Bela Lugosi as Dracula

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MOST PHYSICIANS endure lives of quiet anonymity, plying their trade for a few decades and then silently retiring to their private destinies. A handful of physicians, however, became known beyond their dispensaries because of some notable scientific or therapeutic discovery, and their names are properly immortalized. And then there are some with medical training who entertain pretensions of writing documents more lasting than their ephemeral prescriptions.

In this Olympian group of physician-writers are such eminent personages as François Rabelais, John Keats, Oliver Goldsmith, Anton Chekhov, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, all achieving a literary prominence that eclipses their efforts in medicine. A few, sadly, lived but briefly, such as John Keats, who died at 26, while others, such as Maugham, lived beyond 90. Some, such as Conan Doyle, wrote prolifically for decades while others, such as tragic John Polidori, is remembered solely for a momentary burst of literary creativity during a single dark and stormy June night in 1816.

John William Polidori, the sole offspring of Gaetano Polidori, a political refugee from northern Italy, and Anna Maria Pierce, was born on Sept. 7, 1795, in the Soho district of London. From 1804 through 1810, he was a boarding student at Ampleforth College, a preparatory school supervised by Benedictine monks who had fled France during the French Revolution. The school prided itself in encouraging “the pursuit of academic excellence with a strong emphasis on the spiritual and moral aspects of school life,” and Polidori remains as its most illustrious graduate.

Polidori traveled north to the University of Edinburgh to attend medical school. His years at the university were uneventful, and on Aug. 1, 1815, he was awarded the degree of doctor of medicine. His doctoral thesis, incidentally, summarized his research on sleepwalking (somnambulism).

Polidori did not have sufficient funds to establish a private practice of medicine and hence he sought a salaried position. Friends directed him to a 27-year-old sometime poet named George Gordon, aka Lord Byron, who was then seeking a traveling companion and a personal physician. Polidori was hired, and the two then journeyed through western Europe, reaching Lake Geneva by late spring of 1816. Byron rented a shoreside house, the Villa Diodati, for the summer. A friend of Byron, the poet Percy Shelley, took residence in a neighboring villa, accompanied by 19-year-old Mary Wollsencraft Godwin, soon to be Shelley’s bride and already bearing his second child.

And thus the four amused themselves on the shores of Lake Geneva, Byron and Shelley sailing much of the day, and the four engaging in earnest debate after sundown. On one such evening (according to Polidori’s diary, a wet and stormy night) Byron proposed that each of the four compose a ghost story with an unnamed prize for the best literary effort. Two such essays have since become among the signature themes of terrifying 19th and 20th Century gothic stories and have immortalized this evening as the birthdate of modern horror tales.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (Mary Shelley after Shelley’s first wife committed suicide in London) submitted a story that night, that remains as the pinnacle of gothic horror. It is the moral tale of a physician named Victor Frankenstein who assembles a monster from various body parts snatched from the gallows and numberless cemeteries. The creature is of vast strength but without a soul. The story was written when science, still in its adolescence, was shedding its older alliance with religion and bringing undreamed of powers to society. Such new visions as electricity and the inner dynamics of the human body were commanding the attention of a new generation. Mary eventually published her novel, now entitled Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus.

Byron, on that fateful June eve, wrote a brief outline of a tale of a vampire but quickly discarded it as uninteresting. Polidori seized upon Byron’s bare outline, and wove it into a story of startling complexity and dread that he later entitled “The Vampyre.” After its publication, in the April 1819 issue of New Monthly Magazine, of London, it was widely read. The older vision of the vampire as a bestial clod-like miscreant was now replaced by a menacing male of wealth, aristocracy, sophistication and mystery, a seductive stranger capable of overpowering the will of innocent maidens. Polidori named his creature Lord Ruthven, a barely concealed reference to Byron, who, in other fictional writings, had been referred to as Ruthven. History does not record what Shelley contributed that night.

Thus Byron’s casual suggestion that the quartet compose horror stories on that June night at Villa Diodati culminated in the two most chilling themes of this genre: the vampire and the soulless monster.

And what of that young doctor described by Mary Shelley as “poor Polidori”? Byron dismissed him shortly thereafter for unknown reasons. A depressed Polidori traveled in Italy briefly but then returned to his father’s home in London. His efforts to establish a medical practice failed, his gambling debts accumulated and in August 1821, at 26, he took his life by consuming prussic (hydrocyanic) acid. Polidori’s name persists now as but a small footnote to the flamboyant Byron.

Stanley M. Aronson, M.D., a weekly contributor, is dean of medicine emeritus, Brown University ( smamd@cox.net).