In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [82]
Swift is thought to have begun Gulliver’s Travels in 1721, which was interestingly enough the year in which a deadly smallpox epidemic broke out, both in London and in Boston, Massachusetts. There had been many such epidemics, but this one saw the eruption of a heated controversy over the practise of inoculation. Divine knowledge had varying views: was inoculation a gift from God, or was smallpox itself a divine visitation and punishment for misbehaviour, with any attempt made to interfere with it being impiety? But practical results rather than theological arguments were being increasingly credited.
In London, inoculation was championed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had learned of the practise in Turkey when her husband had been ambassador there; in Boston, its great supporter was, oddly enough, Cotton Mather—he of the Salem witchcraft craze and The Wonders of the Invisible World—who had been told of it by an inoculated slave from Africa. Both, though initially vilified, were ultimately successful in their efforts to vindicate the practise. Both acted in concert with medical doctors—Mather with Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, who, in 1726, read a paper on the results of his practise-cum-research to the Royal Society, Lady Mary with Dr. John Arbuthnot.
You might think Swift would have been opposed to inoculation. After all, the actual practise of inoculation was repulsive and counterintuitive, involving as it did the introduction of pus from festering victims into the tissues of healthy people. This sounds quite a lot like the exploding dog from the Grand Academy of Lagado and such other Lagadan follies. In fact, Swift took the part of the inoculators. He was an old friend of Dr. Arbuthnot, a fellow member of the Martinus Scriblerus Club of 1714, a group that had busied itself with satires on the abuses of learning. And, unlike the ridiculous experiments of the “projectors”—experiments that may have been invented by Swift with the aid of some insider hints from Dr. Arbuthnot—inoculation seemed actually to work, most of the time.
It isn’t experimentation as such that’s the target of Book Three, but experiments that backfire. Moreover, it’s the obsessive nature of the projectors: no matter how many dogs they explode, they keep at it, certain that the next time they inflate a dog they’ll achieve the proposed result. Although they appear to be acting according to the scientific method, they’ve got it backward. They think that because their reasoning tells them the experiment ought to work, they’re on the right path; thus they ignore observed experience. Although they don’t display the full-blown madness of the truly mad fictional scientists of the mid-twentieth century, they’re a definitive step along the way: the Lagadan Grand Academy was the literary mutation that led to the crazed white-coats of those B movies.
There were many intermediary forms. Foremost among them was, of course, Mary Shelley’s Dr. Frankenstein, he of the man-made monster—a good example of an obsessive scientist blind to all else as he seeks to prove his theories by creating a perfect man out of dead bodies. The first to suffer from his blindness and single-mindedness is his fiancée, murdered by the creature on Dr. Frankenstein’s wedding night in revenge for Frankenstein’s refusal to love and acknowledge the living being he himself has created. Next came Hawthorne’s various obsessed experimenters. There’s Dr. Rappaccini, who feeds poison in small amounts to his daughter, thus making her immune to it though she is poisonous to others and is thus cut off from life and love. There’s also the “man of science” in “The Birthmark,” who becomes fixated on the blood-coloured, hand-shaped birthmark of his beautiful wife. In an attempt to remove it through his science