When Vampire Novels Get It Wrong–Part II

In my life, I think I’ve read three vampire stories: The Vampyre, Interview with the Vampire, and Dracula.

Each is a major landmark in vampire fiction (which is why I read them; the genre doesn’t have a lot of native appeal to me, but I’m not opposed to reading the classics in it). Yesterday I was listening to an audiobook that I made out of Dracula, and it got me to thinking about the medical aspects of vampirism, which led me to do a pair of posts on the subject.

I must say that I’m impressed with the way Bram Stoker wrote Dracula. Though, from what I can tell, Stoker was an Irish Protestant, his novel is remarkably Catholic-friendly and spends a great deal of time discussing spiritual matters.

It’s also quite cosmopolitan culturally. Though the main characters are British, there are not only representatives from different English social classes but also a lot of characters from and portraits of other cultures. As he goes to visit Count Dracula in Transylvania, Jonathan Harker describes various eastern European cultures in significant detail. Dracula himself is Transylvanian. Dracula’s nemesis–Dr. Van Helsing–is Dutch. And there’s even a major character who is a cowboy from Texas.

A special treat for me is the way that different languages and dialects bleed through into the language of the novel–as when Van Helsing speaks of things that in English are neuter using the masculine or feminine genders they would have in Dutch. (E.g., referring to "corn" [i.e., wheat] as "he" instead of "it.")

The novel is told in semi-epistolary form. An epistolary novel (in the strict sense) is one told exclusively through the use of letters written by characters in the novel, though in Dracula not only letters are used but also diary entries, telegrams, and newspaper articles. (I’m sure one day soon someone will write an e-pistolary novel told entirely through e-mails.)

So it’s a cool read.

But there are still flaws.

Some of these occurred to me when Stoker got to a particular point in the plot in which a character named Lucy had become the object of Dracula’s predations and her health was suffering. Dr. Van Helsing determines (I presume correctly) that her blood loss is sufficient that she needed transfusions in order to survive. He then sets about arranging these.

At the time, this would have been REALLY cool. I don’t know of ANY prior vampire story in which they tried to bring (then) modern science to bear on the problem of vampirism by giving blood transfusions. So megakudos to Stoker for that!

But there are some oddities for the modern reader.

One of the first things that struck me about the way the novel treated them was how DRAMATIC the transfusions were held to be. I mean, the characters were making a WAY bigger deal over transfusions than we would today.

Some of that may be natural for the time period, though, since I assume transfusions weren’t done as regularly as they are now.

One of the ways that a bigger deal is made of transfusions is that there is a big hullaballoo over who can be a donor for the procedure. Van Helsing is willing to do it himself, but his student–the English Dr. John Seward–points out that he is younger and ought to do it. Better yet is Lucy’s fiance, an even younger lord who is simple and healthy and uncomplicated–unlike the two doctors who, being engaged in intellectual pursuits by their profession, have higher strung "nerves" and are less suitable donors.

This sounds very suspicious. Old people give blood all the time today. In fact, blood banks rely HEAVILY on the generosity of older people; the young frequently being unable to be bothered with giving blood. And having an intellectual career has NOTHING to do with the ability to give blood.

Still, this may have been the 19th century understanding of things.

Another way a bigger deal is made of the transfusions than we would make of them is that discussion is made of giving the donors an opiate in order to knock them out during the procedure. I guess maybe folks back then were so horrified at the thought of giving blood that they wanted to be knocked out for it, though today people give blood all the time without any sedation at all. (I’d also have a hesitancy of giving the donor a sedative as anything that goes into his bloodstream is, of necessity, going to go into the recipient’s bloodstream in short order as the transfusion progresses–see below.)

After the transfusions are over, Van Helsing orders that the donors "eat and drink much," which is fine by modern medical science. They should do that to help their bodies replenish their blood supply.

I’m less sanguine (pun intended) regarding his advice that one of the donors should be given port wine to drink after a transfusion. I’m not sure about the effects of alcohol on a person who has just given blood (won’t that at least make him EXTRA woozy?), but I can let that pass.

What really set off alarm bells was Van Helsing administering to LUCY (the blood recpient) an opiate BEFORE the transfusion in order to knock her out.

WAIT A MINUTE! Lucy is suffering from acute posthemorrhagic anemia! She’s lost so much blood that she’s going to DIE if you don’t get more blood into her. Her blood pressure is DOWN and her heart is STRUGGLING ot beat fast enough to keep her blood pressure up and her cells oxygenated. Is giving her a sedative that will depress her system REALLY the thing to do at this moment?

"Please, Jim! Don’t leave her in the clutches of 19th-century medicine!"

Where Dracula really loses it, though, is in the fact that Van Helsing administers the blood transfusions with NO ATTEMPT WHATSOEVER to establish whether the donors have blood types that are compatible with Lucy’s blood type or not.

I’m sorry, but Dracula came out in 1897, and blood typing began (in a rudimentary form) almost a hundred years earlier. Doctors had realized that far back that the reason that people often died from blood transfusions was that they had different types of blood than the donors. It was the discovery of blood typing that ALLOWED transfusions to begin to become commonplace. Previously it was too dangerous.

Now, I’m not an expert on the history of medicine, and it could be that a doctor in 1897 would have made no attempt to type the blood of a donor and a recipient, but it seems to me that almost a century after this discovery–when it was this discovery that really allowed blood transfusions to take off–that a supergenius such as Dr. Van Helsing should have been on top of this one.

So, like later authors of vampire stories, I think that Stoker could have done with a little more medical research amidst his admirable cultural and historical researches.

That doesn’t stop the book from being a really cool read, though.

GET THE STORY (FROM PROJECT GUTENBERG).

UPDATE: Further investigation reveals that Van Helsing did just fine by not checking for blood typing. The original criticism was based on a Wikipedia statement that blood typing was discovered in the first decade of the 19th century, but whoever wrote that was wrong. It now appears that blood typing was not described in medical literature until three years after Dracula appeared.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

20 thoughts on “When Vampire Novels Get It Wrong–Part II”

  1. Jimmy, would you rate Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula as true to the book?
    Also, Bram is good Protestant name, i.e. from Abraham, given the proclivity to Old Testament names by early Reformation types.

  2. “Better yet is Lucy’s fiance, an even younger lord who is simple and healthy and uncomplicated–unlike the two doctors who, being engaged in intellectual pursuits by their profession, have higher strung “nerves” and are less suitable donors.”.
    Sounds like they were still under the impression that blood disorders accounted for all kinds of unrelated maladies.
    It is amazing (and a little horrifying) to look at advertisements from that time period and see all the quackery that passed for medicine. There were dozens of popular “blood purifiers”.

  3. Jimmy: Regarding your prediction of a novel being written entirely in emails: It’s been done, though the one I’m thinking of is unlikely to have crossed your path, being a romance/chick lit novel by Meg Cabot entitled “The Boy Next Door”. I’m sure there are others, though!

  4. “There were dozens of ‘blood purifiers'”
    Tim J, what were these?
    This reminds me of what Dr. Guo, a 7th generation Chinese Medical Doctor (for longer than there has been an America the Guo family has practiced traditional chinese medicine,) told me about one of his herbal formulae “It’s not a blood thinner, you western guys always say it’s a blood thinner, it’s not a blood thinner”
    When asked about an herbal formula for getting rid of what in TCM is called “blood stagnation.” I was concerned about a pt on coumadin or warfarin. Blood stagnation causes pin point pain, like a bruise, but a bruise doesn’t have to be present to have blood stagnation.

  5. FWIW, as a quarterly blood donor I can certainly confirm that efforts to fortify oneself after a loss of blood should NOT include drinking port or other alcoholic beverages. Though as you repeatedly note the understanding in Stoker’s time may well have been inadequate on this point.

  6. “”There were dozens of ‘blood purifiers'”
    Tim J, what were these?”.
    Oh, I have no idea what was in them, Dr. Eric.
    It scarcely mattered. The main ingredients were mostly ignorance and shrewd marketing.

  7. Stoker was not alone in the blood-typing issue. There’s a George MacDonald novel in which the hero saves the heroine’s life twice by a blood transfusion, just using his own blood. Without, of course, checking the type.

  8. There’s a George MacDonald novel in which the hero saves the heroine’s life twice by a blood transfusion, just using his own blood.
    Paul Faber. But was there time to do blood typing in the first instance (it’s been several years since I read it)? If she was going to die before the test could be completed, there was nothing to lose by trying. Of course there would be no need to do typing the second time because obviously it worked the first time since she’s still alive…

  9. No, there wasn’t time. She was bleeding to death from a suicide attempt.
    OTOH, he didn’t think that there wasn’t time, he just did it.
    And, of course, he was kind of short of time the second time, too. (Childbirth, that time.)

  10. “It scarcely mattered. The main ingredients were ignorance and shrewd marketing.”
    Comment #1 “Ah, snake oil. What ever became of snake oil?”
    Comment #2 “Just like most of the drugs of today” ie vioxx, bextra, etc… especially the shrewd marketing.

  11. There’s a marvelous crime story by Dorothy Sayers called “Blood Sacrifice” which centers around a blood transfusion, performed at the scene of an accident by a doctor who carries and uses a blood typing kit. It was published in 1936 but is set a little earlier. Sayers was a stickler for medical accuracy and she correctly makes use of the fact that there were still failures even when the blood was type-matched. (At that time the Rh factor was still undiscovered.)
    Regarding Jimmy’s comments, apparently a blood transfusion was _still_ a big deal even in the period between the wars. In the story, it draws a horde of reporters and results in front-page headlines. The accident victim is a public figure but Sayers makes it clear that “the operation” itself is a sensational element.

  12. If you drink when you have less blood, you end up with a higher blood alcohol content. While you may not objectively have more ethanol in your bloodstream, the greater relative concentration will allow it to bind to receptors more readily and dissociation will be retarded, leading to greater CNS depression.
    As such, it is a bad idea to drink after giving blood and a very bad idea to drink after giving a significant amount of blood.
    Did the book mention if the good Doctor adjusted the dose of the opiate before administering it to Lucy? Because giving her a standard dose after losing that much blood would lead to the same kind of complications as drinking after donating blood.

  13. Drinking after donating blood use to be a standard thing– when my Mom first donated blood, in high school, the old guys who had just given blood invited her right over to the back where the Blood Ladies gave her a shot of the donated whiskey. (It was all good stuff.)
    She isn’t dead, and no-one she knows died of it. I presume they also had cookies and juice to chase it, but the whiskey was first.
    Ditto for my dad.
    It may not be *great* for folks, but it’s not a “bad idea” like jumping off a bridge is a bad idea.
    Now, I also know service members I’ve served with who would go donate blood to get drinking money, because they could get REALLY ripped after that…… (None of them died, and two of them did it the day before the physical readiness test, and both passed just fine. I still think they’re insane.)
    (Fairly small towns, one of County Cork Irish folks and the other Scottish and Basque folks.)

  14. “AFAIK, there is no very faithful adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula.”
    Yeah, I’d love to see a Dracula movie that depicts the Count as Stoker describes him, hair on palms & all! But, given our society’s current *vampires are romantic* thing, I somehow do not see that happening.

  15. Port wine is high in iron. My mother’s doctor told her to have a small glass every day for anemia. That’s probably why the doctor in the book would have had a patient drink it. But it would likely be a good idea to wait a few hours and drink a lot of water first.

  16. While Jimmy’s right that Dracula is generally a Catholic-friendly book, Van Helsing’s desecration of the Blessed Sacrament still bugs me.

  17. The idea that blood donation best comes from the young and strong hasn’t died out completely. When the Japanese Emperor Showa (Hirohito) was dying (1988/1989), Japanese doctors gave him blood from police officers, who were all young and strong men. Towards the end, he was receiving transfusions on a daily basis. I was living in Japan at the time, and I remember people talking about it; even very well educated people believed that giving him the blood of strong young men to be a great idea.
    I never pursued it, but I wondered if that belief was based on medical ignorance, or if the belief persisted *despite* medical knowledge. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Japanese knew the medical facts quite well, but based their belief on something else, with more religious (or spiritual, at least) overtones.

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