Horrors of the Medical Profession

[dem bones]

in tribute to Dr. Heiter and his revolutionary one-man sewing circle, an imaginary collection of Horrors of the Medical Profession. The spirit of this anthology can be summed up in Lord P.'s appraisal of The Human Centipede

The whole concept is horrible, the mad scientist does what he does for no other reason than because it's going to cause suffering, which it does, in spades."

The much loved and sadly missed Karl Edward Wagner led the way with his excellent anthology, Intensive Scare - as ever, he was too modest to include his own work but The Fourth Seal or Passages really should have been in there.

Rivals of the The Human Centipede

Alex White - The Clinic
Seabury Quinn - The House Where Time Stood Still
Flavia Richardson - Behind The Yellow Door
Charles Birkin - The Harlem Horror
Harold Ward - The House Of The Living Dead
Bassett Morgan - The Island Of Doom
Robert Ferrers Broad- Dr. Fawcett’s Experiment
Charles Braunstone - Suitable Applicant
Harry E. Turner - The Tunisian Talking Ferret
James McClure - God, It Was Fun
Dawn Muscillo - Sister Coxall's Revenge
John Llewellyn Probert - Size Matters
David Campton - At The Bottom Of The Garden

A grim thirteen to be getting get going with, depending on how many of you fancy picking up the gauntlet of gloom, I've a feeling this is a thread that could run for a few pages at least. With but two exceptions, all date from the pre-WWW2 Weird Tales/ Not At Night/ Creeps golden age or the Pan Horror stories.

Virgil Finlay (Weird Tales, March 1939).

Seabury Quinn - The House Where Time Stood Still: KEW already beat us to Seabury Quinn's classic The House Of Horror featuring the brilliant surgeon Dr. Marston in The House Of Horror avenging the suicide of him son by deforming beautiful women. Fortunately, Quinn was very generous with his evil surgeons and mad scientists, seemingly all - bar one unforgivable exception: what was that goody two-shoes bastard in Frozen Fear playing at? - both fiendishly sadistic and rabidly misogynistic. Otto Beneckendorff, the depraved vivisectionist in Horror On The Links is deserving of a mention, but i've gone for Dr. Friedrichsohn in The House Where Time Stood Still. De Grandin and Trowbridge investigate the disappearance of Southerby, an English diplomat who has gone missing en route to Washington. During a rainstorm, they discover his car in a river, and Trowbridge wanders off to a nearby mansion to request a tow-rope. This is the home of the brilliant German surgeon Friedrich Friedrichsohn and his assistant in infamy, Mishkin. Trowbridge is taken prisoner and the sadist takes huge delight in parading the wretched victims of his horrific experiments, the most appalling attrocities having been inflicted on that which was once Viki Boehm, the Viennese coloratu, whose crime was to spurn the evil genius. She is now a toad-like, pear-shaped monster with neither arms nor legs, held captive in a roomful of mirrors so she remains constantly conscious of her mutilation.

Charles Birkin – The Harlem Horror: The Harwoods, Michael, Mary and little Clare, move from London to New York. There have been a spate of child disappearances in the Big Apple, and one day Clare goes missing. Some months later, the grieving, broken parents attend a funfair on Coney Island. During a sudden downpour they take shelter in a tent which turns out to be the entrance to a freak show. The star exhibit is the ‘What-is-it?’, a one-eyed, hideously deformed creature which the barker assures is female and aged no more than ten. On the boat home to England, Michael buys a newspaper. The lead story tells of a police raid on a laboratory in Harlem where the brilliant – albeit criminally insane – plastic surgeon, Sir John Trowbridge, has been performing abominable vivisection on children and animals which he then sells on to the freak shows

Birkin would return to the medical profession for several of his vilest creations, a case in point being Dr. Morris of the Meryham Mental Home in The Last Night, which might best be summed up by the line “It’s to be our secret, my dear. You understand that, don’t you? If you tell anyone that I shall come, I’ll kill you.” Nora, who is to be freed tomorrow after three years incarceration, pleads with the staff not to let Dr. Morris come anywhere near her. She can’t get Dr. Patterson to listen, and nurse tells her to stop being a naughty girl or they’ll keep her in indefinitely. In the early hours, Dr. Morris pays her a visit. After hypnotizing her he sets out to prove that “pain exists only in the imagination.” Out comes the scalpel …

Flavia Richardson – Behind The Yellow Door: Mrs. Merrill, the brilliant surgeon and pathologist, advertises for a secretary. Marcia Miles is told that her main duty will be to act as a companion to her daughter, Olivette. As it transpires, Merrill only wants some of Miss Miles to act as permanent companion to the girl, who is a horror from the waist down. Together with Dorcas the ‘chambermaid’, Mrs. Merrill overpowers Marcia and straps her down on the operating table: “Assuming that the operation is successful, as it must be, you will find Olivette’s deformed legs grafted on to your body, while Olivette will at last be able to enjoy her life as a normal human being. She has waited nearly twenty years. You have had twenty years. It’s your turn.”

Bassett Morgan - Island Of Doom: On a remote tropical island, Bill Evans carries out his pioneering research in the field of brain surgery with only wife Nell, two Chinese assistants and a tame orangutan, Willie, for company. "Think if we could take human wrecks and use the best bits! That's what my surgery is for", he explains to Mansey, the fellow who periodically visits the island to deliver the surgeon's supplies. Mansey admires the crocodiles with the brains of hens and the fly trap orchids - "cultivated and bred for size and ferocity" - fed by Willie with lumps of pig meat. Most of all, though, he admires Nell.

Bill Evans' neglected but loving wife has another admirer, Dink Forster, Bill's fellow surgeon, whom she jilted, and when he arrives at the island to assist in his rival's experiments, it is with malice aforethought. Forster takes advantage of Nell's brief sojourn to Australia (where she's gone to have a baby) to operate on her husband, transplanting Willie's brain into his head and vice versa. As he crows to the horrified Mansey: "He'll have time to think of the Hell I've endured thinking of Nell with him. Only with Nell and me the separation was geographical. With Nell and Bill it's biological!"

Mansey is clubbed unconscious and strapped down for brain surgery, but the orangutan with Bill's brain rescues him, slashes Forster to pieces and then throws himself into the midst of the monstrous vampire flowers.

Robert Ferrers Broad - Dr. Fawcett’s Experiment: The disgraced biologist, ‘Nicholas Fawcett’, holes up in the country where he can conduct undisturbed his researches for the dubious benefit of mankind. A luckless, epileptic tramp chooses to take a doze in his garden and the kindly mad professor takes him under his wing, helping himself to the fellow’s brain and sundry internal organs while he’s about it. Fawcett raises a murderous culture - “an obscene thing that … swelled in my glass dish like a huge puffball” - which soon runs amok in a frenzy of throat-ripping.

Harry E. Turner - The Tunisian Talking Ferret: Set in a grim bazaar in the Casbah, this has everything that is good about a pulp horror story - an evil dwarf-cum-mad surgeon, scientifically dubious brain transplants (Rog Pile is so right about this being "Bassett Morgan territory") and several murders. The real horror is in Turner's graphic depiction of the squalor and abject hopelessness of the beggars locked into the ungovernable few miles of fetid, sweltering slum. "Nearby a donkey hee-hawed and emptied its bowels into the street"

David Campton - At The Bottom Of The Garden: Truly horrible tale of a little girl who befriends a ... something which attempts to cure her headaches and fix her wonky eye. Unfortunately, her parents disturb the strange surgeon when she's reached the tricky stage of the operation.

some monster nurses from Vault Mk. I

Kim Newman - Where The Bodies Are Buried 3. Elizabeth Yatman wasn't quite glamorous enough to become a 'Comet Knock-out' ("I didn't grow the chest for it") so the young blonde became a 'Sister of Murder' instead, bumping off all the little kids in her care to secure a place on the front page of her favourite newspaper!

The vicious old bat in Flavia Richardson's Behind The Blinds, an everyday story of a brilliant scientist "stricken with a loathsome disease" and his elderly assistant, who keep girls chained up in the spare room and starve them to death. As the twisted old spinster explains to plucky Joan Morgan: "slimming is so fashionable now. Our method of reducing is a little drastic perhaps, but so efficacious ... in a few days you will hardly know yourself. Your clothes will hang on you so loosely that it will be simpler to remove them entirely .... we keep our patients under a very strict regime - no outings, and no visitors - except the doctor, of course. And he comes twice daily".

She's the talkative one of the two. It's the best the wheelchair-bound old boy can do to slobber "too fat ... too fat" and chuckle with "filthy, senile amusement."

In Dawn Muscillo's Sister Coxall's Revenge the scourge of Violet Ward doesn't take kindly to a new doctor interfering with the way things are run ...

[oatcakeredux]

No place for Christopher Fowler's On Edge?

This truly un-nerving tale of an unfortunate guy who pays a visit (courtesy of a brazil nut) with a cracked tooth to an unfamiliar, all-too-happy dentist is a truly gruesome piece, with an unforgettable ending.

"And whatever - whatever you forget to do...don't for God's sake forget to floss."

[Shrink Proof]

From the psychiatric end of medicine comes "The Boogeyman" by Stephen King.

The majority of the story occurs in the office of Dr. Harper, a psychiatrist, where a man named Lester Billings talks to the doctor about the "murders" of his three young children. Billings seems paranoid and possibly schizophrenic as he describes the circumstances of the death of his children. His first two children died mysteriously of apparently unrelated causes (diagnosed as crib death and convulsions, respectively) when left alone in their bedrooms. The only commonalities were that the children cried "Boogeyman!" before being left alone, and the closet door was open slightly after finding their corpses, even though Billings was certain the door was shut.
Billings' wife Rita became pregnant approximately a year after their second child's death, at which time the family was living in a different house far away from the location of the original deaths. Their first year in the new house was without incident, but not long after, Rita left to care for her mother who had become ill. Billings and his son were left alone in the house.
It soon became apparent that whatever had killed the first two children had managed to track down Billings and his family, lingering in the closets for a brief time. Finally one night, the child cried "Boogeyman" while being put to bed, and an hour later, the child began to scream. Billings ran into the son's room and found a demon killing the boy. Billings, terrified, fled to a local 24-hour diner. He returned home at dawn to find the boy on the floor with a broken neck and the closet door open slightly. Billings lied to the police, arguing that the death must have been accidental.
As Billings finishes his story and starts to leave, Harper recommends he make an appointment with the nurse for further discussion. Returning to the office after finding the lobby deserted, Billings finds Harper taking off a mask to reveal that he is in actuality the Boogeyman that had killed his children.

Trust me, I'm a doctor....

[dem bones]

some more from the psychiatric end, etc.

The Boogeyman strikes me as King's fleshed out and E.C.-ed up take on another psychiatric horror, Dr. David H. Keller's much anthologised The Thing In The Cellar. It was almost mandatory that a depression era pulp author came with an interesting back-story, and in Keller's case it was a long term career in psychiatry, an experience which, allegedly, soured his view of womankind. The stories collected in Tales From Underwood (Neville Spearman, 1974) are divided into three sub-sections, 'The Science Fictioneer', 'The Fantaisiste' and 'The Psychiatrist'. If you've not already had the pleasure, it's worth looking out for. Keller's work is consistently rewarding.

Shrinks of the mad/ evil variety are as much a fixture of Robert Bloch's work as murder by decapitation, and he combines both of his favourite fixations in The Closer Of The Way. i'm also a big fan of another of his relatively late psycho outings, The Rubber Room.

The late, great Tim Stout's Wake Up Dead sees a Dr. Kellin expose mass-murderer John Vanner to his deepest fears with hideous results, a theme later, uh, "expanded upon" in at least two horror novels by 'Thomas Luke' and Guy N. Smith, both of which share the title Phobia.

and, of course, there have been enough vampire-on-the-couch stories to fill a Robinson Mammoth Book!