Van Helsing’s decision to transfuse the blood of Lucy’s suitors into her proves not only futile but also dangerous: Lucy, far from helpless, ultimately turns undead to prey upon children, and Dracula’s contagion now potentially circulates among the male citizens of an ostensibly pure English nation.
Stoker’s Dracula, in particular, imagines transfusion at its very limits. Victorian gothic texts like Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s “ Good Lady Ducayne” (1896) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) feature explicitly the scene of blood transfusion, suffused with the sentimentality of the sickly female in need of male medical heroism. Gothic literature since the late eighteenth century and sensation fiction in the mid-nineteenth century dramatized the dangers that could befall the vulnerable “Angel in the House.” This gendered “gothic body,” characterized by her susceptibility to violation and permeability of corporeal boundaries, became the figure by which cultural anxieties surrounding the female could be worked out. The figure of the male physician (who could possibly be a quack) interloping in these otherwise private, domestic spaces, as well as possibly serving as a donor himself in the place of a husband with a weak constitution, provoked further suspicion of an already invasive, risky procedure.** It is no surprise then that practitioners customarily employed husbands as donors for their wives due to the intimacy of the procedure that took place by the bedside.įurthermore, we can connect blood transfusion to the history of obstetrics, which shifted during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from midwives to male physicians. The donor-patient relationship Aveling understands to be “a close imitation of nature” is a heterosexual one that physically connects the bodies of a healthy male donor and a receptive female. These details underscore the persistent gender hierarchy in Victorian medical theory and practice. Note also that Aveling’s figure first appears in the Obstetrics Journal. Critical to my reading is the explicit gendering of the two subjects: the patient is depicted as a female in bed and the blood donor is depicted as a male seated by the bedside and facing away from the patient. In this figure, we have a representation of the proper positioning of patient and blood donor for immediate transfusion.
Aveling promoted his technological solution as a method that was “safe, easy, uninterrupted, and a close imitation of Nature.”īut what Aveling believed to be “safe” and “a close imitation of nature” was precisely the center of intense medical debate* in Victorian scientific communities surrounding the controversial procedure of blood transfusion only recently brought back into practice in 1818 by James Blundell, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh.
Theoretically, immediate transfusion aimed to circumvent the problem of coagulation or blood clotting thought to be caused by the blood’s contact with the air. In 1873, James Aveling proposed the first apparatus for immediate transfusion, a blood transfusion procedure characterized by the direct connection between donor and patient. Aveling, `Immediate transfusion in England’, Obstetrics Journal, 1873, 1, 303. To contribute to this set, contact Lan Li at H. The Image Series invites HASTS affiliates and guest authors to write freely about one image relevant to their work.