Dracula for Doctors: Medical Facts and Gothic Fantasies [Paperback]

Explores the connection between medicine and gothic literature examining disease, psychiatry and supernatural in the nineteenth century.An overview of how Victorian medical and psychiatric knowledge and culture informed Bram Stoker's masterpiece and other gothic and sensation literature of the time. Topics discussed include asylum doctors in fact and fiction, Darwinian ideas and degeneration theory, vivisection, blood, sexual disease, and concepts of the supernatural and the undead.An overview of how Victorian medical and psychiatric knowledge and culture informed Bram Stoker's masterpiece and other gothic and sensation literature of the time. Topics discussed include asylum doctors in fact and fiction, Darwinian ideas and degeneration theory, vivisection, blood, sexual disease, and concepts of the supernatural and the undead.Exploring how medicine and psychiatry are portrayed in gothic literature, this engaging book illustrates how Stoker's famous work was influenced by nineteenth-century attitudes to disease and medicine and reveals many previously unknown links. Extracts from many sensational stories of the time are presented, and the role of doctors and their appearance and contribution to gothic fiction is investigated. The book covers topics such as asylums, their purpose, practice and patients, deadly diseases echoing the symptoms of vampirism, and the otherworldly allure of the undead. Dracula for Doctors is an entertaining and informative examination of how Victorian medical knowledge and culture informed Stoker's gothic masterpiece. This book suggests that Stoker, who had many medical connections, was able to link lurid stories of operations and asylums with fictional horror and suspense. Fans of gothic literature, as well as those of medical history and the supernatural, will find this an enjoyable read.Preface; Foreword; 1. Body and mind; 2. Medico-gothic; 3. Stoker medical circles; 4. Asylum doctors; 5. The gothic asylum; 6. Renfield, the pet lunatic; 7