Heroes Not Zombies

The BMJ carries a weekly column about literary classics and the piece this week by Ross Camidge considers Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. If you’ve never read the book, you’ve missed something. As Ross Camidge points out the movies over the years have distorted the serious and fascinating consideration of life which Mary Shelley’s book presents. (As well as the original book I highly recommend the biopic about James Whale, who made the original Frankenstein movies – “Gods and Monsters” – a disturbing but very insightful tale)

Frankenstein (the book) is subtitled “The Modern Prometheus”. Don’t know if you remember about Prometheus but he is the one who stole fire from the Gods and took it to Earth to create Life out of the soil. Frankenstein is the creator’s name (it’s not the “monster’s”) and his intention was a good one, but how he handles his creation is one of the morals of the story. Here’s the last paragraph from the BMJ column –

Frankenstein’s outright rejection of his creation, denying it even a name, twisted its basic goodness into hateful barbarity. This is something to think about when treatments go wrong and patients or relatives look to us for answers and support. Or when trainees are heading off the rails and need more intensive mentoring. Frankenstein teaches us that to get the best possible outcome from anything that has involved our creative input requires elements of responsible care, love, and nurturing. And if we do this we will not create monsters.

Oh, that’s so spot on! Let’s bring that back into the agenda when we consider health care and the education and training of health care professionals –  “responsible care, love, and nurturing”