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On Monsters and Medicine: What can spooky stories tell us about health and disease? - Lorenzo Servitje

• Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding • Season 3 • Episode 3

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This episode of ReligionWise features Dr. Lorenzo Servitje, Associate Professor Literature and the Director of the Health, Medicine and Society program at Lehigh University. Trained in both Victorian Literature and Public Health, he considers the way that culture influences and is influenced by questions of health, healthcare, and disease.

In this conversation we consider the broader field of Medical Humanities, where it came from and why it is important. We then dig into his particular area of interest, monsters of the Victorian era, from Dracula to Mr. Hyde, asking what can they tell us about both historic and contemporary understandings of health, sickness, and treatment.

Show Notes

Chip Gruen:

Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host Chip Gruen, the director of the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding at Muhlenberg College. Today's ReligionWise episode features Dr. Lorenzo Servitje. Dr. Servitje is associate professor of literature and the director of the Health Medicine and Society Program at Lehigh University. Dr. Servitje also served as the 2023 presenter of the Wallenberg Lecture at Muhlenberg College. That's an annual event that is hosted by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding where we both invite a speaker but then also recognize an individual or community group who has demonstrated courageous moral action on behalf of others in the likeness or in the tradition of Raoul Wallenberg. If you want more information on that event, or want to be invited to it in future, if you're local to the Lehigh Valley, or would be willing to come to the Lehigh Valley for that event, I would encourage you to go to our website, religionandculture.com, to learn more, and to fill out our contact information link so that we can keep you apprised of future programming. So of course, on ReligionWise, what we like to think about is the ways in which a more nuanced view of religion can influence or does influence public life, right. So we talked about education, medicine, law, scholarship of various kinds, and how that translates into our shared cultural experience and the meanings we associate with it. Today's episode is a little different, because you might listen. And you might think, well, traditional religion just doesn't show up very much in the conversation, Dr. Servitje's work, as you'll hear is largely interested in both the Victorian periods the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the literature from that period and how it reflects and is reflective of issues of health, medicine, disease, contagion, those sorts of things. And then of course, he takes that interest, being the Director of Health Medicine and Society Program more generally, and uses some of those lessons to think about how similar issues affect health care, health care delivery, ideas about disease and contagion in the contemporary world. And I want to make the argument that what he does is actually really, really closely related to what we're interested in both in the podcast and then in the Institute more generally. And that is to say that the way that we think about things, the way that we conceive of the world, whether it is drawn from traditional religion, or popular culture, or literature, is deeply influential on how we see the more apparent or surface level aspects of our world. That is how we navigate health, the law, politics, etc. He uses this turn of phrase, in his work sometimes to think about culture, being a part of infrastructure. And I think if we can expand the idea of infrastructure for so for his work, thinking about infrastructure in the medical world, hospitals, and doctors and insurance companies, and you know, all of that apparatus that leads to healthcare delivery, you know, vaccines and medicines and the rest of it. But if we expand our view of that, to think that a significant part of infrastructure is also the thought world, that we each inhabit, as we interact with that more physical, more tangible infrastructure. So how one thinks about disease, whether that disease is reflective of our ethical, moral, spiritual wellness. So that gets into issues of holistic medicine and non traditional medicines, how we think about the relationship between the physical world and something else, whether that be a spiritual world, or something more transcendent than what we experience as parts of our bodies. What I would add to this is that this is all dealt with, I think, when one thinks about vampires or zombies or whatever, that there are metaphors here that their anxieties that are expressed, that are deeply part of our cultural associations of how we think about the other or issues of purity and corruption, of hybridity, those sorts of issues. But I would also argue that a lot of those same issues are confronted even more explicitly in traditional religion, that issues of of health and wellness is contagion, other purity and, and pollution, all of those things are, of course dealt with head on within religious traditions. So on the one hand, I'm, as you'll hear in the podcast, I'm a huge fan about thinking the Victorian period. There are reasons why this period has always been, though I don't specialize in it is always been very attractive to me, because of some of the shifts that happen there. But I would also want you to listen to this thinking about ways in which the methods used the questions that Dr. Servitje asks, can be extrapolated outward, so that it's not only about the consideration of popular culture, and literature as part of these infrastructures, but that we really need to take questions about religious meaning and religious identity in health care and many other aspects of our of our world seriously, if we're going to deliver care, for example, or understand people's moods and motivations better. So that being said, Please enjoy the conversation between me and Dr. Lorenzo, Servitje. Lorenzo Servitje, thanks so much for being on ReligionWise.

Lorenzo Servitje:

Thank you so much for having me, Chip. I'm very happy to be here.

Chip Gruen:

So let's just jump right in. So if you don't mind, I'd really like to start with intellectual biography. So you have a couple of fields that you're a part of, that don't go necessarily together in people's minds. So I'd really love to hear a little bit about the trajectory of your career. And this confluence of English literature with public health.

Lorenzo Servitje:

Thank you so much, Chip, I'd be glad to talk about that. I definitely spent a long time and maybe continue to think about like, what it is I want to do when I grow up in terms of my intellectual interests. But I can tell you I, I started off thinking I wanted to go to medical school in undergrad. I was a fitness instructor at the time, trying to do my pre med reqs and majoring in exercise physiology. And I picked up an English major because I always happened to be good at it. And I liked it. And I always found it fascinating. And as I got closer toward graduation, I was not really sure what I wanted to do and was taking, you know, looking at and starting to practice and taking the MCAT. And then kind of got the idea in my head of maybe just toying with the idea of graduate school in English in case that didn't work out. And as I was finishing my upper division English requirements, I noticed I started just to write a lot about medical topics and literature, metaphors of disease in fiction from like, the Fairy Queen and the Canterbury Tales, and even Shakespeare, and some romantic fiction. And one of my advisors told me like, hey, you know, there is there's people that actually study medicine and health in history and literature. So I started looking around to graduate programs near me and I found a professor, her name is Dr. Susan Zieger, at UC Riverside who focused on the idea and invention of addiction and the addict in 19th century literature and sent her an email about you know, I work at a rehab center, I'm a fitness instructor, I'm really interested in medicine and literature. And so I applied to a number of different programs. And I got into that one. And that's how I kind of got into the English graduate degree. And I wasn't really sure what I wanted to study specifically, I knew I was just interested in medical things and health. And I finally eventually settled on the Victorian period and started to look at representations of health and epidemiology and infectious disease. And as my work progressed, and I finished my PhD, I became really interested in not just the representations of science and literature, but thinking about how humanists, historians and literary scholars and philosophers could interface and interact with people that work in health, which eventually got me to apply to a master's in public health program. And that's how I really kind of started to drive my intersections in terms of my formal training and intellectual interests.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, so you and while you represent this in yourself and in your work, in your scholarship and teaching, that this is part of a larger trend that we can point to and you mentioned this actually, in one of your papers you I'm going to drop a little quote here in the paper, "The Not So Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Antibiotic Research" you write, "Recently, there's been an impulse to include humanistic and social scientific dimensions in scientific and biomedical research. Yet this is often reduced to the form of a checkbox on a grant application." So on the one hand, there is this nod that this exists. But on the other hand, you seem to indicate that there's a little bit of dissatisfaction and how the rubber meets the road in this kind of interdisciplinary work. So can you talk about sort of the promise of this and maybe the failed start of it in other ways?

Lorenzo Servitje:

Yeah. And I mean, I could say like a lot of this in terms of social science that's predates, I think the inclusion of the humanists at work. We're in a lot of NSF grants, for instance, our, I think, some NIH grants as well, they would like like a social scientist, or an anthropologist or sociologist to do something for but recently, in terms a lot of funding internally at my institution, and externally, there's been an interest and like, how can you bring these two things together, and whether it's been, you know, STEM and engineering, or natural science research, or, you know, even public health or epidemiology and you want to include some other kind of field, to do that substantively is hard, and it takes a lot of, you know, risk and time. And so sometimes, you know, it can be where like, well, we'll just include you as a co author on a paper, or, you know, like, just come and kind of, like, tell us about your work and like, tell us about it, and we'll kind of like think about it. And that's kind of like we're we're really bridging the inclusion of health humanities and medical humanities, or people just in humanistic work, that are already coming in on collaborative projects, you know, that are within the sciences or engineering in and of themselves. And so that's kind of like the interdisciplinary merging of medical health humanities, science and literature. And then coming in with you know, let's say biology or microbiology or epidemiology, or public health or health policy, or even engineering as I've done in actually very productive ways. Not this kind of like checkbox ways. When it comes to medical humanities and health humanities, a little bit independently of that it's medical humanities, which has been sort of traditionally defined as the inclusion of humanistic study in medical education and really focused on academic medicine for training medical practitioners. The impulse for that has been around at least since the 70s or 80s, where the increase kind of technologization of health, the increase in what a sociologist of medicine, Adelle Clark calls biomedicalization, or Peter Conrad called medicalization, where, you know, medicine is starting to take over all these different aspects of life, there's a kind of dissatisfaction and impatience be kind of kind of becoming objects of knowledge, or, you know, kind of just being processed and medicine had lost its kind of, "human side." And so there was this kind of desire to try to reintroduce humanism, or the humanistic side of medicine in in a very, Arnoldian kind of way. Kind of, like, let's let's introduce, like liberal arts, history, philosophy, literature. And so the idea was, if you reintroduce these things into the medical curriculum, poetry and history of medicine and philosophy, that medical practitioners will become more, you know, liberally human and liberally humanist, and more empathetic, and then that sort of progressed into in the 90s and early 2000s, were things, you know, beyond just kind of including it thinking really substantively, you know, well, what does this really mean? And, you know, are we doing more than just like trying to inculcate empathy by having, you know, practitioners or medical students read poems about patients with strokes and things like that, and started to become like, really its own field of research, where we're really thinking about, well, what does it mean to do work about medicine and medical practice, from a humanistic perspective, and it's sort of shot off in a couple of different directions. One became narrative medicine that was developed by a PhD, MD out of Columbia, named Rita Charon. And that's really looking at understanding literary theory, literary close reading, at a very, very high level and applying that to medical practice and developing interpersonal patient skills, shared decision making, and really like in a very substantive way, innerpersonal and professional, reflexive practices, that help, you know, creates better doctors patient better patient experiences. And you know, as she argues, my, I definitely would see that there's a case and there's studies on this that it produces better diagnoses, like you can catch things because you can help understand patient's illness narratives and stories beyond just their signs and symptoms and disease states. So that's like narrative medicine. And that's really practice oriented. Health humanities sort of started to be theorized as an expansion beyond medical communities and beyond medicine to really think about not just the clinic and doctors, but other allied health professionals, and health, and other dimensions of health that aren't necessarily just related to the clinic and the providers. So this starts to include physical therapy, nursing, pharmacy. And even beyond that public health, and then even more broadly than that, and inclusive of public health, the different drivers and conditions that shape people's health, beyond just access or experience with health care and health care delivery. So health humanities is much broader, and definitely like, isn't just focused on medicine, per se, like you won't see in a venue or a conference that's really focused on medical humanities, there's much less about doctor patient. And there's more about, you know, people's experience in the community relative to like, harm reduction strategies, or public health interventions, or self, you know, things like studies of wellness, and what does wellness culture mean. And to that, I would probably add one more way to discretize the field, at least in terms of my training as a literary scholar, originally, we could talk about literature and medicine as a related but can also be a discrete thing. So though, part of the way I'm thinking about this is just the different journals that exist. So we have journal of medical humanities, there's health humanities journals, literature and medicine is one very specifically. And that's that's what I'm really identify with, because it's really interested in focusing on thinking about works that can both focus on literature, on health and medicine, in literature, and it can be ultimately, like a value and about literature itself. Or it could go the other direction. And see, like, think about like, well, here's this object, and what does it tell us about this, either historical or contemporary understanding about literature and health. So like, the research potion, or the conclusion, or the implication of the work, can be more relevant to you know, the people working in the humanity side, or it could be relevant to those that are more on the health side. So a lot of this in terms of the fields and you know, a lot of people can can split hairs. And you know, like to take hard stances on this. But a lot of the supply, I think, comes down to like publication and what the kind of venue is, if you're teaching, are you teaching in a medical school? Are you teaching in like a health sciences school? Are you teaching an undergrad institution? That's where, you know, sometimes these disputations and kind of nominalizations, I think, make a difference. But I think it is important. And I think likewise, there are a lot of incentives for funding these. And there's a lot of excitement and institutions like it, and I think some of the funding agencies that are not just in the humanities, so things beyond the NIH want to try to do this. But it's, you know, often difficult to find a good mix mix, because, you know, how are you going to like, a to bring you back just a quick example of the Jekyll and Hyde article that I published in the Journal of Antibiotics. That was a really unique experience in this case, because it was the first time I had a paper that had four external peer reviewers. You know, in literary studies in history, we often like get two, but you know, I suggest that a bunch of different reviewers, but I mean, I could really tell that at least one reviewer was very well trained in, you know, Victorian studies and science. One reviewer was clearly trained in the history of medicine. Two other reviewers were clearly coming at it from a clinical and biomedical angle. And, you know, were talking, you know, making comments on my definitions of virulence and pathogenicity, and other ones about antibiotics. So like, that was a really, really unique experience. And it was like, probably one of the most generative publication experiences I've had in terms of like revising. So that actually ended up being really cool, and a really neat intersection of how I think this could work in an ideal situation. But it's really it's hard to do in practice, especially if you're pulling work and trying to find a bunch of different experts in related fields, maybe coming from different disciplines, but experts enough to talk about a topic and then like judge something, whether it be a publication or a grant application, say like yes, we should do this. So it's fun and exciting. It's like a great time for this but it's it doesn't operationally it doesn't always execute well, just because it's hard.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah. I wonder, you know, being a professor of liberal arts place, right? The Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding is embedded as part of Muhlenberg College. And so we teach undergraduates, you know, and I have lots of people who are going into medical fields. And one of the things I always like to tell them is working on a person, right, doing healthcare for a person is not the same as changing the oil in a car, right, that there is a certain amount of sort of cultural fluency that is necessary, you know, some of those things that you described as humanistic. And I wonder, you know, as health humanities develops, or medical humanities develops, and you see the introduction in curricula of courses, like history of medicine, or things that are topically, you know, seem really, really relevant, right to somebody who would be interested in pursuing medicine as a career. But you can also imagine another scenario where somebody says, you know what, being broadly trained in the liberal arts, in human culture is important, too. So what is the back and forth of the current state of the conversation about that, you know, hey, let's build humanities curricula that are intended to be, you know, for those people who are interested in medical fields, as opposed to, hey, being broadly educated can help in lots and lots of different ways, some of which are not predictable.

Lorenzo Servitje:

health humanities, and health medicine and society programs like the one at Lehigh or medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt, that are introducing this as a major in the undergraduate curriculum. And again, like that, that works really well for people that are going into medicine, but not necessarily. And that sort of kind of, like, on the one hand, fixes a problem where look, it's really hard to like put more things into the medical school curriculum. Especially like, you know, I would love to teach a class where I have like, third year, fourth year medical students read Middlemarch, but like, no way does that gonna happen, they don't have the time and totally get it. And, you know, by introducing this at the undergraduate level, like we do develop that kind of broader sensibility and broader interdisciplinary and you know, liberal arts kind of thinking, for people that are like already kind of primed that think they want to do something in health, and a lot of them go on to medical school, or different professional schools, like PA school, but we also increasingly see students and have written a lot of like, successful letters of recommendation for students that have gotten into master's in public health programs, students that go to work in industry. And I mean, I have to tell you, I kind of don't hate the idea of somebody who's going to be an actuary, or a claims adjuster, or somebody at, you know, evil insurance company, evil medical insurance company, or not so great health insurance company, being trained in this and already having that kind of sensibility. I mean, that seems to be like, a way to introduce this kind of thinking back into like, all these different facets and industries and, you know, large stakeholder, institutional and corporate apparatuses that affect our health, that aren't just like the clinic. And if we have people that are going into that workforce, and are trained in liberal arts are broadly trained, you know, whether it is through a more focused like health humanities, health medicine side the curriculum or not, or it's something that could be history, and or liberal arts or religious studies, that is able to provide that kind of broad context for critical thinking and contextualization. And, you know, not and not to circumscribe other disciplines or majors to purely technical training. But I think that's one positive benefit that I start to see reflected in the growth of these kinds of programs and popularity of these majors at the undergraduate level.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah. So okay, so that's the field, right. So let's, let's dig down a little bit into your work. And I've had such a great time. Over the last several weeks, as we've been talking about doing this interview, reading a lot of your work and thinking about the things that you're thinking about. And so much of that work, much of your publications spring from the Victorian period, a period, by the way that I also find endlessly fascinating, and maybe, maybe I will have the chance to editorialize on why I find that as well. But can you talk a little bit about what drew you to this period and why this period seems so you know, so pregnant and useful for your work?

Lorenzo Servitje:

Yes. And can I be completely honest, I did not go into the Victorian period as my PhD because I loved Victorian literature. I had actually, I mean, I don't think I read any Victorian literature in my undergraduate degree. I read like Dracula and Jane Eyre in like high school and never liked it. I avoided taken like taking a Dickens class, my first year of graduate school, I was very influenced by my advisor, who was a Victorianist Dr. Sue Zieger who wrote the book on the invention of the addict. But I ended up choosing the Victorian period because I mean, I was interested in medical things. And I was like, Well, if I have to pick a historical period, for my HD, I want to pick the one that's most interesting in terms of medical history. And to me that there was a Victorian period. I mean, that's where we see, you know, the developments of the profession that you know, medicine is a profession in its kind of modern inflection, you see the development of epidemiology, the development of microbiology, pharmacology, anesthesia, I mean, there's so many interesting medical developments, particularly likewise, also from my work in terms of public health, the intersections of health and medicine in the state, that don't always take the form of public health as such, but, you know, might, we might theoretically talk about it is an emergence of bio politics, if we're thinking about theoretically, but really thinking about how different state driven and political and economic determinants kind of are defining shaping and refining population, you know, that really starts to become, as Foucault would say, like a technique or tool of governance. So that those are the different things that really informed my decision to study the Victorian period. And, you know, when you look at, at authors like Dickens that were so interested in thinking about the ideas of, you know, not just individual people and types of people as they're, you know, treated and mistreated in this machine of modernity, that's urbanization, industrialization, I mean, but he's likewise very much thinking about population. There's a fabulous book, I should plug called "Populating the Novel" by Emily Steinlight, at Penn, which, which just talks about this idea of population and the novel. So that those are the really kind of ideas that that made me think like, okay, like, I'm gonna go with the Victorian period, even though like I don't love Victorian literature, and it was a little bit intimidated by it. But I ended up growing to love it. But it was really still driven by you know, the history.

Chip Gruen:

That's interesting. So my next question is going to be about Gothic literature. But I want to before I get to that I want to sort of, I don't know, as a non specialist on this Victorian period, but but a period I'm super interested in, I've always found it just fascinating, because you have two things it seems to be going on simultaneously. One is what you're talking about, sort of the emergence of sort of the taking root of some of those enlightenment scientific ideas, right, in the rise of particular technologies or methodologies for thinking about the world, you know, as you so eloquently said, about, about population, about health care, and all of those sorts of things developing so we get, you know, all of this great technological advancement in the world's fairs and, you know, all this, you know, stuff that is going on, and people are very excited. It's a, it's a period of, of great anticipation and hope for the future, of course, brought to an end by World War I because we realized all that technology can be used for......for for bad purposes, as well. But then at

Lorenzo Servitje:

Yes. the exact same time, you have the emergence of, for lack of a better term, spiritualist movements, right people thinking about continuities of life and death. And while we might think about those as being diametrically opposed, the Victorian mind thinks of those as being very closely related to one another, right? The idea that, Oh, wait a minute, we can maybe figure use these new devices to figure out ways of communicating, you know, with, with people who have passed... Photograph them and measure them, you know, do different, like, you know, Electromatic is it like electromagnetism? Are we measuring changes in heat? You know, and, you know, of course, there's the doctor photography, but at least like, you know, the, the attempts in the interest in the investment to try to be like, yes, there are, you know, these extra supernatural things, but like, they don't have to be diametrically opposed. And, you know, even if, you know, the science didn't ultimately end up, you know, substantiating some of the things like, you know, the interest of the effort was there, and, like, the excitement was there. And it was really interesting to see that, like, you know, can we use science to kind of like, start to capture what is beyond science and, and I think, likewise, also, there was like, in the same way, we saw, you know, romanticism in the, you know, late 1700s and early 1800s, kind of a reaction against, you know, rationalism and enlightenment thinking, I think likewise, there is an element of the supernatural and you know, supernaturalism, the occult, and you know, different kinds of fiction and aesthetics as well at the end of the 19th century that were invested in interest in like, you know, very explicitly pushing back against, you know, the rationalism and the, "progress of science."

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, so let's talk about so that brings us to the Gothic literature, and the idea of the Gothic. So let's talk about that and in what ways the Gothic overlaps the Victorian? In what ways does it sort of root itself or find a home in some of those Victorian sensibilities? Because here, this gets us into the conversation, I think that the both of us love as well about, about monsters about about the occult, about the things that are that are less well explained.

Lorenzo Servitje:

I mean, it's such a great question. And it's, it's really one that I think works really well in the classroom. And likewise, I think it remains to be a, you know, rich field of inquiry for research. And I also have to plug in Lehigh at my institution. We have Dawn Keetley, she's a horror studies scholar, probably one of the most, if not, I would say, one of the most renowned in the world. And she does contemporary horror, but you know, a lot of it is still invested and you know, rooted in this idea of the Gothic in its modern inflections. So, like, I would just like to say, like, you know, the Gothic doesn't remain to be like just a very historicized thing. It's a very exciting, you know, contemporary field. But to go with your question, I mean, as we often think about the Gothic as either like, an aesthetic mode or genre that's super heavy, heavily studied in and of itself. I mean, we can definitely see it as emerging from the late 18th century with, you know, things like The Castle of Otranto, and The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis; The Monk as, as the kind of key Gothic texts that start to move into the romantic period in the early 1800s. And we have some very key identifiable tropes that we see in those, you know, the labyrinth out of the way castles, decaying kind of aristocracies, the entrapped woman haunting some kind of curse from the past secrets. And as we see those kind of, like, take different forms in the early 1800s, and start to shift away from decaying landscapes and away from like, things that are old, archaic, I mean, you still start to see the remnants of that in, you know, Mary Shelley, for instance, that is still very heavily influenced by romanticism and the Gothic as such, when we start to move into the Victorian period, that is very much defined by you know, things that are kind of in opposition to that, but not exactly like urbanization, industrialization. I mean, as a result of those, since you do see so much urbanization and industrialization, you start seeing the decline of the aristocracy, literally, as a class, I mean, you absolutely get like decaying castles that no longer can be like upkept. And that creates, like a lot of occasions in later on sensation fiction for plot devices. But as we move into the later 19th century, and what we might think of as late Victorian, or urban Gothic, you know, rather than having, you know, an out of the way landscape or a castle or moor as the setting I mean, you're really looking at the same kind of tropes of like decay and filth and curse, and occlusion and secrets and kind of like the past having a stranglehold on the present. But the landscape changes to like the city. And this is where we do see things like to like the city in the streets, the factory, the crowds, pollution. You see this and things like Dorian Gray and Jekyll and Hyde and Dracula, although that one kind of jumps back and forth in both modes, which is a great, one of the reasons it's a great text. But you know, likewise, Jekyll and Hyde and even in some, you know, late, weird and horror fiction, like Arthur Machen, which again also kind of harkens back to the past, but really like, you try to see the same, the same kind of modes of terror, horror, dread, the unknown, doppelgangers, madness, women being taken away and like en enclosed and jailed and having to, like escape these labyrinth structures, but they they're just like not castles and not archaic landscapes, but they take place in like another form that's become taken the same kind of properties that we saw on the Gothic but again through the engine of modernity. So it's really about like, the, I would say much of the late Victorian Gothic is about the haunting and decay and monstrosity of the engines of modernity.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, so you mentioned monstrosity, which sort of leads us into where I want to go next is that we get all of these really, you know, fantastic monsters that emerge. And as you say, you know, from early on, we get some of these emerging in the earlier 19th century but then But then moving on into your your Victorian period as well. Ghosts, ghouls and fiends of all kinds. Can you talk a little bit about the presence of the monster and and how you see that monster functioning in this world?

Lorenzo Servitje:

Yeah, absolutely. So, um, well in the earlier romantic Gothic and earlier a 19th and late 18th century Gothic, there's still much of the supernatural at work. And by the late Victorian Gothic, I mean, you definitely do have like the supernatural there. But much of the supernatural can be explained through science. So like Jekyll and Hyde, for example, is a great example where you do have like a monster and you have a kind of supernatural creation of a monster, but like it has a scientific explanation. And in that way, often this these kinds of monsters are explained likewise, through fears of the progress of science and what that entails. You can see that as early as Frankenstein, but you know, you absolutely see this later on, you know, Dr. Moreau, a bunch of other tales and beyond scientific romances and horror fiction of H.G. Wells, certainly by the early 20th century, things like by Lovecraft, and likewise, there's a couple of other like less well known ones, but ones that are really using the Gothic mode to villainize scientists and doctors. And a lot of this is informed by one kind of like the fear of experimental science and experimental physiology, that was developed in the late 19th century, as defined by a famous French physiologist named Claude Bernard, who started kind of the practice of vivisection. And so this is when they were doing autopsies of live animals, because they wanted to help try to understand I think this is a quote from Bernard in his book, he says, We need to create experiments of destruction, because in order to understand nature, we need to destroy her. And the idea was like, You need to keep these animals alive. And you need to like create pathology without like anesthesia or anything like that. Except, of course, they had no problems using paralytics. But and this is, again, a nice intersection with gothic tropes of poisoning and stuff. But that was a way to kind of like we need to understand nature in its purest form. And there were a lot of politics and reaction. I mean, in fact, the SPCA developed in response to like vivisection. And in fact, anti vivisection was very tied to first wave feminism. And even you know, people like John Stuart Mill, so you get into a lot of fiction, you know, this section, just physicians and researchers as these, you know, uber villains that are like not only doing horrible experiments on animals, but they're like killing people. So, for instance, there's this one book that's not very well known, that I wrote about called St. Bernard's, The Romance of a Medical Student that's really kind of a collection of a small kind of sub genre of late Victorian Gothic fiction, where it's really villainizing medical students because there was just a lot of anxiety about them as like one being like very, by this point, very rowdy especially like in like, you know, the city, the London colleges, and then taking like body parts home and like playing tricks on their landladies and things like that, but also becoming like hyper desensitized and dehumanized by their exposure to the anatomy lab. And, you know, there's often very, you know, villainous instructors and researchers there that are doing very dubious things for research that are again harking back to things early in the 19th century. You know, like the Burke and Hare events of trying to where one Scottish doctor named Robert Knox hired these two criminals to be resurrection men and secure bodies, but when the supply of bodies ran out, like there weren't enough dead bodies, they just started killing people. And that's how they were supplying it. So like that kind of anxiety, like re emerges, even though they developed laws to kind of forestall that in problematic ways. You know, you still get Robert Louis Stevenson writing about this later on in this century in the short story, the the resurrectionist, or "The Body Snatcher," I believe it's called. So like, these are some definitely some monsters that are like where you kind of get, you know, the mad scientist or the scientist as villain, but you know, likewise, we still have, you know, Dracula, or, you know, I should also add Dr. Moreau to that one because that's an important one, particularly in the rise of evolution and degeneration and eugenics, and vivisection. But likewise, you also get Dracula in 1897, which is like such a great text because on the one hand, it's got so much of the archaic and antiquity and you know, earlier Gothic things from like a pre modern worlds, but then on the other hand, heavily technologized there's telegraph's and photographs and blood transfusions, which were ahead of the game, you have chloroform and chlorohydrate, electric lights. And Dracula is really interesting, because as Halberstam defines him in this great article called"Technologies of Monstrosity," he's defined as like an amalgam of all of his other. So it's just a stand in for so many things like immigration, degeneration. And like, you know, the way that England is declining in the face of all of its like Imperial and colonial conquest, reverse colonization, I mean, you can pick a dozen different, like, salient cultural anxieties of British culture, and you can find an element of them in Dracula as a monster. And that's like, one of the reasons it's such a pivotal text that like, kind of never seems to lose relevance. I mean, you kind of can't like, beat that undead horse to death, I think.

Chip Gruen:

Yeah. So I'm, I want to sort of follow up here a little bit, because it sounds as you're describing Dracula, I mean, it's fascinating, complicated, right text, because it seems to have this this foot in, in a couple different worlds or a couple different...

Lorenzo Servitje:

Yeah, times and worlds, right?

Chip Gruen:

Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, being somebody who's who's primarily interested in religion, you know, one of the ways I've thought about Dracula, is it's this, this old thing that will not die, right? You can't escape from that you can't get away from and so that other can be described, you know, as you say, reverse colonization, right? This is coming from Eastern Europe that this is aristocratic, right, that we're trying to get away from. But I wonder also, if it's not something about, like superstition, right? And included in that superstition is the idea of institutionalized religion as well.

Lorenzo Servitje:

Absolutely. I mean, there's definitely, like, a lot about superstition. And that's one of the things that's so scary, at least for the beginnings of the crew of light where they have to draw on Van Helsing, who seems to be this great interdisciplinarity who has a foot in both worlds, right, ain medical science and but you know, it's one of those people that has like nine degrees in spiritualism, and, you know, while he's like one of the heroes of the text, at the same time, you know, he's very, like, brus very much like controverted sensibilities, into the thing into the things that they have to do in order to, like, eliminate this monster. And so there's, like, even, you know, not just Dracula himself, who again, you know, embodies some of these old worlds things, you know, that include, like, religion and, you know, let's say like blood lineage and that kind of thing, you know, the focus on land and markers of class and status, you know, very much tied to older aristocratic and kind of feudal modes. But at the same time, you know, Dracula is also super well versed in like modernity, knows the train times, like knows the logistics of travel very much like capitalizes on like, you know, the British desire to, like globalize that to be able to, like get in where he needs to get in, but at the same time, like, you know, the, the way to, you know, combat Dracula, they still have to use these technologies of modernity. But at the same time, you know, they have to, like rely on Mina, who, you know, is infected by this vampirism and has this telepathic connection with Dracula and kind of knows, it's really interesting. It's this very kind of like espionage kind of like plot where she's, you know, little bit double agent ish. And they have to rely on that and utilize that and those reels, those, like existing supernatural things, you know, in concert with, like, the tools of modernity, that Dracula is utilizing. So it's this an interesting contest between both forces, you know, drawing on, you know, the tools, and like, you know, power, different kinds of modes of power, from different time periods in different worlds at the same time to like to resist each other. So, like, just the clash of the of the temporality in those modes, and how they're related to different kinds of institutional investments, whether they be, you know, religious, or folklore or mythic, or, you know, science and modernity and technology. They just consistently clash in the most fascinating of ways. I mean, even like, the form of the novel itself, you know, it's an epistolary novel that again, has like that's like a could be is an older tradition still shows up in the late Victorian period. But you know, you might think of that as you know, a 18th century something in the late 18th century, or early 19th century, like Frankenstein, for instance, but at the same time, you know, it's like a, oh, I'm forgetting the scholars name, who wrote this fabulous article called "A Parasite for Sore Eyes" that he talks about it is very much like proto modernism, and it's pastiche of like, not just different, like media forms, but genres and you get telegraph's and just, you know, the composition of itself like is all also likewise, flooded with contradiction. And so like, in so many ways, it's a text of like, of an antiquated time, but also ahead of its time.

Chip Gruen:

Which, I mean, it fits the period so well, right?

Lorenzo Servitje:

It does.

Chip Gruen:

That's just exactly it. So, you know, going from the stories themselves to the receptions of those stories, right? Or how they're understood. I mean, you know, I can imagine somebody out there saying, No, I loved Dracula when I was 12 years old, and what are you doing to it? Right? Like, this isn't about all of this cultural anxiety that this is just a fun story about a supernatural creature. But clearly, clearly, right that there is a whole field. And there's so much as we said, it's so pregnant with all of these other meanings, right with all of these entailments to it. And so, are those put there, right? Do you see this as the mad genius of the authors sort of imagining the world around them encapsulating in an allegory encapsulating in in metaphor? Or is this, you know, is this sort of just seeping out because it is part of the culture that they're sort of soaking in, and it can't help but come out? How do you see and think about, you know, the role of the author when we start getting into these really, when we're looking at these things, 100 years later, and finding so much in them?

Lorenzo Servitje:

It's a great question, it really kind of like speaks to in particular, you know, different debates and modes of research and theoretical approaches and literary studies, especially, you know, after the 70s. And, you know, with, you know, theorists like Foucault and Barth, and this idea of the death of the author where, you know, the, we started to become a little bit less interested in what the author intended. And I mean, for some good reasons, because I mean, evidentiary wise, I mean, that's very hard to prove, I mean, with, you know, without a ton of textual criticism and biographical criticism, and like, notes, and manuscripts and things like that, which certainly still is like a viable mode of making those kinds of claims. And Dracula is an interesting one for that, because there are

Chip Gruen:

No, that's great. So I just want to follow up with like, you can definitely see notes, you have, like, you know, his brother was a neurologist. And so you actually, there's like a lot of textual and are all evidence of him as a writer, where he's bringing in these different medical themes, you know, around like cholera and disease, he grew up after his mother having a really a horrific experience during one of the cholera epidemics in Ireland, and that was like, heavily influential to him. And it's, you know, he writes about it in relationship to not just Dracula, but one of his other short stories called "The Invisible Giant," I believe. And, you know, in the book as well, there's like, a ton of very explicit, undeniable medical references that are hard to like, say, are just like, they're like, you know, William Harvey, and Claude Bernard, and John Burdon-Sanderson, like people of the period talking about experimental physiology and germ theory. And I mean, I can also say that I mean, the idea of infectious disease and Dracula is very maps on super well to the changing understandings of infectious disease, because Dracula himself is at once, you know, this mist, he's like, he's associated with pollution and corruption, and like noxious air, and like kind of miasma. And so like, that's an older mode, but at the same time, you know, he's this contagious agent that's not really defined as such almost like a poison. So that's a pre germ theory kind of contagionism. And then finally, at the same time, the way he reproduces, has like very much the elements and the language of germ theory. And to add to that, like, you know, the ways describe to as a parasite, I mean, models like the development of parasitology, in the late 19th century. And, you know, so you have those kinds of, you know, elements in there that we could say, like, yes, you know, there are like elements of like, you know, within the author's life in periods and writing that kind of give us, you know, evidence to make claims about why there's health and medical relevance in this text beyond just like, you know, this interesting monster, but at the same time, just the, the, you know, as you were mentioning the period kind of very much informed by new historicism where we do see texts products of, you know, their cultural and historical context and try to understand what's going on historically and other documents and other periods and other archives and see how they make cross references. And so when you look at the language of infectious disease and tropical medicine, and public health and like germ theory as it's understood, both in biomedical pros in scientific publication, but also in things like, you know, all your rounds and the review of reviews and just kind of General periodical press, like the language of, you know, fighting disease and infection as like this aggregate growth thing, or as this like kind of single embodied agent. And the way that Dracula is described as being fight, they're fighting against them. And he's also talked about as a disease and as a replicating agent. And as an infection. Like, I think there's a lot of evidence, and I'm just speaking to my particular case, but I, it's the same with other sorts of readings, where you can see how, you know, the descriptions of texts, resonate with other kind of idioms. And you know, whether they be metaphors, or, you know, particular references or illusions. And then likewise, when you see the way Dracula and other texts start to show up, not only in biomedical prose, like a couple years later, but later on, or the way that scientists and doctors and people that are writing about different medical health topics or another topic, if you know, of studying health and medicine isn't your field, but you know, you're looking at, you know, economics or something like that, you know, likewise, you can start to see in the period, and then years afterwards, how those texts are either reference either just like in passing or as an illusion or as a metaphor, or just as a rhetorical device. it. And I know our time is running to a close here. So I I mean, you can see them seeping in and influencing the culture themselves. So there's that element of by directionality that likewise, I think, allows us to make these kinds of cases. I hope that answers that question. want to follow up with just the maybe the so what question, right, so you and I can sit and have this super interesting conversation, right? We're both fascinated by some of the same materials, right, some of the paradox or irony that is built into these things. And it becomes a great opportunity to have a good conversation and to find interest in this. But at the same time, you know, I think the argument that you make, and the argument that your your field makes is that this is actually important, right? That this is important to the contemporary world, in thinking about how these cultural mechanisms work, right, the thinking about what the relationship is, between the medical between the scientific and between this more amorphous, cultural, literary, you know, context in which we live, and that understanding that relationship is not only interesting, but is useful for us and something that we really need to pay attention to, can you can you give that case for me?

Lorenzo Servitje:

Yes, I can. I can think of one like particular example, I wrote this short piece for medical anthropology and science and technology studies, online publication called Somatosphere, which is fabulous. Not I mean, I like my piece, but I think the publication is fabulous, everybody should see it. And in there, I'm sort of talking a little bit about the language of the war on COVID during that moment, and there's a couple of lines, for instance, where I'm like, finding resonance in the way, you know, Donald Trump was like speaking about the China virus, and the way that this, you know, the language of infection and like stamping out and controlling and pushing out and this really militaristic, pejorative framing of not just a disease, but association of disease with people and particular groups of people was almost like it was uncannily I mean, there's a couple of quotes in there where I do this piece, I'm like, look at these, like four quotes, like, is this the crew of light? Is this Van Helsing? Or is this like Donald Trump, and there's a couple of where like it sounds like very, very close and resonant to each other. Just to give you one case, but what I would suggest is that many of these structures and thinkings especially the ones that can be problematic, and ultimately causes harm, in terms of the language and figurations we use to describe other people through lenses of either medicalized racism or xenophobia, that, you know, are kind of couched in some sort of, like, quasi science or characterization that like is, you know, thinking of these other people as being like harmful as like swarms as parasites. I mean, there's like easy associations with this. And, you know, World War II and Nazi Germany, but what I like to try to tell my students and what I like to think about, it's like, you know, we can see these things as products of their time and understand them as being problematic, and representing kind of problematic structures that are not equitable, and definitely reflecting things that we now recognize as as problems and issues of the past. But likewise, you know, the way we can see them, I think that also provides an opportunity for us to reflect on how, okay, maybe the precise thing that's been critiqued here, like very specifically, isn't the thing that's going on now, but the way of thinking or the structure, where the way it's using language and figuration and narration, or the way it's like just referring, it's being used itself as a, as a kind of placeholder, like, still operates today. I mean, the way we still use, you know, in content in contemporary movies, I mean, just think about, like James Bond movies that I think a lot of us like, and even, you know, the newer ones, I mean, we can't get away from having disability and deformity as being a marker of villainy, visually speaking. I mean, that's like an old, old, old, old kind of trope. And like, you know, we can think about that now. But I mean, we could also think about how like, look, this has been a thing since like the beginning of the Gothic, and it remains, it remains a thing. And yes, it serves a purpose in cinema and cultural productions. But why are we still invested in that? And why is that still such a utilizable and capturable you know, aesthetic mode that works in cinema? And what does that tell us, tell us? So the way that we can trace some of the things that remain from the period, and I think is one way that they're still useful. And likewise, we can think, also a bit counterfactually and say, we use these texts, almost like a theoretical apparatus and a framework to think about where we are now. And, you know, you might might work on antimicrobial resistance, for instance, you know, help us, I mean, I can make a historical case about how Dracula has a role to play in the development of the overuse of antibiotics through the kind of war of infectious disease. But, you know, we can also think about the way, you know, the War of the Worlds, or other texts, like, you know, while they might not be about something contemporary, like antimicrobial resistance in 2023 do provide us a way to think about our kind of anthropocentric way of thinking in relationship to ourselves and other kinds of life, you know, especially through a kind of colonizing impulse. So, I mean, I think there's a way that we can use them historically to trace structures and lineages. And I think likewise, they can also be used as you know, a kind of frame or kind of lenses to help analyze our own period, or something we see in the present that we might not so readily or easily see without something that's like, just defamiliar enough to be able to kind of like, just give us another perspective. I hope that gives us I hope that that answers that question.

Chip Gruen:

No, yeah, I think it absolutely does. And I think that that is a good place for us to leave it today. So thank you, Dr. Lorenzo Servitje for being with us here on ReligionWise. This has been great.

Lorenzo Servitje:

You're welcome. Thank you so much Chip.

Chip Gruen:

This has been ReligionWise. A podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about his speaking engagement. Please visit our website at religionandculture.com. There you'll find our contact information, links to other programming and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you next time.