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Study 042 - The Island of Doctor Moreau - Part 2 (Patreon)

Published:
2023-05-11 11:00:04
Edited:
2023-10-06 09:04:18
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

Learn the terrible secrets of The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells!

Special thanks to reader Andrew Leman - check out the goods at The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society!

Outro track is on Music from the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast - Volume Three.

Next up: FEEDBACK and MORE MOREAU!

Comments

Mark Simmons

Lovely voice work by Mr. Leman! The Sayer of the Law is very preacherly, and I enjoyed his grumpy Moreau. Speaking of the Law, I'm getting ahead of the story a little bit, but my recollection is that--unlike most later adaptations--in Wells's version this parody religion wasn't created by Moreau, but by the animal people themselves. It feels to me as if they're trying to give some kind of deeper meaning to their pointless suffering - "We must have done something wrong"- but surely that's not intended as a commentary on organized religion. :-) Looking forward to Moreau's mad-scientist monologue in the next installment, which should be Leman-tastic!

HRPrice

Ah, Island of Dr Moreau- one of those classic works where the only thing I knew about it going in turned out to be the reveal. It survives cultural saturation a little better than Jekyll does, largely because the beast people scene is so wonderfully intense. Poor beast people. They’re just trying to welcome a new man to the community and let him know the ground rules, and somehow that’s the wrong thing to do this time? Moreau’s ways are ineffable indeed. The ape-man being so excited to meet another “five-man” has stuck in my head since I first read this in High School.

David Halstead

Montgomery reminds me of Fritz played by Dwight Frye in James Whale's Frankenstein.

Boss Coffee

Whenever a story mentions ‘rhythmic chanting’ in an ambiguous way my mind fills it in with the beginning of the song ‘Hooked on a Feeling’ by Blue Swede.

KateSherrod

I must confess that when I was much too young to be reading this book (but nonetheless reading this book because my elementary school librarian rocked), I interpreted the Speaker of the Law as an Eagle-Man and furthermore envisioned him as Sam the Eagle, of Muppets fame. And now I want a full Muppet Moreau, with Bunsen Honeydew in the title role with Beaker as Montgomery. But who for Prendick? Classically it should have been done in the 1970s with someone like Charles Grodin, but who now? Jason Momoa?

Eldritch Golem (JPM)

So I had my comment for this week all lined up and then Chad said that Prendick's assumption that Moreau was grafting animal parts on to people made more sense than what was actually going on and Chris questioned this, so now I have to come to Chad's defense by pointing out that this kind of xernotransplantation was something that was actually going on during Wells' lifetime, though all the cases I'm about to mention postdate the publication of The Island of Moreau. Nevertheless they could be considered real-life examples of the kind of mad science Dr. Moreau was doing. The first (and most obscure) is John R. Dedge (1865 - 1926). Dedge hailed from Georgia and graduated from the Southern Medical College in 1890 as a doctor of dental surgery. During this time dentists were often employed by sideshows to file the teeth of geeks to make them appear more savage. Dedge - who had a taste for the theatrical - had a more ambitious plan however and in 1901 performed a non-consensual surgery on a black man named Calvin Bird onto whom he grafted a pair of goat horn to his head. Bird was just the first however as Dedge would go on to create at least three more "goat-men" for various sideshows before his death. If you want to know more about Dedge historian Robert Damon Schneck tells his whole story in his book Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist: And Other Strange-but-True Tales from American History (Penguin, 2014). More well known than Dedge is Serge A. Voronoff (1866 – 1951) a French surgeon of Russian origin who gained fame for his practice of grafting the testicle of chimpanzees and baboons onto men as an anti-aging therapy while working in France in the 1920s and 1930s. Apparently Vornoff originally used the testicles of executed criminals but as these were harder to procure than those of apes and monkeys he switched to the latter. Vornoff also transplanted the thyroid glands of chimpanzees to human teenagers suffering from thyroid deficiencies and the ovaries of monkeys into infertile women. David Hamilton's book The Monkey Gland Affair (1986) tells the whole story of Voronoff's pseudoscientific career. Finally there is John R. Brinkley (1885 – 1942) who combines the best - or maybe worse - attributes of both Dedge and Voronoff and so is perhaps rightly the most infamous. Brinkley was a native of North Carolina who had no formal medical training or education and acquired his credential as a doctor from a "diploma mill" with the amazing title of the Kansas City Eclectic Medical University. In October of 1917 Brinkley and his wife moved to Milford, Kansas after he spotted an ad in a newspaper saying the town needed a doctor. The following year he opened a 16-room clinic and began treating local residents. One day a patient came to him asking if he could fix a man who was "sexually weak." Brinkley responded that the patient would have no problems if he had "a pair of those buck [goat] glands in you." The patient then begged Brinkley to try and graft the testicles of a goat onto him, which Brinkley did for $150. Soon after Brinkley began to perform more operations to restore male virility through the transplanting of goat testicular glands onto male patients at a cost of $750 per operation. Brinkley - who remember had no medical training whatsoever - often performed these operations while drunk and with instruments which had not been sterilized. As a result an undetermined number of his patients died. There is a 2016 documentary about Brinkley by director Penny Lane with the appropriate title of Nuts!

Dyche Mullins

Chad seems surprised that Chris would not be put off by a “Dog’s breakfast.” Nicely done.

Ethan Cordray

Oh man, this episode seems to be bringing back memories I'd repressed from reading this novel. I find this to be one of the most disturbing pieces of horror literature of all time. It's got it all: medical horror, body dysmorphic horror, survival horror, existential horror about the blurred lines between human and beast. Eesh. Personally, I find the prospect of deliberately-inflicted medical mutilation to be deeply upsetting. But more than anything, I'm moved by the pitiable situation of the beast-men. They never asked for any of this. They've been twisted and transformed by Moreau's experiments, and now all they're trying to do is cope by living as well as they can in their painful unnatural forms.

Jim Cannon

Why did I bounce off this so hard thirty years ago? I had the same trouble with _At the Mountains of Madness_ at the time but I managed to read that eventually. Not so Moreau. Reading it now I am utterly floored at how horrid the situation is for everyone involved, but especially the experiments. Feeling sorry for them isn't going to keep anyone from getting murdered, though, I can already tell.

Anna-Elizabeth

I think when pain is so callously inflicted, when humans lack empathy for the suffering of others, that is the most disturbing thing for me. Such is far too often encountered in life.

Anna-Elizabeth

Also, I couldn't help but think of the great Donald Pleasance - "A Pyu-may-mon, if you will".

Leprejuan

Dudes, I know that I am older than you so 80's music means something else to me than it means to you but Oingo Boingo NO SPILL BLOOD was RIGHT THERE! To the house of pain indeed!

Jack Saul

Alan Moore has Moreau as a character in his League of Extraordinary Gentleman where he is responsible for creating various anthropomorphised Victorian and Edwardian animal characters such as Rupert Bear, Peter Rabbit and Mr Toad from Wind in the Willows. Moore links the story with Darwinism, and he argues that only after Darwins ideas spread do you get animal stories where animals are fully humanised and wear full human clothes, live in human housed etc- and that this is the anxiety about humanity existing on a continuity with animals rather than as some unique distinct form- not only fear of degeneration but also them being far closer to us than we might think.

Hayden Orr

You guys mentioned some unexpected influences this book has had on pop culture in general over the years but it’s had a great many influences on the world of comics as well! While there have been multiple straight adaptions of the story, the most recent of which was done by Ted Adams and Gabe Rodriguez and is great by the way, Moreau as a character has popped up in comics outside his own story as well. He appears in vol 2 of the league of extraordinary gentlemen (where Alan Moore implies he’s an uncle of the painter Gustave Moreau) he shows up as a villain in a Hugh Jackman Van Helsing prequel comic, and recently in a weird west comic called West of Sundown. There was also a DC elseworlds comic where the Justice league are all hybrids created by Moreau, and in one of the later arcs of Eric Powell’s The Goon series, the book and its themes play a big role in a characters mental breakdown.

Jason of the K

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 borrows HEAVILY from Dr. Moreau. I feel like the "Can I mold flesh to make it something new?" idea is a timeless concept, even moreso in todays world of advanced cosmetic surgery and even physical transformations with larynx and uterus transplants, as well as gender reassignment surgery. How much does physical change relate to mental or emotional change? Can one drive the other or is it always a fleeting effect? Is the only thing separating man from dog an opposable thumb and a voicebox? Is enough surgery all it takes to be a Kardashian, will I succeed when so many others try and fail?

Tomas Rawlings

Great episode as ever! Wanted to add a note regarding evolution and 'de-evolution' - that idea that the evolution path was a 'tree' and as organisms got more complex they got 'better/higher' is a very human interpretation of evoution and very much of the age the story was written in as you noted. The goal of a species is to procreate to survive, so becoming more complex is just a strategy to achive that. A virus, a very simple organism by comparision to us (but also very complex in own right!) is very, very sucsessful in evolutionary terms; numbering countless forms and popuations here on earth whos numbers dwarf us Sapiens. So the idea that there are higher or lower beings in evolutionary terms is just not how nature works, only how we interpret nature and our place within it. For example Neanderthals, in the past considered a 'lower' or more 'primative' form of Hominid lasted for around 450,000 years, whereas us Homo sapiens are around 350,000 years old, so before we consider ourselves 'better' than them, we've got to last around a hundred thousand years more! Interesting too is that Darwin realised humans were subject to the same process as all other creatures, but really held back in going to far here, as he knew already that his ideas were hard to take for Victorian society. Which helped to further the idea that somehow us humans were the 'peak' of the process. Cosmic horror warning; we're not and the full realisation of evoution's implications is that every species that is born is also destined to die. Us included.

Magicthize

Only upon listening to this week's episode did it occur to me that 1980's space cowboy super hero BraveStarr *must* be an alumnus of the good Doctor's island given his special powers of: Eyes of the Hawk Ears of the Wolf Strength of the Bear Screams of the Puma

Colm Kearns

"There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other." Our man HP was right on the money with that one, and this story (and particularly Andrew's reading of it) really gets under the skin with this primal, nature-transgressing horror.

Grahm Eberhardt

I will forevemore ask myself "Does it look like a dog cooked it?" before every meal. Thanks Chad!