The Body of Frankenstein's Monster: Essays in Myth and Medicine

By Cecil Helman

Frankenstein. Werewolves. Dracula. These images aren't just imaginary creatures—they're also powerful symbols of the body. The body can be thought of as a machine made up of parts like Frankenstein's monster, or as a creature ruled by animalistic urges, or as an entity that's vulnerable to infection from a diseased fiend. In The Body of Frankenstein's Monster, Cecil Helman, M.D., expands our view of our bodies by exploring its cultural and artistic representations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paraview Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2004
• ISBN: 9781616406417

Book preview

DAUGHTER

PREFACE TO THE PARAVIEW EDITION

The Body of Frankenstein's Monster is a collection of essays on different aspects of the modern body: how we now understand it, how we talk about it, how we represent it in art and cinema, and how we try to make sense of its symptoms and cyclical changes.

Although it was first published in Britain in 1991 under the title Body Myths (followed by the American edition the following year, under its current title) almost all the insights in the book are still true today.

In the early 1990s interest in the iconography of the body was only just beginning. The book was ahead of its time, for since then there has been a growing interest in every aspect of the human body: its ideals of beauty, strength and fitness; its diseases, fashions and foods; and its iconography in present-day art, literature, myth and religion. Even the contemporary cult of Celebrity — which some anthropologists see as a modern substitute for religion, and the worship of Saints — has added to this growing interest, with the media's relentless, and daily focus on beautiful people and their perfectly-formed bodies.

By why the body? Why such an enormous interest in it, in recent decades? My answer now (as it was then) is that in a rapidly changing, unstable world, the individual's body has become one of the last frontiers of their personal identity, and of their sense of Self. At a time of increasing fragmentation and uncertainty— with the breakdown of families, communities, and even nation states — many people have a growing sense of vulnerability, and of a loss of control over their lives. In this atmosphere, the individual's body can become one of the last refuges of their sense of security, the last space that they can actually control. For even though they cannot control the financial crises, terrorism, war, pollution, and other global threats that impact upon them, at least they can still exert some control over the foods that enter their bodies, the way that it is dressed or adorned, its shape and form and fitness, and how it interacts daily with other human bodies in work, play and sexuality.

In the 1960s, as a medical student in Cape Town at the time of the world's first heart transplant by Dr Christiaan Barnard, I soon realised that the body was not just a physical object - a collection of organs, cells and enzymes. On the contrary, despite all that we were being taught at medical school, it also had powerful symbolic dimensions. In fact, you could never understand the body fully, or even talk about it, merely in terms of anatomy, physiology or genetics. For it is intimately connected with language, and we have always had to resort to metaphor, poetry and imagery to help us understand it and its changes, whether in illness or in health. Several years after graduating, my anthropology studies at London University also taught me about the very different ways that the body is understood in different cultures. I learned how our own image of the body — far from being universal — is always, to some extent, ‘culture-bound’. For each society teaches its members a unique way of perceiving themselves, and their own bodies, which may be quite different from those of other societies, in other times and other places.

In order to understand more fully our own, modern Western perceptions of the body, I felt that one had to look for clues in many different places: especially in the imagery of popular culture. I became interested in how the body is portrayed in contemporary literature, art, history, myth, television, and, of course, cinema — particularly its more imaginative genres of science fiction and ‘horror’ films. I came to the conclusion that it was just as important to understand all these fictional bodies, as it was to understand the bodies portrayed in scientific and medical textbooks.

Looking back, it is fascinating to see how many of these fantastical images of the body in literature and film, from as far back as the 19th century, are now actually coming true. Frankenstein's monster, for example — that collage of bits and pieces of other people — can be seen as a precognitive vision of transplant and ‘spare-part’ surgery; the ‘cyborg’, in movies like Terminator and RoboCop, predicted bodies that were part-machine, much like those modern bodies now joined forever to dialysis machines, pacemakers, or life-support systems; the steady stream of Dracula movies gave early warning of some of deep fears of sexual contagion that would develop in later years during the AIDS epidemic, and all the hysteria over a disease transmitted by blood and other bodily fluids; and finally, the Werewolf films were a commentary in the 1930s and 40s, as they still are today, on the cyclical patterns of male violence that still occur, with their regular reversion to ‘animal’ behaviour.

Many of these changes to our modern notions of the body, have been brought about by Medicine itself — especially its advanced technologies of diagnosis and treatment. Several of the essays in this collection address this issue. The Radiological Eye, for example, suggests that thanks to the invention of X-Rays (and later of CAT Scans and MRI's), we now take for granted — for the first time in history — that the body can be made ‘transparent’ to the human gaze. What therefore, I speculated, are the possible effects of this fact on our contemporary ideas of self, and of our own mortality — especially when, on an X-Ray plate, we can now glimpse the skeleton hidden inside ourselves, like a precognitive photo of the future?

The Rise of Germism argues that from the late 20th Century onwards, we have increasingly borrowed concepts from medicine (such as its ‘Germ Theory’) to express — and explain — some of the major anxieties of our Age: from a loss of personal identity, to the fear of penetration by invisible dangers, such as terrorism or pollution. The Rise of Germism has a particular salience at this time, with the major, recurrent epidemics of recent years — from SARS, AIDS and Hepatitis, to more recent anxieties about the latest version of Germism: the fear of anthrax, and other forms of bio-terrorism.

The Medusa Machine deals with the growing role of the machine in everyday life, and in the daily functioning of our bodies. Although these machines are useful, and often necessary for our survival, there is also a price to be paid for our dependence on them. It seemed to me that, for all their many advantages, they are slowly but surely robbing us of our autonomy: not only by making our bodies increasingly dependent on them, but also by leading us to conceive of the body itself as a sort of soft machine. In medicine, particularly, this has often led to a view of the sick body as a dysfunctional machine — one that primarily needs ‘repair’, ‘maintenance’, or ‘spare part’ surgery, rather than human healing and tender loving care. This in turn has led to a loss of some of the most human, and holistic dimensions of the relationship between doctor and patient.

A Time of the Heart describes how the body in modern society is often controlled not only by technology and machinery, but also by our concepts of time. The rushed and frantic pace of modern life — dominated by the clock, the calendar, the diary, and the appointment book — can have major effects on the body, especially the heart, but also on our very sense of self. They remind us, every minute of the day, of how little control we have over our bodies, and our everyday lives.

A further effect of the dependence on machines is that in a globalised, increasingly man-made world — where Nature is under threat from a whole new generation of Dr Frankensteins — high-tech innovations are actually redefining what we mean by ‘a body’. They are also extending the boundaries of that body, and of its nervous system. As Marshall McLuhan had predicted in his book Understanding Media, these new technologies now extend our sensory organs way beyond our skulls— weaving our nervous systems into a complex world-wide web of radio and television waves, telephones and the Internet. Thanks to TV and radio, we can now actually ‘see’ or ‘hear’ things in real time, even though they are occurring many thousands of miles away, on the other side of the globe.

The essay The Dissecting Room reminds one that the human body is not only influenced by medicine and technology, but that it always exists in a political context. It illustrates how our attitudes to the body — even to dead bodies — can be strongly influenced by political pressures. It drew on my own experiences as a medical student in South Africa in the 1960s, dissecting cadavers during the worst days of the apartheid system, when the harsh rules of racial segregation had penetrated even into our own medical school. Fortunately, since that essay was written, the political situation in South Africa has improved enormously, especially after the peaceful transition to democracy in 1994 under Nelson Mandela. Nevertheless, much of what I wrote then about the negative aspects of anatomical dissection in medical schools - with its fragmenting of the body into parts and organs - still applies: especially its possible effects on doctors' attitudes towards their patients in the future. Perhaps this medical fragmentation of the body is mirrored in cases like the one described in A Bridge of Organs, where the patient's body has ceased to be viewed as a unity, but has now become just a collection of autonomous parts, each with its own identity and needs, its own history and diseases.

In writing about all these poetic, and metaphorical aspects of the modern body, I soon found that I needed a very special language to fully describe them — one that was very different from the dry, formalised languages of medicine and the social sciences. For that reason, the reader will find that in the essays I have often used a language that is itself poetic and metaphorical, and sometimes polemical.

I hope that you find these essays both stimulating and informative.

Cecil Helman

2004

INTRODUCTION

This book is about Myth and Medicine, and about how, in a curious way, they both converge on the human body — or rather bodies, for there are many of them to be described here, all hidden within the same bulging bag of skin.

Among these many bodies is the magical body of myth and memory; the votive, sacrificial body; the body penetrated, but also impenetrable; the infected body; the invaded body; the bleeding body; the body damaged by devils and dybbuks; the body possessed by ancestral spirits; the archaic body of legend; the body in and out of harmonious balance; the body as disequilibrium and disease; the self-healing body of belief and trust; the body in time; the transparent radiological body, thin as celluloid; the modern, industrial machine-body; the hairy half-animal body, slave to the Full Moon; the sacred body of psyche and soul; the solitary, unknown, medical body; the shared body; the body crowded with autonomous organs; the dissected, dismantled body; and the fragmented, artificial body of Dr Frankenstein's monster — reassembled by Science into an automaton of flesh.

All of these bodies are different, and yet somehow they are all the same, for they all revolve — like the spokes of a complex wheel — around the same familiar human form, staring back at us from the depths of the mirror.

One afternoon in late 1967, when I was still a medical student in the last year of my studies, some friends and I were sent to examine a middle-aged man, lying breathless and pale in a bed at the end of a hospital ward.

He was one of the dozens of patients that we examined over those next few weeks, frantically refining our clinical skills in the period before our final examinations. At first glance there seemed to be nothing special about this man — but soon after, something very special would be happening to him, though at the time we knew nothing about it. A short time later his name would become famous, very famous, more celebrated than any of us would ever be. And his pale face too, would be splashed across every newspaper, and almost every television screen in every country of the world, For on that day, everyone knew him as the very first person to receive a human heart transplant, and as someone who —by living to tell the tale — personified one of the great triumphs of twentieth-century surgery.

And yet, to begin with, I was puzzled by the degree of media attention that the transplant attracted. For years, other organs such as kidneys or corneas, had been successfully transplanted. Blood and plasma from one human body were daily being transfused into another, and artificial hips and heart valves had by then been implanted into tens of thousands of ageing bodies.

The answer lay not only in the technical brilliance or humane purpose of the operation, but also in the fact that the surgeon had somehow strayed into a mythic landscape, a land of signs and metaphors — where ‘Heart’ still stood as a universal symbol of emotion, courage, intimacy, and will.

Now for the first time, one of the most important metaphors for person-hood had been cut out, and handled, and cleaned, and then placed inside the body of another individual. In a few historic moments, the borders of one human body had been breached by the symbolic core of another.

For a while, after the operation, all those familiar idioms such as ‘to take heart’, ‘with all my heart’, ‘from the bottom of my heart’, ‘a heart to heart talk’ had a peculiar new salience, a double meaning both medical and metaphorical. During the operation itself the recipient was literally ‘heartless’ for that brief — and by now mythological — pause, as the surgeon lifted the old broken heart out of the body, and handed it to an assistant — before replacing it inside the empty chest, with the healthier heart of another.

In this exchange, both donor and recipient had, quite literally, Tost their hearts' to one another, via the matchmakers of medical science. So that afterwards, with his heart now ‘in the right place’, a man who had once been ‘sick of heart’ could resume his everyday life — as ‘hearty’ as before.

At the time, it had seemed to me this heart transplant marked one of those great convergences (though by no means the first) between the worlds of medicine and those of myth and metaphor. For one dizzying, petrifying instant, the protective boundaries between Nature and Art, between physical reality and the language we use to signify it — were suddenly dissolved.

I had seen how fragile this boundary was, elsewhere in my medical studies, especially when I dissected human remains in the anatomy department. But a medical education made clearer in other ways the many links between language and flesh. Those famous lines in the poem by T. S. Eliot — ‘We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men’ — had already had an uneasy resonance for me as I watched a man hollowed out during an autopsy, or when I peered through a body made empty and transparent by an X-Ray.

And so I was not that surprised, some years later, to read in the