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Bad Medicine: Evil Clinicians in Literature and Film
John Watson | October 26, 2017
| Contributor Information
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Bad Medicine: Evil Clinicians in Literature and Film
John Watson | October 26, 2017 | Contributor Information
Medicine is the most intimate science. Patients give themselves over to doctors and nurses at moments of utmost vulnerability, while our bodies become testing grounds for new treatments that may scare us. It's no wonder, then, that these anxieties often manifest themselves in, shall we say, less than favorable depictions of clinicians.
This collection of some of fiction's most infamous clinicians shows that as medicine has made its march of progress, artists have expressed their apprehensions in some particularly vivid and bloody ways.
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Bad Medicine: Evil Clinicians in Literature and Film
John Watson | October 26, 2017 | Contributor Information
The legend of Dr Faust (or Faustus) has been told in countless versions over the centuries, perhaps most notably in Christopher Marlowe's play in the late 1500s. Faust can be considered something of the foundational "mad scientist": a protagonist whose unchecked ambition leads him to transgress the natural order of the world. Although traditionally held as a cautionary tale, the good doctor does have his adherents who view his dogged pursuit of knowledge, no matter the personal cost, as the heights of academic heroism.
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Bad Medicine: Evil Clinicians in Literature and Film
John Watson | October 26, 2017 | Contributor Information
Mary Shelley was just 21 years old when Frankenstein was published, more or less inventing modern science fiction in a work that's never been out of print in the 200 years since.[1] Dr Victor Frankenstein may be an invention of pure fiction—Shelley said the story came to her in a nightmare—but he was inspired by much-publicized experiments of the era, including those whereby electrical currents were used to generate facial grimaces and jaw movements in executed criminals.[2] The doctor's surname is invoked any time society fears that a medical or scientific experiment will take on a life of its own and destroy innocent lives.
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Bad Medicine: Evil Clinicians in Literature and Film
John Watson | October 26, 2017 | Contributor Information
An efficient, bloody treatise on the duality of mankind, many have claimed Stevenson's story as a clinical case study on such conditions as bipolar disorder[3] or even as a proto-Freudian analysis of the divided mind.[4] Another popular theory is that Stevenson was inspired by the real-life case of Horace Wells, the pioneering anesthesiologist whose self-experimentation with ether and other agents led to erratic and violent behavior, ultimately ending in his suicide. However, research published in 2015 determined it unlikely that Stevenson had caught wind of Wells' story in UK newspapers.[5]
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Bad Medicine: Evil Clinicians in Literature and Film
John Watson | October 26, 2017 | Contributor Information
The inspiration for Stevenson's second most well-known ode to unethical doctors is decidedly easier to determine. The writer based The Body Snatcher on the infamous case of Robert Knox, an early-1800s Edinburgh physician who bought corpses from the murderers William Burke and William Hare. The tale was more than just a macabre fascination for Stevenson, whose own uncle had trained under Dr Knox.[6] So horrified was the public by the actions of Burke, Hare, and Knox that it led to the passing of the British Anatomy Act of 1832, making it far less restrictive to procure research cadavers,[7] to discourage murder.
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Bad Medicine: Evil Clinicians in Literature and Film
John Watson | October 26, 2017 | Contributor Information
Science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells described this work as "an exercise in youthful blasphemy." The novel is suffused with ethical concerns regarding the treatment of animals, which was at the time being hotly debated in Victorian England.[8] It is also possible to see the story as Wells—a trained scientist—reacting to the still-reverberating bombshell of Charles Darwin's research.[8] The book beseeches readers to see themselves in other species, and in its villain offers a reminder that mankind can advance scientifically while declining morally.
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Bad Medicine: Evil Clinicians in Literature and Film
John Watson | October 26, 2017 | Contributor Information
Forty-five years before the first face transplantation, this classic French horror film envisioned a murderous physician obsessed with pulling off the pioneering surgery. The mad-doctor tropes are all present: a subservient assistant helping the doctor with his misdeeds, a secluded laboratory, etc. The film diverts from the template, though, by presenting the surgeon's original sin not as unbridled ambition so much as overwhelming love of his daughter. However altruistic the doctor's motives, the genre still requires punishment for flouting nature, which is duly meted out by a pack of dogs in the doctor's research lab.
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Bad Medicine: Evil Clinicians in Literature and Film
John Watson | October 26, 2017 | Contributor Information
Never one to let scientific implausibility get in the way of a good scare, Hollywood churned out a series of B movies in the 1950s and 1960s with mad doctors at their center. This particularly ludicrous film again finds a surgeon following true love down a dark route leading to murder. We can thank the film for popularizing the image of the talking head in a jar, used to high comedic effects in such films as Steve Martin's The Man With Two Brains and Simpsons creator Matt Groening's television show Futurama.
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Bad Medicine: Evil Clinicians in Literature and Film
John Watson | October 26, 2017 | Contributor Information
The cruel-clinician genre was almost entirely the province of male characters, given the historical gender distribution in the field. In the middle of the 20th century, that began to change. Enter Nurse Ratched, Cuckoo's Nest's villainess supreme. Ratched oversees her wing of all-male mental patients in a needlessly malicious fashion, resulting in an otherwise avoidable suicide, a retaliatory lobotomy, and untold torment. With hindsight, it is difficult not to read into Nurse Ratched (as others have[9]) a misogynistic reaction to women asserting greater influence in healthcare.
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Bad Medicine: Evil Clinicians in Literature and Film
John Watson | October 26, 2017 | Contributor Information
By the late 1970s, the zeitgeist had changed considerably, and horror fiction had to change as well. Mad scientists were replaced with maddening systems, killers with conspiracies. Coma's vision of the human body as the ultimate commodity was a perfect match for an age of post-Watergate cynicism.
"When we began questioning our supposed experts in society, doctors fell out of favor," said Coma's author Robin Cook. "And there's a sense that a lot of doctors have been extremely greedy, operating on their own agenda rather than on what the public needs."[10]
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Bad Medicine: Evil Clinicians in Literature and Film
John Watson | October 26, 2017 | Contributor Information
Stephen King's entry into the killer-clinician genre is memorable enough in literary form, yet Kathy Bates' depiction of psychopathic nurse Annie Wilkes in the 1990 film adaptation takes it into iconic territory. As the plot escalates rapidly from kidnapping to maiming to murder, Bates maintains her character's creepily chipper demeanor. The film can be read as a decidedly morbid take on the excruciating nature of long-term rehabilitation.
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Bad Medicine: Evil Clinicians in Literature and Film
John Watson | October 26, 2017 | Contributor Information
As if the medical community hadn't already taken enough on-screen beatings, the very next year saw the arrival of Dr Hannibal Lecter, cinema's preeminent evil psychiatrist. Many have expressed fears that such characters as Lecter keep patients from seeking psychiatric care. However, in her 2012 book Cinema's Sinister Psychiatrists: From Caligari to Hannibal,[11] author Sharon Packer sees them as a means for expressing and alleviating anxiety. "Such films provide potential patients with opportunities for dress rehearsals of their fears about relinquishing control to a mind doctor who might 'read their minds' or manipulate their psyches," wrote Packer, herself a practicing psychiatrist.
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Bad Medicine: Evil Clinicians in Literature and Film
John Watson | October 26, 2017 | Contributor Information
As the 21st century dawned, with it came the promise of once undreamt-of technological advancements. However, the depiction of clinicians in horror and sci-fi found itself exactly where it started two centuries prior in Shelley's nightmares. Splice updates the Frankenstein myth with an important new distinction. Its protagonists suffer with hubris, yes, but their poor ethical decision-making is attributed to a decidedly modern reason: They need funding to keep their research laboratory going. The film is the "publish or perish" conundrum brought to life.
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John Watson
Freelance writer
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Disclosure: John Watson has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.
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References
Ginn SR. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: exploring neuroscience, nature, and nurture in the novel and the films. Prog Brain Res. 2013;204:169-190.
Mackowiak PA. President's address: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, and the dark side of medical science. Trans Am Clin Climatol Assoc. 2014;125:1-13.
Dell'Osso B, Ketter TA. Clinical observations about The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in relation to bipolar disorder. Acad Psychiatry. 2015;39:607-608.
Beattie HJ. Father and son. The origins of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Psychoanal Study Child. 2001;56:317-360.
Vyas RA, Desai SP. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—was Robert Louis Stevenson inspired by Horace Wells? J Anesth Hist. 2015;1:18-24.
Richardson R. Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body Snatcher. Lancet. 2015;385:412-413.
Harris DF. History of the events which led to the passing of the British Anatomy Act, A.D. 1832. Can Med Assoc J. 1920;10:283-284.
Darbyshire P. Reclaiming 'Big Nurse': a feminist critique of Ken Kesey's portrayal of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Nurs Inq. 1995;2:198-202.
Packer S. Cinema's Sinister Psychiatrists: From Caligari to Hannibal. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company; 2012.
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