, I'm not saying you could tell that he was a scientist, but there was that aspect of his experience, maybe, in the text.
Gretchen:
Yeah, there are those stories when you're reading something and there's a detail. You can tell that they're very passionate about it. And that's what this felt like during those sections when it gets into the medical details and the scientific details.
Nate:
Yeah, and honestly, medical technology from this time is just really cool. Devices are fascinating in their primitive sophistication, I guess, if you want to put it that way.
JM:
Yeah. In the beginning of the podcast, I was saying, you know, I read "Project Hail Mary", and there's so much of that. Like, this is how the ship was laid out, and this is how this drive works, and this is how the... And if you like that kind of stuff, it can be cool. And it definitely plays into a part of my appreciation that comes from a childhood side of me. So that's cool. I mean, I like that. And the story was really fun, but it was pretty... I don't know, it was kind of ridiculous, I guess.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I like the soap opera nature of it, and I like that image of the man. Here is this guy who's working on a brother he absolutely hates, and it's just him pumping the... And the storm going outside. I think it's just a really fun, a really neat visual.
Nate:
It's definitely a cruel form of torture, too, where they're heating up his blood slowly over time. It's very Edgar Allan Poe.
Gretchen:
Yeah, and it's like he starts screaming and yelling and cursing, and it's like, yeah, I like that. I do enjoy the more gruesome moments of this.
JM:
There's some really good stories and authors in that "Monster Makers" anthology, but it goes all the way to the late 60s or 70s or something, I think.
Nate:
Yeah, it was published in the mid-70s, I want to say, so it definitely spans 100-ish years or so, I guess, dating back to "Frankenstein", so it's closer to 150.
JM:
Yeah, it's kind of cool how we're seeing, like, I don't know, the work of somebody who, I guess, from what it seems like, he decided late in life to start writing some fiction pieces, that he hadn't really done that before.
Nate:
This one was, I think, written in the 1880s and only published after his death, I want to say, but was that how it was?
Gretchen:
Yeah, well, I mean, from what it... It was very vague from when I... because I looked at other sources beside the Monster Maker, like, bio, but all of it was just focused on, like, his medical research, so what it said in the "Monster Makers" was that this was published right before his death. It does not say when he wrote it. I didn't find any other sources that talked about his fiction and when he wrote it. Just like, I did see some mention of his poetry, which seemed to be a little more popular, and they mention collections published, I think it was, like, 1928, 1931, but also doesn't say when he wrote those either, so I don't know exactly when this was written.
Nate:
The Internet says 1881, so we'll go with that. Another one says 1882, so, I don't know, 1880s sometime, we'll say. But yeah, definitely published for the first time in the 30s. So I guess it was unpublished for a while, he had it in a notebook or something, and maybe when he was on his way out, they wanted to settle final things with his estate. I don't know, but...
Gretchen:
Kind of a bit of a Forster situation.
Nate:
Yeah, I think so, yeah.
JM:
It was a weird one for me, I mean, I mostly liked it, I guess, but I don't know, this is something about the way that Irish guy kept going on and on, Joseph, you know, it was a bit much for me, but like I said, there were definitely aspects of this that I really liked. It was very much a satire, like extremely satirical, and I thought that of all the stories we read for tonight, this one was the most humorous, satirical, kind of light-hearted.
Gretchen:
I didn't get into the ending where, you know, they're talking about how awful vivisection is after they just like gone hunting and killed like all these birds, and they're like having this wonderful feast of meat, and they're just like, oh, it's awful what vivisection is.
JM:
I love the name Snogginsville.
Nate:
Yeah, it's great.
Gretchen:
Snogginsville is very good.
JM:
Snogginsville, that's so great.
Nate:
It sounds like somewhere in Pennsylvania.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I want to...
JM:
That's not a real place, is it?
Gretchen:
I looked it up, I did not see any Snogginsville. I wanted to make sure I was like, is there a place actually named that, and I did not see any.
Nate:
Yeah, Google says the only references to it are this story.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
The one thing if you sent your story in New York, but if you sent it in Snogginsville.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
People have to wonder.
Gretchen:
Set my location on Letterboxd to Snogginsville.
JM:
It seems clear that he was trying to be pretty funny for all this, and yeah, like the twist with the brothers, it's just so randomly weird. The weirdest story in some ways.
Nate:
Yeah. If you're checking out, I'd say I'm going to post it on the blogspot so you can read it easily.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I think it's worth reading. It's not my favorite of all the ones that we read tonight, but it's still pretty fun.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. Oh, you did a good job of explaining how this thing works. I don't know, quite a piece. I think I can recommend this because it's weird, but sometimes you get that feeling where you're like, I really know what the author is thinking here. I'm just going to go with it and enjoy it.
Nate:
Yeah, it's a fun ride.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
So I guess should we get into the next one, which is similarly silly, but fun ride?
Gretchen:
Yeah, sounds good to me.
JM:
Yeah. So we have another pretty over-the-top wild tale coming up. We'll be right back.
Bibliography:
Haining, Peter - biography on Ronald Ross from "The Monster Makers" anthology (1974)
Nobel Prize and Laureates - "Ronald Ross" https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/1902/ross/biographical/
London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine - "Biography of Sir Ronald Ross" https://web.archive.org/web/20140202111525/http://www.lshtm.ac.uk/library/archives/ross/biography/
Sinden, Robert E. - "Malaria, mosquitoes and the legacy of Ronald Ross", Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 2007 Nov; 85(11): 894–896
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2636258/
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