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COPYRIGHT 2004 Boston University
THOSE WHO HAVE ADDRESSED THE SIGNIFICANCE OF VICTOR FRANKENstein's reading in Albertus Magnus (c. 1200-1280); Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535); and Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better and more conveniently known as Paracelsus (1493-1541), have typically downplayed the importance of that reading. Of Victor, Samuel Holmes Vasbinder observes, "He clearly rejects the works of Albertus Magnus, Paracelsus, and Agrippa in favor of men who wrote and experimented with the new science" (1) Anne K. Mellor takes note of Victor's "misguided and self-taught education in the theories of the medieval and renaissance alchemists, Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Albertus Magnus," an education that brings Victor to the point of "being suddenly forced to acknowledge the ignorance of these pseudo-scientists.... " (2) James Rieger, writing in the introduction to his 1974 edition of the 1818 text of Shelley's novel, goes so far as to characterize the scientific knowledge that Frankenstein supposedly imbibes at Ingolstadt as "switched on magic, souped-up alchemy, the electrification of Agrippa and Paracelsus." (3) And U. C. Knoepflmacher, although not naming any actual or would-be scientists in particular, apparently concurs, stating that, "Science in Frankenstein is, of course, pseudo-science." (4)
Generally speaking, the critical commentary concerning the significance of Victor Frankenstein's three objects of youthful quasi-scientific study has followed the apparent lead of the novel's interior voices. Alphonse Frankenstein, Victor's father, observes Victor avidly reading Agrippa and responds by cautioning, "'do not waste your time upon this; it is sad trash.'" (15) At the University of Ingolstadt, M. Krempe, Victor's initial choice for a mentor, upon learning that Victor has been reading the three, asks incredulously, "'Have you ... really spent your time studying such nonsense?'" (Frankenstein 26). M. Waldman, Victor's ultimate choice for a mentor, is more charitable than the other two respondents: he characterizes the work of Albertus, Agrippa, and Paracelsus as "'the labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed,'" and credits those labors as "'ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind,'" which has been able "'to give new names, and arrange in connected classifications, the facts which they in a great degree had been the instruments of bringing to light'" (Frankenstein 28). But Waldman questions the projects of the three even as he credits their labors, associating them by implication with those "'ancient teachers of this science [i.e., chemistry, who] ... promised impossibilities and performed nothing'" in attempting to transmute metals and to create the elixir of life (Frankenstein 27).
In fact, Victor attempts on his own to distance himself from Albertus, Agrippa, and Paracelsus, even before leaving home to attend university. After seeing a powerful bolt of lightning reduce "an old and beautiful oak" to "a blasted stump" and "thin ribbands of wood," Victor asks his father to explain "the nature and origin of thunder and lightning." Alphonse, with a little help from Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751), "constructed a small electrical machine, and exhibited a few experiments; he made also a kite, with a wire and string, which drew down that fluid from the clouds." Victor concludes, "This last stroke completed the overthrow of Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, who had so long reigned the lords of my imagination" (Frankenstein 23). Perhaps Victor overstates the case. "But," he adds, "by some fatality I did not feel inclined to commence the study of any modern system...." He opts out of a series of lectures on chemistry that he has agreed to attend out of respect for his father's wishes that he do so, attributing his absence from them to "[s]ome accident." And when Victor begins attending, near the end of the series, he finds the discourse "of potassium and boron, of sulphates and oxyds, terms to which [he] could affix no idea," thoroughly incomprehensible and confesses, "I became disgusted with the science of natural philosophy, although I still read Pliny and Buffon with delight, authors, in my estimation, of nearly equal interest and utility" (Frankenstein 23). (6)
Victor's judgment, in several instances in the novel highly questionable, seems especially so in his comparative assessment of Buffon and Pliny. The former, the author of the forty-four volume Histoire Naturelle (1749-1804), was a painstaking if not always entirely accurate naturalist--he refused to relinquish his belief in "the scala naturae and the immutability of species," for example 10ut he commented usefully on "such central evolutionary problems as the origin of the earth, the extinction of species, the theory of 'common descent,' and in particular the reproductive isolation between two incipient species" (Mary Shelley 96). The latter was the "Roman author of the Historiae Naturalis (called by the Encyclopedia Britannica 'a storehouse of ancient errors')" (Frankenstein 23n). A statement like the one about Buffon and Pliny raises the question of whether Victor is in fact competent to judge whether "the overthrow of Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus"--in any event, of the last of these--has indeed been as complete as he himself announces it to be. Despite Victor's protestations to the contrary, Paracelsus continues as a formative presence throughout the novel.
Why consider Paracelsus, above and beyond Albertus and Agrippa? Commentators such as Vasbinder, who make no distinctions among the three as purveyors of ceremonial magic and alchemy, (7) and Lawrence Lipking, who is quick to point to the Paracelsian homunculus discussed in the De natura rerum (1537) as an example of the "pseudoscience" that Mary Shelley "needed for her experiment in fiction," (8) fail to see that of the three, Paracelsus is the one most nearly deserving of the praise that Waldman tenders for "'the labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed,'" whose work can be seen as "'ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind.'" Jeremy Adler notes the influence of the work of Paracelsus, (but not Albertus and Agrippa) among others on E. F. Geoffroy's Tables of the Different Relations Observed in Chemistry between Different Substances (1720), a work that ultimately influenced subsequent theories of chemical attraction and Goethe's 1809 novel Elective Affinities. David Van Leer observes that the names of "Bacon, Newton, Laplace, Swedenborg and Paracelsus loom larger" than those of "Lamarck, Lyell and the two Darwins" (9) in the rise and progress of American romantic science.
Two of Paracelsus' modern editors go even further. Jolande Jacobi, editor of the Bollingen selected edition, observes that Paracelsus "often approaches the most recent insights of the modern psychology of the unconscious, and just as his pharmaceutics make him a precursor of modern chemotherapy, he may well be regarded also as a pioneer of modern psychotherapy. His faith in the 'healing word,' in the radiating efficacy of the physician's personality, is part of the modern psychologist's indispensable stock-in-trade." (10) A more recent editor, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, notes Paracelsus' "advocacy of homeopathy" (26), a doctrine that also attracted the interest of early nineteenth-century physicians such as M. J. B. Orfila, Astley Cooper, and Samuel Hahnemann, (11) and suggests that he "is often hailed as the founder of modern medicine and iatrochemistry." (12)
Perhaps it is best to let Paracelsus himself speak on at least two of these issues. His comments on poisons show him to be one of the originating thinkers of the homeopathic position, which states that in small doses, agents that are ordinarily held to cause illness may actually cure it. "Is not a mystery of nature concealed even in poison?" he asks. "What has God created that He did not bless with some great gift for the benefit of man? Why then should poison be rejected and despised, if we consider not the poison but its curative virtue?" (Paracelsus/Jacobi 169). And Paracelsus' comments on a cure for syphilis point the way toward both chemotherapy and iatrochemistry. Of the use of mercury to treat syphilis, he argues, "Upon these three forms of manifestation of mercurius, or quicksilver, is based the cure for the French disease" (168).
In part owing to the long-lasting renown of Paracelsus as a founder of modern medicine, mercury remained the drug of choice for treating syphilis among other maladies well into the nineteenth century. Keats was treated with it for the symptoms of syphilis. (13) And Percy Shelley's "partial recovery" from what he thought might be syphilis at the end of August 1815, after being treated by the surgeon and physiologist William Lawrence and prior to the set of circumstances...
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