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Notes on contributor
Martin Willis is Professor of English Literature and Head of the School of English, Communication, and Philosophy at Cardiff University. He is editor of the Journal of Literature and Science, former Chair of the British Society for Literature and Science, and Co-Director of the Wellcome-funded ScienceHumanities Initiative. His previous work includes Staging Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Literature and Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and the award-winning Vision, Science and Literature, 1870-1920: Ocular Horizons (Pickering and Chatto, 2011).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 This article was partly researched and entirely written during a Visiting Fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University. I am indebted to the support, both financial and intellectual, of the HRC and of the ANU community more widely.
2 My term “scientific self-fashioning” is a conscious borrowing of Stephen Greenblatt’s influential work on Renaissance self-fashioning, which was the subject of his 1980 book of that title published by the University of Chicago Press. Greenblatt showed in that book the influence upon identity that different forms of literature could have, which is one of the aims, albeit very specifically focussed on a single fictional text, of the present article. It is worth noting that I use the term “scientist” in this context as the majority of examples I employ come from a period in the second half of the nineteenth century when that term was in common usage. I recognise, of course, that my earlier examples fall in the period when other titles (natural philosopher, man of science, and savant, for example) were still more regularly used. My use of a single term is done to ease any complexity in the mixing of terminology.
3 Additionally interesting, as it is written by a scientist rather than a media scholar, is the slightly earlier work by Rollin (Citation1995).
4 There are numerous other examples of the use of Frankenstein focussed on the late twentieth and twenty-first century, when the prefix “Franken” came into use, often to describe scientific manipulations of objects perceived as natural: Frankenfoods or Frankenbabies, to give two particularly striking examples. There is nothing to be gained by my citing an extensive list here, but Hammond (Citation2004) and Stubber and Kirkman (Citation2016) offer two very different approaches and include extensive citations to further scholarship.
5 Blundell’s phrasing makes clear that he is thinking not only of the novel but also its various stage adaptations, which had been common in London theatres in the 1820s.
6 A masculine descriptor seems most appropriate for an anonymous author in Nature, considering the gender imbalance of its overall authorship.
7 Stone is the generic term for a range of conditions such as bladder stone, urinary tract stone, and kidney stone. See the Oxford Stone Group’s brief history (Citation2018).
8 Cunningham’s views on cholera and contagion were proven at least partly correct by Robert Koch’s discovery of cholera’s bacterial source in the 1880s.
9 Cohen (Citation2018, 148–150), writing in Science, gave some examples of the use of Frankenstein to celebrate new scientific discovery. His examples are actually uses of the prefix “Franken”, which is used with wider symbolism, often humorously. Specific reference to the novel and its main actors remains almost wholly negative in other media.
10 The section on Frankenstein was almost always quoted directly when this article was summarised or reported in the popular press. See, for example, “Overcrowding the Medical Profession” (Citation1899) and “Increase in Number of Medical Men” (Citation1899).
11 This example also uncovers the rich metaphors of Frankenstein that exist across the Anglophone scientific world. A further examination of Australian, or American or Canadian, materials would clearly extend the work undertaken in this article, and while there is not time to develop more of it here, there are fruitful possibilities in doing so.