JRSM >
Volume 96, Number 1 >
Pp. 51-52
Mount Sinai School of Medicine, 1425 Madison Avenue, Box 1240, New York, NY 10029; and Brain and Perception Laboratory, University of California, San Diego, USA
E-mail: eric.altschuler{at}mssm.edu
I have noticed that Bram Stoker's Dracula1 (1897), a multifaceted classic, contains the first known discussion of hereditary somnambulism. Lucy Westenra (who eventually is killed, after becoming a vampire subsequent to having been bitten by Count Dracula) long had a habit of sleep-walking. Moreover Lucy's mother, Mrs Westenra, tells Mina Murray ‘... that her husband, Lucy's father, had the same habit [sleep-walking], that he would get up in the night and dress himself and go out, if he were not stopped.’ Sleep-walking runs in the Westenra family. The next2 description of a hereditary component of somnambulism is not until nearly a half century later. More recent studies (e.g. Ref. 3 and references therein) continue to find a hereditary component in somnambulism, though no gene for somnambulism has yet been found.
Dracula abounds with medical content and allusions—e.g. blood transfusions, diagnosis-based treatment, David Ferrier (1843-1928), and J-M Charcot (1825-1893). Also, two important figures in the book, John Seward and Professor Abraham Van Helsing, are physicians. Even the vampire legend itself, in Dracula and other stories, may well have a medical basis4,5 (both vampirism and rabies are infectious conditions characterized by general limbic system derangement in affected individuals, as well as biting and blood-seeking behaviour). Stoker spent orders of magnitude longer on Dracula than on any of his other literary projects—six years compared with a couple of months—and read widely. Besides being an author, Bram Stoker graduated from Trinity College Dublin with honours in mathematics, and worked as a civil servant and a manager for stage actors (Bram is short for Abraham, and one suspects that Stoker portrays himself in the eccentric, eclectic, and peripatetic genius Professor Van Helsing, who has not only an MD but also a DPh and a DLit and is a lawyer). Also, in writing Dracula Stoker was greatly influenced by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein which was itself imbued with the medical and scientific spirit of James Lind, MD, FRS (1736-1812) via his lectures and contact with Shelley and her husband6. It is not known whence or how Stoker came to appreciate the hereditary nature of somnambulism, or why he chose to include the seemingly non-essential detail in Dracula.
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