Mary Shelley's Frankenstein @ 200: it's alive! and why it still matters

2018-02-14

University of Virginia. School of Medicine

In the summer of 1816, an eighteen-year-old English girl on a lark in Switzerland with a married man and her stepsister began writing a story that would outlive her by centuries. Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, published in 1818, still fascinates and confounds us today, told and retold in so many genres that even those who have never read the original know the story. This Medical Center Hour marks Frankenstein's 200th anniversary by exploring two of the many reasons for its apparent immortality. First, this novel probes the central quest of medicine and biology: What is life? Second, it asks—but leaves for us to answer—the essential ethical question: Should we as human beings manipulate the spark of life?

Co-presented with the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, Historical Collections, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library

Hitchcock, Susan Tyler (Speaker); Guo, Jacqueline (Speaker); Childress, Marcia Day (Moderator); University of Virginia. School of Medicine

Claude Moore Health Sciences Library

Filmed lectures

Literature and medicine; Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851; Frankenstein (Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft)

Medical Center Hour

Claude Moore Health Sciences Library

English

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1 online resource (1 video file, 57:11 min.) : sound, color