This Is How a Historian Ends Up Becoming a Novelist Who Writes About Vampires

by Brandy Schillace

Brandy Schillace, PhD, is managing editor of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry and Research Associate for the Dittrick Museum of Medical History. Her non-fiction book, "Death's Summer Coat: What the History of Death and Dying can Tell us about Life and Living," will be released in 2015 with Elliott and Thompson. Her most recent book is "Villagers," the second in her Jacob Maresbeth Chronicles.

“What do you do for a living?” asked an innocent bystander—with no idea what he was in for.

“I work at a history museum,” I say. “And I’m managing editor for a medical anthropology journal. I also teach a class on history of science and the Gothic, lecture on anatomy and the history of birth, and write about death and ritual. Did I mention I’m a historian? Right. I also write vampire fiction.”

That’s a terrible opening for any cocktail hour conversation. What on earth could any of these disparate ideas have in common? The answer usually surprises people.

I work at the Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum. The exhibits appear on the third floor, the Allen Memorial Medical Library on the second floor, and in the basement lurk the sprawling, fascinating, seemingly endless collections (for which there simply isn’t room upstairs). As I sit here writing, I keep company with a 500-year old ivory anatomy model, a surgery set with amputation saw, two pairs of forceps and fifteen archive boxes of forensics material. And that’s just the desk-space paraphernalia that accumulates after a summer of research. There are days when I have trouble seeing the chief curator, with whom I share an office, over the books on obstetrics, surgery, anatomy, brain science, and more that steadily accumulate in the office—which is, itself, the one-time reading room and library of a Cleveland Syphilologist, Thomas Corlett. I sometimes think, if we sit still enough, we’ll be catalogued into the collection along with everything else. (One can dream.)

Any museum usually has far more in its collection than can reasonably be displayed. So what happens to all that other material? It serves as the seed bed for ideas, enriching our experiences of history. This last spring, while cleaning in the stacks, we re-discovered an exhibit from the museum’s original curator, Howard Dittrick. Pig’s pancreas, emulsified, separated into vials and tied with red bows can cause quite a stir: this was an original exhibit on the creation of insulin by Eli Lilly. Plus, we had a pig’s pancreas wrapped in ribbon; I mean really, who wouldn’t be excited? Diabetes used to be a death sentence; children rarely lived past toddlerhood—their emaciated, sunken forms appear in some of the old photographs. Diabetic children “withered” away, mainly because, before insulin, the only real way to treat the disease was a starvation diet of extremely reduced calories and carbohydrates. Imagine the drawn looks and sunken cheeks, the plaintive hunger that cannot be satiated. Insulin gave them a chance at life. On the other end of the spectrum (and returning to Corlett’s “syphilology”), we have diseases like syphilis that affected adults through sexual transmission—and yet, it frequently affected children, too, through congenital birth defects. The introduction of Salvarsan 606 (a mercury compound) could cure the disease, not just treat the symptoms—and we have that hanging about the museum collection, too, with some nasty looking syringes.

The pig's pancreas wrapped in ribbon

These two conditions and their treatments can tell us something beyond medicine, something that gets at the heart of what it means to be human. Consider, for a moment, what such illnesses were like before they were medically explained? Children who waste away, eruptions on the skin, eating away the flesh like some sort of zombie contagion…Medical history often includes byways into folklore, fiction, and the Gothic imagination itself. It certainly influences my imagination, firing it to light with the tangible, the real. Touch the strange stretched skin of the obstetrical mannequin, remove the tiny ivory organs from the model on my desk, handle the tools of surgery that, while effecting a cure, were also horrors in their own right. Suddenly, you find yourself considering the people behind the objects, their hopes, their dreams, their dread. This has been my experience, and research into medical histories and mysteries ultimately led me to write fiction. About a vampire. And I’m not the first.

In 1732, a vampire “outbreak” happened at Český Krumlov, not far from Prague. I say a bit more about this in an article for Disinfo (“What’s a Vampire, Really?), but the question, for me, was this: Why outbreak? Why not, for instance, call them vampire attacks? Because the fear of vampires at the time were linked to contagion and spread of disease, and by some accounts, vampirism sounds much more viral than supernatural. The “vampire debate” of the 1730s borrowed from science and from folklore. Some 40 years later in 1775, Kirby’s Miscellany carried the story of a young woman struck by palsy who could not eat. She must have been starving and dehydrated, but the witness describes something else entirely: “her cheeks [are] full, red, and blooming. […] she slept a great deal and soundly, perspired sometimes, and now and then emitted pretty large quantities of blood at her mouth.”i Such descriptions probably sound familiar, and it’s no surprise; Bram Stoker spent years researching strange tales of folklore for Dracula, and the vampire-infected Lucy is described much the same way.

What if vampirism was a contagion of the blood? The biggest fear for those at Český Krumlov was not that the bodies would reanimate, but that their fluids might contain a kind of pollution, an infection. In Bram Stoker’s day, syphilis certainly fit the bill. Some estimates suggest as many as one in three people had syphilis, but it passed—like the vampire, perhaps—unnoticed in its secondary phase, allowing the infected to spread disease without check. Worse, syphilis could enact its rage on the innocent—on children born from afflicted parents. According to a popular treatise on syphilis at the time of Dracula’s publication, children might be born apparently “healthy and vigorous.”ii However, symptoms begin to appear within the first three months: “the skin is loose and wrinkled […] the hair dry and scanty”—the child appears to age rapidly and unnaturally.iii Like the diabetic children, they wither before the anxious eyes of their parents who, knowingly or not, have passed the deadly poison through the transmission of fluid. It’s worth noting that Stoker himself likely had syphilis.iv He didn’t infect his own child, as he contracted the disease afterwards, but the shame attached to the disease remained—it was, in fact, called a “taint” in the blood, something “monstrous.” And considering the numbers of blood-born diseases we now know of (and the myriad others that we probably don’t), I found myself wondering about the possibilities. What if a modern-day child became infected with a curious disease of the blood? What if it seemed, in many respects, like vampirism? What sort of hurdles would he have to surmount to avoid being labeled a monster?

My fiction series, the Jacob Maresbeth Chronicles, are not, strictly speaking, about a vampire. Or not quite. The sixteen-year-old protagonist has a blood disorder, a mystery condition that plagues him as he tries (like so many real young people before him) to lead a normal life. How would he navigate his bizzare condition in the face of a medical community willing at once to seize him as a lab rat or–alternatively–to burn him at the stake? And what if, instead of being angst-ridden and brooding, he was just another teen trying to fit in?

“Let’s face it,” says Jake, “consuming raw blood instead of cheeseburgers kind of gets you noticed, and not in a good way.” Easygoing and affable, Jake knows the whole blood-drinking thing is a little weird, but doesn’t spend too much time thinking about it. What teen would? Hospital visits suck (pun intended) and medical tests are boring. Anyway, Jake’s got bigger things to worry about, like writing articles for the school newspaper and trying—desperately—to get a date. But the safety bubble Jake’s family and community provides is burst when he takes a summer visit to his quirky professor Aunt Sylvia. While Jake and his theatre-loving sister Lizzy struggle to keep the “unofficial” details of his disorder secret from Aunt Syl (who embarrassingly mistakes Jake’s condition for spastic colon syndrome), Jake also has to contend with a growing appetite and a limited travel-sized blood supply. Level-headedness tends to be Lizzy’s strong suit, however, and Jake throws caution to the wind in an effort to impress Zsófia, Aunt Sylvia’s gorgeous Hungarian graduate student… And that’s just book one. In book two there are bullies, and thefts, and a nefarious hematologist who is a little too interested in Jake’s condition.

Blond beach boy with a spotless reputation, well-balanced home life, and plenty of friends: it doesn’t sound like your normal angsty vampire novel. But the world of a “differently abled” young adult is fraught with plenty of danger—probably as much now as it ever was. And so, my interests in history, my work at a medical museum, and my love of reading and of the Gothic have a great deal to do with how the Jacob Maresbeth Chronicles took shape. An active curiosity and a willingness to get your hands dirty—to touch the tangible pieces of history—opens windows into who we are today.

And now, about that pig’s pancreas…

iKirby, R.S. Kirby’s wonderful and scientific museum: or, Magazine of remarkable characters, Vol 4. (London: 1820), , 242.

iiiIbid.

ivSenf, Carol A. “Dracula: Stoker’s Response to the New Woman.” Victorian Studies, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Autumn, 1982), pp. 38