Medicine, Crime and Realism in Ouida’s ‘Toxin’ (1895)

Abstract

In 1895, Ouida published a short story called ‘Toxin’ in the Illustrated London News which prompted an outraged response from the British medical establishment. In their words, this tale of an English surgeon who decides to murder his patient depicts ‘the search after scientific truth as naturally leading to crime’. The British Medical Journal considered Ouida’s story ‘an attack […] on the medical profession’. This article analyses the story and the BMJ’s response, considering it in relation to crime fiction and realism. It further looks at reports of medical crimes in the late-nineteenth century, and considers Ouida’s deployment of diphtheria, a virulent epidemic of its time, through reports of the recently discovered cure in medical journals and the popular press. I argue that the reason the BMJ felt so threatened by her depiction of a murderous doctor is in great part due to Ouida’s attention to medical realism: the threat of fiction’s entanglement with the real.

• Content Warning

This journal article contains graphic descriptions of animal and human suffering, vivisection, murder, and cruelty, which may be disturbing to some readers.

1. Introduction

In 1895, Ouida published a short story called ‘Toxin’ in the Illustrated London News. Set in Venice, the story involves a romance between an aristocratic Italian couple whose lives and relationship are disrupted by a cruel English surgeon, Frederic Damer, who ultimately decides to murder the prince, his patient, who is recovering from diphtheria. This fictional story so outraged the British medical establishment that they felt duty bound to publish a response to it in the British Medical Journal. In an article entitled ‘Physiology and Fiction’, they denounce Ouida’s story, protesting that this tale of an English surgeon who decides to murder his patient depicts ‘the search after scientific truth as naturally leading to crime’ (Anonymous 1895, p. 40). As such they considered it ‘an attack—feeble and futile, it is true, but most malignant in intention—on the medical profession’ (ibid.). Ouida, they argued, ‘has a perfect right to represent a doctor as a murderer, but she has no right to imply that he is a murderer because he is a doctor’ (ibid.). While dismissing the story as foolish, feeble, futile, and ‘an infamous falsehood’, the journal is clearly concerned that Ouida’s depiction of an (English) doctor might be read as not only literal, but representative of all (English) doctors.

This article follows three strands of enquiry to explore why the BMJ felt so threatened by this story. First, it analyses their response and what they found so objectionable, and compares this to Ouida’s depiction of Damer. Second, it looks to famous public trials of doctors who really did commit murder in the late nineteenth century, to question whether these had left the medical establishment particularly sensitive to criticism that linked the scientific approach to criminality. Finally, I consider the importance of medical realism in the story, particularly Ouida’s deployment of diphtheria, a virulent epidemic of its time, for which the cure had only recently been discovered in the early 1890s. This virus features in the story as a plot point—Adrianis contracts diphtheria naturally—but also acts as the murder weapon; Damer uses a concentrated toxin of the diphtheria virus to kill Adrianis while pretending to treat him with the anti-toxin. Ouida weaves in well-informed content about this disease and its newly discovered cure. This is symptomatic of her broader attention to medical accuracy; the story includes carefully specific descriptions of the ‘false membrane’ or ‘fungous growth’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 16) of diphtheria, and the practice of vivisection. I argue that the reason the BMJ felt so threatened by her depiction of a murderous doctor is in great part due to Ouida’s attention to medical realism: the threat of fiction’s entanglement with the real.

2. Ouida and ‘Toxin’

Ouida was the nom de plume of Maria Louise Ramé (1839–1908), an author and women’s rights activist, prominent in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. As well as writing popular fiction, ‘Ouida also sought to intervene in contemporary political and social debates in the more serious periodical press’, writing over sixty essays on a range of subjects between 1878 and 1906; Lyn Pykett lists ‘the nature of modernity, the vulgarity of modern life and literature, the evils of science, war and conscription, on animal rights, the folly and inevitability of female suffrage and the causes of the rise of anarchism and socialism’ (Pykett 2013, p. 147). Ouida was famously an animal lover and campaigner for the anti-vivisectionist movement, and wrote multiple essays denouncing animal experimentation, including ‘Some Fallacies of Science’ (1895), ‘The New Priesthood: A Protest Against Vivisection’ (1893), and ‘The Torture of Animals’ (1893). As Andrew King (2015, p. 1230) has observed, ‘Toxin’ acts as a fictional supplement to her critical essays about vivisection and the scientific attitudes which allowed and promoted this practice, through the negative depiction of Damer’s ‘ghastly pursuits, his sickening experiments, his merciless ambitions’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 12). King and Pykett also observe Ouida’s proficiency at adapting her essays and fiction to the readership and editorial requirements of each individual periodical. ‘Toxin’ was written specifically for the 1895 summer issue of The Illustrated London News, a weekly magazine replete with wood-engraved illustrations (Figure 1). The illustrator made great use of the story’s Venetian setting, ‘a possible holiday destination for the paper’s wealthy readers’ (King 2015, p. 1230). The beginning of the story follows an opal necklace dropped into the Venetian lagoon from a gondola, carried off by the current, finally coming to rest under the Devil’s Bridge.

Wandering near the Devil’s Bridge, Frederic Damer and Prince Adrianis find the necklace and return it to the young, recently widowed countess Veronica Zaranegra. The ‘beautiful’ Adrianis (Ouida 1895b, p. 6) and Veronica, ‘rich, childlike, fond of pleasure’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 8), accordingly fall in love. Damer, an older, fiercely intellectual, self-made man, is contrasted with these foolish, pampered, naïve but well-meaning aristocrats. Damer has a ‘vast ability and relentless will’ but is ‘contemptuous and derisive’, arrogant, superior, and motivated by achieving ‘power and celebrity’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 6). Damer is travelling with the prince having previously saved his life after a hunting accident. Adrianis states: ‘he used his brains to cure my body. So I must not dispute the virtue of his use of them. Yet sometimes I fancy that he has no heart’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 8). As the characters spend three months in each other’s company, Damer develops a jealous desire to possess Veronica; he despises her with a fierce misogyny, ‘but her voice turned his blood to flame; the sound of her weeping deepened his scorn to hate; the touch of her ungloved hand was ecstasy and agony in one; he loved her with furious, brutal, unsparing passion, like lava under the ice of his self-restraint’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 16). When Adrianis dives into the sewage-filled canal to rescue a sickly little boy, he catches diphtheria for his trouble. Fighting for his life, he lies at Damer’s mercy. Damer’s jealousy, combined with a heartless scientific mind, leads him to decide to poison the prince, injecting him with the concentrated diphtheria toxin which bolsters the infection, instead of the anti-toxin which would aid his recovery. Adrianis ‘received enough of the virus into his vein to slay a man in health. Passing as it did into an organ already diseased, he would die before the sun rose, or an hour after’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 18).

A lack of realism was a critique often levelled at Ouida’s writing, with critics assessing her plots, characters, and settings as too fantastical and far-fetched. Now, as Pamela K. Gilbert has argued, scholars still tend towards judging nineteenth-century authors against this metric: ‘despite our best efforts, we still see non-realist genres as failed realism’ (Gilbert 2013, p. 51). Ouida wrote a letter to The Times in 1883, republished as the essay ‘Romance and Realism’ in her collection Frescoes, in which she responds to this criticism of ‘writing “fairy stories”’ (Ouida 1883, p. 304). She argues that she sees dramatic events play out every day in Italy, which would be branded sensational or impossible by English reviewers if fictionalised. These ‘little dramas’ (Ouida 1883, p. 301) are not only ‘every whit as “real”’ as the common stuff of mainstream realist fiction—she scathingly points to ‘the British prig going to his aesthetic afternoon tea’, the gossiping bishops of Anthony Trollope, and perplexed heroines of Henry James (Ouida 1883, p. 303)—but also better subjects for fiction. Her defence is not just of her own writing, but also demands a broadening of what realism includes, arguing that fantastic events occur in everyday life. She states that while she does not object to realism in fiction, she does object to ‘the limitation of realism in fiction to what is commonplace, tedious, and bald—to the habit, in a word, of insisting that the potato is real and that the passion-flower is not’ (Ouida 1883, p. 306). Ouida wants to push against the rigid boundaries of what we consider realism: ‘I have also known many circumstances so romantic that were they described in fiction, they would be ridiculed as exaggerated and impossible; in real life there are coincidences so startling, mysteries so singular, destinies so strange, that no wise novelist could venture to portray them for fear of making his work appear too bizarre and too melodramatic. That “truth is stranger than fiction” is found at every turn in the world’ (p. 307). Ouida’s spirited defence of truth-being-stranger than fiction, and her solid understanding of the medical topics she describes, indicate a bold re-definition of realism, one that can absorb fantastic-seeming events and scientific evidence at once.

Gilbert focuses on sensationalism and melodrama in Ouida’s work to make the case that these modes can constitute radical rhetorical tools: ‘by the canons of realism these texts seem naïve and exaggerated. But sentimentalism and melodrama, which use exaggeration and repetition to build emotional power, are damaged and diluted by complexity of character, whereas they can thrive on complexity of plot or on repetition, both of which can be used to defer and amplify emotional tensity’ (Gilbert 2013, p. 42). Indeed, Ouida’s writing career began in the sensation genre, and the techniques and modes of sensation were often employed in late-Victorian campaigning strategies (see Ann Loveridge 2024). In ‘Toxin’, she also draws on the public’s familiarity with crime genres, such as the Newgate novel and the penny dreadful. We can see her story as an example within what the editors of The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction call: ‘alternative genealogies of crime writing’ (Allan et al. 2020, p. 2). They encourage examining crime stories as individual texts on their own terms, as ‘mutable, fluid and transgressive’ (ibid.), ‘rather than embodiments of fixed generic norms’ (ibid, p. 5). As Paul Cobley notes, the very way in which ‘subgenres of the crime narrative represent an “advance” or “departure” in realism from other genres […] acknowledges that “realism” is multifarious, subject to change even within the genre of crime fiction, and not susceptible of one, unitary definition’ (Cobley 2020, p. 202). Reading Ouida’s ‘Toxin’ as an example within the alternative genealogy of crime fiction thus offers to broaden our understanding of both crime fiction and of realism. It further allows us to see the ways in which Ouida employs realism on a micro-level while challenging its rigid generic demands.

3. The BMJ and Modern Science

Roughly a week and a half after Ouida’s story was published in The Illustrated London News, the British Medical Journal published their response to this ‘“shocker” with the blood-curdling title of “Toxin,” all about a wicked English surgeon’ (Anonymous 1895, p. 39). They describe Ouida as a ‘grotesque’ figure ‘flashing her little toy sword in the face of science (ibid.), continuing: ‘the story is as silly as Ouida’s productions usually are, but with that we have no concern. What we do protest against is that a scoundrel like Damer should be presented as the type of a scientific surgeon. There can be no doubt as to the purpose of Ouida’s story; it is an attack—feeble and futile, it is true, but most malignant in intention—on the medical profession’ (Anonymous 1895, p. 40). They list some examples of Damer’s immoral medical behaviour which they understand as mere silliness, and repeatedly insist that Ouida’s story is not worth the effort of responding to: ‘with that we show no concern’; ‘this kind of thing is only an echo of ravings of certain catchpenny newspapers and deserves no serious notice’; ‘she merely talks nonsense’ (Anonymous 1895, pp. 39–40). However, they protest, they have ‘some reason to complain’ nonetheless, because Ouida asks the reader to accept Damer as ‘the representative of scientific medicine’, and she further represents the ‘infamous falsehood’ that a criminal mindset is a logical outcome of the scientific approach. The BMJ author ends by stating that after reading ‘Toxin’ they are ‘willing to allow that she can write fiction’ (Anonymous 1895, p. 40). This sarcastic comment draws attention to the fact the story is, inherently, fictional, which paints their own response as somewhat disproportionate, a pearl-clutching overreaction. It is interesting that the BMJ deploys ‘fiction’ here as the opposite of ‘fact’, as synonymous with lying. Yet the simultaneous dismissal of Ouida’s story and force of the offence taken suggests that she hits upon an uncomfortable truth: that the public has no choice but to place their trust in the medical profession, despite it not always deserving or honouring that trust.

However, the story is indeed rather relentless in its message that science, and the scientific approach, lead to immorality and criminality. Ouida’s specific political rationale for this is clear: implying a direct connection between vivisection and murder, that scientific attitudes towards animals were not a far cry from a mindset that would excuse murder. Chris Pittard observes two key rhetorical moves of the anti-vivisection campaign: first to argue that the practice was scientifically useless, and second to indicate that ‘animal experimentation deadened the sensibilities of physiologists, and would therefore encourage more serious crimes against society’ (Pittard 2011, pp. 158–59). He notes: ‘that vivisectors should become murderers was a familiar trope of the anti-vivisectionists, since it was a logical conclusion of the dual premises of the campaign’ (ibid., p. 162). Indeed, Ouida pointed to this correlation in an essay: ‘the scientific torture of animals will be, and is, and had been in the past, extended to human subjects’ (Ouida 1893b, p. 4). In ‘Toxin’, she develops this vivisection-to-murder pipeline in three phases: Damer’s treatment of a dying servant of the Zaranegras, graphically detailed acts of vivisection, and lengthy rationalising of the murder of Adrianis which the narrative relates through free indirect discourse. Like the ‘gems of sorrow’—the necklace of opals which begins the story—these phases are strung together throughout by Damer’s general attitude towards bodies, both human and animal. Damer’s perspective that all life is disposable to science is apparent from the start; he will sacrifice both human and animal bodies in the pursuit of scientific progress with no remorse. Adrianis flippantly notes that to attract Damer a woman ‘must be lying, dead or alive, on an operating-table’, to which Damer replies he would prefer them alive: ‘the dead are little use to us; their nervous system is still, like a stopped clock’, and agrees that ‘a creature must suffer’ to interest him (Ouida 1895b, p. 6). He dismisses Adrianis’s idea that there are men of science who care for the ‘poor human material on which they work’, saying such men are ‘not in the front ranks of their profession’, and science will never owe much to them (Ouida 1895b, p. 6). He admits that when treating Adrianis for his hunting wound, ‘I should have preferred to let you alone, and study your natural powers of resistance in conflict with the destruction which was menacing them. But I could not follow my preferences. I was called in to assist your natural powers by affording them artificial resistance, and I was bound to do so’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 6). Hippocratic principles of care and doing no harm, rather than a proud standard of the medical profession, are perceived by Damer as an irritating hindrance to scientific progress.

In ‘The New Priesthood’, Ouida observes that physiologists always point to their use of anaesthetics to conceal the hundreds of experiments which do not use it: in which they roast animals to death, lay their nerves bare in extended agony, or experiment on them repeatedly for months (Ouida 1893a, p. 158). Her article draws a comparison between the vivisector who claims the necessary ‘incessant and excruciating torture of millions of animals’, and the fifteenth-century religious fanatic, the inquisitor, who tortured men, women and children (ibid., pp. 151–52). She argues that if unchecked now, scientists will soon openly and successfully demand human subjects as ‘absolutely necessary to the perfecting of science’ (ibid., p. 158). Yet she also notes that modern medical professionals are already extending their ruthlessness to ‘the poor victim of the hospitals, helpless as the dog tied down to the torture-trough’, whom, she says, becomes a spectacle, experimented on against his will, seen by the doctor as mere material to be studied (ibid., p. 155). We see this directly fictionalised in Damer’s treatment of an old servant of the Zaranegra household, who lies dying of cancer in hospital. Knowing full well that the old man will not survive an operation, Damer operates anyway. He evades Veronica’s question about whether the servant will experience ‘frightful suffering’ if she consents to the operation, by saying he will be placed ‘under anaesthetics’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 10) He defends his actions: ‘it was a rare and almost unique opportunity. I have solved by it a doubt which has never been solved before, and never could have been without a human subject’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 10). The knowledge he gains in fact makes him famous, and brings him a step closer to the power and celebrity he seeks: ‘his skill, his manual dexterity, his courage, were themes of universal praise, and more than one rich person of the Veneto entreated his examination, and submitted to his treatment’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 10). Ouida’s comment on medical science is clear; the public remains unaware of the ulterior motives of doctors, whose fame and success are gained by way of immoral activities and attitudes. This event fictionalises her statements in essays that ‘there is not a single argument put forward in defence of the vivisection of animals which cannot, with equal logic, with equal force, be alleged in defence of the vivisection of men, women, and children, or the criminal, of the pauper, of the idiot, of the madman, or of the merely useless member of society’ (Ouida 1893b, p. 4). Accordingly, Damer comments: ‘the life of a man at sixty is not an especially valuable thing, and I believe he did nothing all his life except polish your palace floors with beeswax or oil’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 10).

The value Damer places on human life is mirrored in his treatment of animals. As Veronica and Adrianis hold a funeral for this servant, Damer turns to his work. He has moved out of the prince’s apartments and into a house in an industrial part of town, where ‘the clang of hammers and the roar of furnaces drowned the cries of animals which it was not convenient to make aphone; and the people of the quarter were too engrossed in their labours to notice when he flung down into the water dead or half-dead mutilated creatures’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 10). We are presented with a detailed description of vivisection: ‘bound on a plank lay a young sheepdog which he had bought from a peasant of Mazzorbo for a franc. It was living; he reckoned it would live in its mute and unpitied agony for twelve hours more—long enough for the experiment which he was about to make’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 10). The reader is encouraged through the emotive language to recoil from this act of torture. It is significant that this animal is a dog, a creature that, as Harriet Ritvo has demonstrated, many readers would have felt most sympathy towards; Ritvo notes ‘the relation between humanity and its dogs was special’, and ‘like horses, dogs were frequently characterised as “noble”’ (Ritvo 1987, pp. 20–21). ‘Toxin’ was reprinted in book form by T. Fisher Unwin, and for this version, Ouida expands the descriptions of vivisection and related cruelties towards animals. The book version adds to this scene the fact Damer had cut out the dog’s vocal cords and torn out its kidneys and pancreas, details which are familiar from her essays against vivisection, but which were presumably considered a little too graphic for the readers of The Illustrated London News. Later, we are told that Damer is used to both killing and torturing ‘with profound indifference, with no more hesitation than he ate or drank or fulfilled any natural function of his body. To obtain knowledge, even the approach of knowledge, he would have inflicted the most agonising and the most endless suffering without a moment’s doubt or a moment’s regret’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 18).

The medical profession was by this point well accustomed to grappling with anti-vivisectionist discourse. It was a debate that had raged for around two decades, with both sides attempting to influence politics and law on the topic. The Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876 imposed restrictions on practitioners, while the 1881 Medical Congress ‘resoundingly endorsed’ vivisection (Donald 2019, p. 189). Ouida’s rhetoric is typical of the anti-vivisection movement, echoing arguments that Frances Power Cobbe’s essays had been making since the 1870s. As Tabitha Sparks has explored, as far back as 1875 Lewis Carroll argued that vivisection would almost certainly be extended to human subjects, and Wilkie Collins’s 1882 novel Heart and Science had fictionalised the topic, offering ‘a devastating account of vivisection’ (Sparks 2016, pp. 99–100). Vivisectionists had been painted as villains for quite a long time prior to Ouida’s attack. Yet Ouida’s 1893 essays point to a renewed interest in the early 1890s; she is responding to the ‘various demands made of the Press of late by physiologists for the free acceptance of what is called vivisection’ (Ouida 1893a, p. 151). Diana Donald observes that the vivisection debate was particularly remarkable because it interested all strata of society: ‘Labouring-class men and women as well as aristocrats, parliamentarians, middle- class leaders of opinion, literary celebrities, church leaders and religious thinkers and of course doctors and scientists actively participated in the increasingly bitter and polarised battles between the defenders and the opponents of vivisection’ (Donald 2019, p. 179). Ouida is rather scathing of the general public: she sees ‘the multitudes’ as ‘easily deluded’ and ‘dully indifferent to all that does not immediately touch themselves’ (Ouida 1893a, p. 164). But, she says, self-preservation is a strong force, and when the public realises ‘that its own flesh and bone, nerves, brain, and limbs are only so much raw material for the New Priesthood’ they will rise up against them (ibid., p. 164). This is what she is hoping to achieve in her essays, and in ‘Toxin’. At a time when the anti-vivisection movement seemed to feel that it was gaining momentum and encouraging the public to take a negative view of experimental physiology, Ouida not only draws on the tools of sentimental fiction to tug on reader’s heartstrings by depicting animal suffering, but also incorporates intelligent scientific rhetoric which encourages the hundreds of thousands of readers of the magazine to recoil from Damer’s perspective.

Ouida also takes pains to accurately depict both the logic and language of the vivisector. After Damer has poisoned Adrianis with the toxin and waits for it to take effect, he ponders on and rationalises his act. We are told by the narrator that Damer ‘had always lived in the hells created by modern science, wherein if the bodies of animals suffer the souls of men wither and perish’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 18). This generalising statement reads as Ouida’s own voice, echoing her longstanding critique of ‘modern science’—what Pykett calls ‘Ouida’s anti-science stance’ (Pykett 2013, p. 160). Yet in the next sentence Ouida switches from this external narrative voice into free indirect discourse vocalising Damer’s perspective: ‘What was the man lying sleeping there to him? Only an organism like those which daily he broke up and destroyed and threw aside. Only an organism, filled by millions of other invisible organisms by a myriad of parasite animalculae, numerous as the star-dust in the skies’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 18). She uses the voice of the vivisector, as well as her own, to demonstrate her argument that scientists become so immune to torturing and killing animals that human bodies would logically come to be seen as equally disposable. Ouida embeds a psychological realism in her depiction of Damer. Manipulation is encoded into the text itself; the sudden shift from Ouida’s critical narrative voice (‘the hells created by modern science’) to Damer’s own rationale (that a man is ‘only an organism’) reveals the narrative’s unreliable positionality, which in turn evokes debates about science, secrecy, and increased transparency. She continues: ‘to slay a man was no more than to slay a mole. To do either was to arrest a mechanism, to dissolve tissues, to send elements back into the space they came from; it was nothing more. One organism or another, what matter?’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 18). Do quotations like these perhaps begin to explain the BMJ’s sensitivity? Both suggest a confident deployment of informed scientific discourse. Ouida is writing in the era of the ‘microbe hunters’ (De Kruif 1926), as bacteriologists raced to isolate germs and create vaccines, discoveries which produced a new view of the human body as a colony of shared life, as well as bestowing upon the figure of the physiologist a new, omnipotent role. Accordingly, she gestures to a myriad of minute, invisible organisms and parasites in the body. She also evokes an entropic dissolving of tissues that draws on thermodynamics, the mechanism of the body simply a collection of elements which ultimately return to their base form. Ouida thus incorporates a kind of medical realism within her sensational story, perhaps what rendered it more threatening than a mere sensationalist ‘shocker’.

However, Ouida was suspicious of microbes. In her 1895 essay ‘Some Fallacies of Science’, she suggests that they might be an invention: ‘their real or imaginary creation, the microbe, has invested cholera with a fanciful horror so new and hideous in the popular mind, that popular terror of it grows ungovernable’ (Ouida 1895a, p. 285). She accuses medical science of creating what it purports to heal: ‘how many nervous illnesses, how many imaginary diseases, have sprung into existence since science, popularised, attracted the attention of mankind to the mechanism of its own construction?’ (Ouida 1895a, p. 286). Ouida was not alone; Sparks notes a pessimistic public attitude towards medicine in the last decades of the nineteenth century in response: ‘the rise of laboratory science contributed to a growing public distrust of doctors; as medical historian Roy MacLeod argues, “Sickness had become a matter of microbes, not of man”’ (Sparks 2016, p. 19) She observes that the doctor figure in fin-de-siècle fiction is a figure often ‘demonstrating a drive-to-knowledge that obliterates his social compassion’ (ibid.). In her study of late nineteenth-century crime fiction, Clare Clarke observes the trope of the outwardly respectable criminal. She analyses the way in which texts like Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde responded to ‘media exposes concerning the secret lives of outwardly respectable upper-middle-class men, which helped to disseminate to the reading public the idea that respectable exteriors often masked immoral or criminal behaviour’ (Clarke 2014, p. 22), reportage which ‘helped to disseminate to the reading public the notion that seemingly respectable gentlemen harboured disreputable desires and were often responsible for sensational crimes’ (Clarke 2014, p. 23). If we read Ouida’s story within the context of crime fiction, it becomes part of a canon of texts responding to this cultural anxiety. As Clarke alludes, the doctor or surgeon is the epitome of an outwardly respectable middle-class man, and furthermore, one who had the skill and opportunity to both commit and get away with murder.

4. Real Medical Crimes

The number of doctors among the suspects in the Whitechapel murders exemplifies the way in which the outwardly respectable doctor became a focus of fear and suspicion. Yet the nineteenth century had seen many cases in which doctors were not only suspected, but convicted, of criminal medical malpractice, including several famous trials of murderer physicians. In a 1982 article on ‘Physician Crimes and Criminals’ William G. Eckert notes: ‘the use of injections and medications has been a rather interesting means by which physicians have tried to kill’ (Eckert 1982, p. 225). He points to the nineteenth century as a time when ‘poisoners among physicians’ were particularly common, and lists numerous cases of doctors who killed with morphine, digitalin, and aconite, by putting prussic acid or strychnine into brandy, or atropine in cooked game birds (Eckert 1982, pp. 224–25). Several then assisted with the autopsies on their victims.1 Leonard A. Parry’s book Some Famous Medical Trials, published in 1928, provides detailed insight into notorious cases of doctor murderers in late nineteenth-century London. Dr George Henry Lamson was tried and hanged for murdering his young brother-in-law in 1882, using the poison aconitine which—it was never conclusive—he either placed into an empty pill casing which he asked the boy to swallow, or injected into currants in his cake. Lamson’s trial attracted a great deal of public attention; indeed, he became something of a celebrity murderer. The head of the detective department at Scotland Yard related how he was pestered by women wanting to see the murderer Lamson, and ‘baskets of hot house flowers and costly grapes were sent by these hysterical creatures to show their sympathy with this brutal criminal’ (Parry 1928, p. 102). Ouida’s depiction of a poisoner physician would have reached an audience not only well versed in sensational crime fiction, but familiar with cases of real medical crimes and charismatic, villainous physicians.

The specific poison Lamson used, aconitine, was quite unusual, though it would later be made famous by its use in Oscar Wilde’s 1891 story “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime”. In the course of the Lamson investigation, the use of aconitine was ascertained by eminent chemists, who tasted the vomit extracted from the viscera of the deceased. They also injected this extracted substance, and the poison aconitine, into two different mice, and observed that the reactions of the two were identical; this formed an important testimony in the trial. Another interesting facet of this trial was that it drew attention to the issue that doctors, or even those pretending to be doctors, could so easily get their hands on various poisons; a chemist would supply anyone who ‘was of respectable appearance and well dressed’ and could sign their name with ‘the style of writing which is characteristic of medical men’ (quoted in Parry 1928, pp. 92–93). The Lamson trial was cited when the Vivisection Abolition Bill was discussed by parliament in 1883. Punch reported positively on the failure of the bill: ‘as we do not wish to see the progress of medical science checked, we cannot regret that the proposal was lost’ (Anonymous 1883, p. 170). They list various benefits that the world owes to vivisection—such as the discovery of the circulation of the blood, and the antiseptic surgery of the present day—and they quote one important speech to parliament, in which Mr. Cartwright pointed to the Lamson trial as a reason not to pass the abolition bill: ‘In the Lamson case the clinching evidence which brought about a conviction was derived from an experiment on a living animal’ (ibid.).

Tracking ‘the entanglement of crime fiction and modern science’, Andrea Goulet notes the influence of new forensic technologies towards the end of the nineteenth century, ‘increasingly used by police and the justice system for criminal identification’ (Goulet 2020, pp. 291–22). She states: ‘each of these technologies—Bertillonage, fingerprinting, photography and phrenology—contributed to an ideology of scientific and social control over the criminal body’ (Goulet 2020, p. 293). These made their way into crime fiction. The medical witness in the Lamson case, a man never afraid to taste the liquid he found in the viscera of the deceased, was Dr. Thomas Stevenson, an expert in Medical Jurisprudence and Forensic Medicine, often employed by the Home Office. He was also the medical witness a decade later in the more famous trial of Dr Thomas Neill Cream, the ‘Lambeth Poisoner’ (also a suspect in the Whitechapel murders). Cream was arrested and hanged in 1892 for poisoning women with strychnine and attempting to blackmail other men by framing them for the murders. In the investigation of the Cream case, Stevenson once again extracted material from the guts of victims, and identified the poison as strychnine through animal testing (this time on a frog), and, again, by taste. This delightfully disgusting forensic technique does indeed contribute to the ideology of scientific and social control over the criminal—not via their own body, as with fingerprinting, but through advances in the scientific analysis of the bodies of victims. Leonard Parry’s account of the Lamson trial clearly relishes the detail that Lamson thought his choice of poison was undetectable, having learnt this at university, but he was ultimately scuppered because science had moved on: ‘these beliefs were, unfortunately, for him, ill-founded; chemical science was too much for him, and his well-merited punishment followed’ (Parry 1928, p. 103).

Willard Huntington Wright’s introduction to Parry’s book remarks on ‘the perennial popularity of crime as a vicarious indulgence among the great masses of humanity’ (Huntington Wright 1928, p. iii). He suggests that the public enjoys stories of murder—both real and fictional—because they offer a second-hand ‘fulfilment of savage impulses’ (Huntington Wright 1928, p. iv). Ouida is consciously drawing on a longstanding readerly appetite for the criminal–hero figure, typified by the Newgate Calendars and Newgate novels of the early nineteenth century (see Clarke 2014, p. 8). Damer also speaks to the persistence of this interest across the century’s turn: what Huntington Wright, in 1928, perceives as the public’s subconscious view of criminals and murderers as representing ‘an adventuresome, if perverted, freedom’ (Huntington Wright, p. iv). Unlike the famous trials discussed above, in Ouida’s story, there is no justice served; the prince dies, Damer gets away with murder, and indeed gets the girl, who lives a miserable life of regret and fear under the ‘magnetism of his will’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 18). The villain outwits the forces of justice, ‘the trivial laws of men’ which he holds in contempt (Ouida 1895b, p. 16). Yet any vicarious indulgence in his crimes that the reader might feel is complicated by the didactic message Ouida aims to impart. While drawing her reader in with the familiar trope of the dastardly, magnetic villain, Ouida’s use of narrative perspective invites her reader to sit in judgement of Damer himself, and scientific attitudes more broadly. Unlike reportage on real trials, fiction allows speculative narrative insight into the mind of the murderer and their thought processes: ‘“I have done well; I have exercised my supremacy,” he thought. “We have right of life and death over all birds and beasts and things which swim and crawl by virtue of our greater brain; in like manner has the greater brain the right to deal as it will with the weaker brain when their paths meet and one must yield and go under”’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 18). Here, Damer demonstrates the flawed logic of social Darwinism, taking natural selection and survival of the fittest out of context to justify his own aims of conquest and destruction. This is a logic that justifies all sorts of crimes, both large and small, and demonstrates how an attitude of power over birds and beasts can so easily slip into an assertion of power over weaker human brains and bodies. The use of ‘we’ indicates the collective authoritarian attitude of science and scientists, but also sweepingly includes the reader, a narrative ploy that encourages a critical awareness of, as Huntington Wright put it, our own ‘savage impulses’.

Damer, as we know, is not interested in healing bodies but in learning from them, and finally, this leads to the perspective that ‘science bade him take all the other sentient races of earth and make them suffer as he chose and kill them as he chose’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 18). Ouida’s implication that, as the BMJ put it, Damer is a murderer because he is a doctor, plays on the fear that holding life and death in one’s hands gives rise to feelings of godliness, corruptions of power, and not just a deluded sense of imperviousness (as in Lamson’s case), but the real ability to get away with murder. Furthermore, criminal or deliberate medical malpractice is so disturbing because it throws into question the association between those in the health-giving professions and compassion; it is a profound betrayal of the instinct to heal. Ouida’s story also incorporates the commonly held notion that a level of empathic distance from patients is part of what makes surgeons good at their jobs. Adrianis protests to Damer that surely there are men of science and surgeons ‘whose desire is to console, to amend, who care for the poor human material on which they work’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 6). Damer responds that indeed there are, but ‘they are not in the front ranks of their profession, nor will science ever owe much to them’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 6.) This distinction is congruent with Sparks’s study of the doctor in the Victorian novel; she observes a shift from the early-nineteenth-century doctor figure as centrally imbricated in the marriage plot, a family man, to the late-nineteenth-century impervious scientist: the ‘clinicism and detachment that came to be identified with modern medicine’ (Sparks 2016, p. 162). Sparks argues that fiction not only observed this shift, but ‘helped to invent modern medicine’s detached manner’ (ibid.). If so, the threat was real: fiction indeed had an influence on shaping both the public perception, and the character, of the medical profession.

According to the BMJ, Ouida’s story lacks credibility, stretches the truth, and exaggerates and misrepresents both the characteristics of the social figure of the doctor and the institution of science; in other words, they claim there is a lack of realism. Yet as Cobley notes, ‘crime fiction faces the dilemma of presenting the commonplace nature of crime, a quotidian phenomenon in contemporary social formations, in a manner which is dramatic’ (Cobley 2020, p. 204). Crime is an everyday, sometimes boring occurrence, and the fiction which depicts it must endeavour to make it interesting. Ouida’s own defence in ‘Romance and Realism’ makes a similar but slightly different point: that real life contains all manner of melodramatic and extraordinary events, just as real as the familiar plot points of realist novels. Indeed, the sensational and shocking trials of real murderer physicians in the nineteenth century seem like the stuff of fiction. Just as Ouida employs realism on a micro-level while overthrowing the genre’s confines, so too does she disrupt the generic expectations of crime fiction through the absence of a detective figure and lack of narrative closure: there is no retribution for the criminal. Unlike Lamson, Damer knows enough of modern forensics to conceal his crime, immediately plunging the toxic syringe into disinfecting acid, leaving no trace: ‘who would ever know it? Who would ever be aware that the intenser virus of the toxin had mingled with the natural formation of the disease? Even were there an autopsy, discovery would be impossible’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 18). ‘Toxin’ contains another form of what Cobley, quoting Jermyn, calls ‘forensic realism’: ‘in which professional knowledge usually unavailable to the public becomes part of the narrative’ (Cobley 2020, p. 204). This forensic knowledge is not focused on solving a crime, but on planning one: Damer’s ingenious murder weapon allows Ouida to include the reader in detailed, accurate, medical discourse around the cure for diphtheria.

5. Diphtheria

Discussing Ouida’s novels, Gilbert demonstrates how, rather than realism, they perform political work through the medium of melodrama, sensation, and affect; this is clearly relevant in the case ‘Toxin’ too. But the depiction of diphtheria in the story shows Ouida taking a slightly different political rhetorical approach, and in addition, close attention to verisimilitude if not generic “realism”. The references to diphtheria are remarkably well-informed, a dangerous exactitude which, in its reflection of the real world, might lend credence to her depiction of science as criminal. In this final Section, I explore how Ouida includes contemporary discourse about diphtheria in this story, and why she chose this disease, with reference to newspaper articles from 1894 discussing the recently discovered miraculous cure.

Diphtheria was a deadly epidemic in the nineteenth century, especially destructive in relation to children’s mortality. In an 1894 article in the Liberal Review, H. E. Roscoe notes that ‘three thousand children died last year in London alone from diphtheria’ (Roscoe 1894, p. 708). He continues in emotive terms: ‘medical practice has had to acknowledge that, having exhausted all the means—good, bad, and indifferent—which have been suggested for its treatment, the diphtheria poison is eating its way into the vitals of the nation’ (ibid.). Damer similarly personifies the disease, describing it as ‘not one which waits’, ‘uncertain and deceptive’, and ‘very treacherous’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 16). He diagnoses ‘what the faculty call Boulogne sore throat’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 14). Describing the history of the disease in the Fortnightly Review, Robson Roose recalls a particularly fierce outbreak in Boulogne between 1855 and 1857 as ‘an epoch in history of diphtheria’, which spread particularly through the large contingent of English residents in the city (Roose 1894, pp. 873–74). The disease itself was older than this; it was named in 1821, but there was evidence of outbreaks in the seventeenth century, and even in ancient times. Roose discusses how baffling it is that mortality from diphtheria has more than doubled in London and increased throughout England and Wales since the 1870s, despite advances in sanitary law and public health measures (Roose 1894, p. 876). He points to theories that the ‘existence of surface ventilators from the main sewers in the neighbourhood of houses is a possible, and even probable, cause of the spread of diphtheria’ (ibid.). While he is talking about British cities and towns, the theory of exposure to sewage vapours recalls the Venetian canals as Ouida describes: ‘the water hereabouts is thick and dark, and sewage flows unchecked into it’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 14).

Many of the newspapers note that the virus is transmitted through close contact: ‘communicable by the slightest touch—as by a kiss, for example—from an infected to a healthy person’ (Roscoe 1894, p. 708). Adrianis contracts diphtheria from just such close contact with a sickly young child, after diving into the thick, dark, sewage-filled Venetian canal water to save him from drowning. Despite Damer’s warning not to ‘embrace little sick beggars’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 14), Adrianis even kisses the child. Roose names kissing among children a key reason it spread through their populations. Yet it is also airborne: ‘the poison, in an invisible form, may pass through the air’ as well as clinging ‘with great tenacity’ to clothes, bed-linen, walls, woodwork, and furniture (Roose 1894, p. 878). Adrianis wants to see Veronica but ‘he feared the infection for her which would be in his voice, in his touch, in his breath, in his mere presence’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 14). Ouida further describes Adrianis’s ‘hot hands’ and Damer using disinfecting fluid to sterilise hands and notes, as was recommended: ‘in the few cases in which vigorous disinfection was practised the disease remained completely isolated’ (Anonymous 1893, p. 211).

Roose describes the disease’s main symptoms. The name diphtheria comes from a Greek word signifying leather or prepared hide, ‘and the disease was so named because of its essential feature, viz., the presence of a layer of more or less tough membrane in various parts of the throat’ (Roose 1894, p. 874). He expands on the description: ‘the essential characteristic of the disease is the presence of a membranous layer or coating, ash-grey in colour, in various parts of the throat, and sometimes in the nose. But before this appears, or at any rate before it is detected, there is generally more or less headache, weakness, difficulty of swallowing, pain in the throat and fever’ (Roose 1894, p. 875). Ouida details similar initial symptoms in Adrianis, in whom the disease first manifests as a hoarse throat and loss of voice, shivering despite the warm night, fever, chill, and thirst, loss of appetite, dizziness, and weakness as his ‘limbs felt so powerless and nerveless’ that he falls. She goes on to carefully describe the disease’s main symptom to a grisly degree, the ‘false membrane’ which fills Adrianis’s throat (Ouida 1895b, p. 16) and prevents him from speaking. As Adrianis fights for his life and begins to get better, the nuns caring for him tell Damer ‘the fungous growth seems loosening’ and Damer observes that they are correct: ‘the fungous growth was wasting, the false membrane was shrinking, there was a healthier look on the tongue’ (Toxin, p. 16). But he stresses the treacherous nature of the disease and primes them for its resurgence, which he himself will bring about.

Ouida writes for an audience who would have been at least passingly familiar with the details of the newly discovered cure for diphtheria, which was widely reported in newspapers towards the end of 1894, including the Illustrated London News. In the Fortnightly Review, Roose states: ‘there is every ground for hope that 1894 will be known as the year in which the disease was first successfully combated’ (Roose 1894, p. 875). So what was this miraculous treatment? Ouida’s story refers to ‘Behring’s cure’, which Damer explains simply to the nuns: “an antitoxin; the serum of an immune beast” (Ouida 1895b, p. 16). The cure was created by repeatedly inoculating horses with the diphtheria culture, known as the ‘toxin’, created by growing the bacillus in broth until it was rich in diphtheria (Roose 1894, p. 881). After several repeated injections the horse would become immune, and the watery part of their blood would be extracted, a ‘wonderfully anti-toxic serum’ of which ‘one dose is absolutely a thousand times stronger than the diphtheritic toxin’, and is ‘prophylactic as well as curative’ (Roose 1894, p. 873).

Many of the articles reporting on the diphtheria cure are focused on bemoaning the fact that the British government would not fund the production of ‘a recognised English source of the pure anti-toxin serum’ (Roscoe 1894, p. 709). The Saturday Review points out that on the continent, large grants of money were being put towards creating supplies, while ‘in England alone the Government and the municipalities look on with indifference’ (Anonymous 1894a, p. 529). As a result, Sir Joseph Lister, chairman of the British Institute of Preventative Medicine, called for the public to donate: ‘appeals to the generosity of the public, urging them to contribute liberally to the funds of the Institute, to meet the necessary expenditure’ (Anonymous 1894b, p. 786), essentially crowd-funding the production of the anti-toxin in England. The Saturday Review commented: ‘In England, hampered as we are by the restrictions of a senseless legislation […] we are, of course, last in the field, and have had recourse to scanty supplies of the serum “made in Germany,” and bought there’ (Anonymous 1894a, p. 529). Yet they are quick to state: ‘with this material, individual practitioners who have bought it have achieved even more brilliant successes than in any other country’ (Anonymous 1894a, p. 529). This attempt to re-establish British superiority mirrors the BMJ’s concern over the depiction of English doctors, and the need to place them above reproach. Likewise, the 1883 Punch report on the Vivisection Abolition Bill debate points to British superiority in order to defend the practice of vivisection: ‘no cases of cruelty under the existing Acts can be cited as occurring in this country, all the horrors of which we read taking place in Continental cities where there are no restrictions’ (Anonymous 1883, p. 170). This common tendency of British periodicals is the revealing of a wider sensitivity towards these topics: what is at stake is not just the reputation of the medical profession, or the scientific approach, but national pride.

Damer shows a Venetian colleague around his home laboratory: ‘What he showed him were three animals—two rabbits and a cat—inoculated with and dying of diphtheria; what he explained to him were the theories of Löffler and Klebs and the discovery of the presumed antidote by Behring. He also displayed to him some serum which he had received from Roux, who was only then at the commencement of his applications of Behring’s theory’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 16). These four names were indeed the key figures in diphtheria research. Friedrich Löffler (1852–1915) and Edwin Klebs (1834–1913) discovered the organism causing the disease, the Klebs–Löffler bacterium, in 1883. Emil von Behring (1854–1917) discovered the anti-toxin, for which he won the 1901 Nobel Prize. In his bestselling popular science book Microbe Hunters (1926), Paul De Kruif included a chapter called ‘Roux and Behring Massacre the Guinea-Pigs’, in which he flamboyantly describes how Roux ‘discovered a strange poison seeping from the bacillus of diphtheria—one ounce of the pure essence of this stuff was enough to kill seventy-five thousand big dogs’, and Behring ‘spied out a strange virtue, an unknown something in the blood of guinea-pigs. It could make that powerful diphtheria poison completely harmless’ (De Kruif 1926, p. 184). Pierre Paul Emile Roux (1853–1933) was responsible for the Pasteur Institute’s production of the anti-diphtheria serum, the serum which he then personally sends to the fictional Damer in Ouida’s story. The fact that in ‘Toxin’, Roux was ‘only then at the commencement of his applications of Behring’s theory’ puts a very specific and important timestamp on this. Damer paints himself as a brave pioneer trying this risky new treatment when there is no other option: ‘you will admit that the responsibility will be great, the theory of the cure being at present unknown to the general public’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 16). Damer’s Venetian colleague encourages him to try the experimental new treatment on Adrianis, and its newness, the uncertainty of its efficacy, is what allows Damer to get away with murder.

Damer is himself unconvinced by the new cure: he ‘had no belief in the efficacy of the serum’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 16). However, ‘he had prepared the venom of the toxin himself; and in that small glass tube there was poison enough to slay twelve men’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 16); not quite seventy-five thousand big dogs, but certainly enough for his purposes. Though Adrianis is getting better, Damer tells the nuns he is declining, and ropes them in as witnesses: ‘I am about to try the cure of Behring. It may succeed’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 16). Damer ‘was well aware that it would be unwise to essay that operation alone—it would rouse comment in the day to come’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 16). The reader knows, though the nuns do not, that he has filled the inoculating syringe not with the anti-toxic serum but with the concentrated toxin of the virus. Ouida does not spare us the details as the toxin takes effect in Adrianis’s body: ‘the poisoned growth filled every chink of the air passages as though they were tubes mortared up and closed hermetically. His face grew purple and tumid, his eyes started from their sockets, his arms waved wildly, beckoning in space; he had no sense left except the mere instinctive mechanical effort to gasp for the air which he was never to breathe again’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 18).

Why does Ouida choose diphtheria as the illness in this story? Certainly, the factual details of the toxin and anti-toxin make for a rather neat murder method. The diphtheria culture is undetectable, the only trace of the toxin ‘in the tumefying vein of the sick man’s throat’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 17) as ‘the concentrated venom had mingled with and been absorbed in the common and usual growth of the false membrane’ (Ouida 1895b, p. 18). Ouida has designed the perfect crime; not even Dr Thomas Stevenson’s taste tests would be able to prove Damer’s guilt. The diphtheria cure was also a hot topic with which readers might be familiar. However, Ouida’s choice of diphtheria in the story could be read as somewhat self-defeating. Ouida wants to call out medical science’s cruelty to animals, to imply that it, like murder, is a crime. Yet the widely celebrated cure for diphtheria relied on the scientific sacrifice of animals; it was discovered through animal testing, a strong point supporting the widespread scientific perspective that animals are indeed necessary sacrifices in the production of cures for devastating human diseases. As Donald notes, ‘in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the triumphs of Pasteur’s bacteriology and the development of effective vaccines tended to discredit thinkers such as Cobbe, Blackwell and Anna Kingsford, who had all dismissed Pasteur’s experiments as both scientifically unsound and morally reprehensible’ (Donald 2019, p. 204). Ouida seems in danger of puncturing the political moral of her story by choosing to deploy this particular disease. Yet the work of the Pasteur Institute and the vaccines created during the era of the microbe hunters were by no means straightforward successes. Ouida’s (1893b) essay ‘The Torture of Animals’ puts it thus: ‘human life, like animal life, is to the physiologist the raw material on which his own scientific success is to be carved; and, when the occasion offers, he uses it up as recklessly as he uses the guinea pig or the cats in his laboratory. This seems sufficiently proved by the enormous number of deaths caused by the Pasteur and the Koch injections’ (Ouida 1893b, p. 3). She is here referring to the tuberculin disaster of 1890–1891, during which time Robert Koch’s supposed vaccine for tuberculosis killed twenty-one people; de Kruif refers to the ‘the dangerous injections of the consumption cure of Koch’ (De Kruif 1926, p. 202). She is thus relying on vaccination scandals to carry her point, rather than the success of the diphtheria cure.

Most of all, diphtheria allows Ouida to demonstrate her ability to write with medical accuracy, which lends extra weight to her anti-vivisection argument. She blends this medical realism with her characteristic sensationalism; as Gilbert observes ‘rhetorical structures that emphasise repetition and recursiveness’, by which she means ‘a rhetoric that not only repeats, but refers backward, that moves simultaneously forward to an end and back to reactivate earlier structures in the text, so that an event is always connected rhetorically, if not logically, to earlier ones’ (Gilbert 2013, pp. 48–49). Thus, the silencing of Adrianis, his inability to speak due to the membrane that fills his throat as he lies on Damer’s operating table, connects him to the ‘aphone’ animals whose vocal cords Damer tears out. This comparison invites attention to our own status as mere creatures. In a way, this suggests that Ouida agrees with Damer that all organisms are equal, though her rationale is to promote the sanctity of all life while his is to justify breaking life apart.

6. Conclusions

In ‘Toxin’, to deliver her political message, Ouida combines the tools of sensationalism with spikes of meticulous medical realism. By embedding accurate details about diphtheria and its treatment, Ouida blurs the line between fiction and reality, leading the medical establishment to worry that readers might see her critique as an indictment of the entire profession. The story’s parallels with crime fiction are also revealing; Ouida depicts the lead-up to this crime, and denies us narrative closure, in order to paint vivisection as criminal; a widespread social crime which she perceives as in need of both investigation and punishment. Gilbert observes that Ouida’s writing more broadly employs a sentimental, affective appeal to readers, then directing that emotional response with a political critique: ‘it is in the world outside the text, the world of readers, that learning may take place and that values are being affirmed’ (Gilbert 2013, p. 47). Indeed, the British Medical Journal’s concern that Ouida’s story had the potential to tarnish the reputation of English doctors suggests fiction’s power to influence public perception of medical ethics. This was a new mass reading public raised on a diet of ‘penny dreadfuls, sensation fiction and prurient newspaper reportage of famous crimes’ who, as Clare Clarke notes ‘had developed a particularly voracious appetite for narratives of a criminal nature’ committed by outwardly respectable characters (Clarke 2014, p. 23). Yet Ouida extends the trope of the outwardly respectable individual hiding nefarious behaviour. Her criticism is directed at science, suggesting that this outwardly respectable institution is inherently criminal. The BMJ’s defensive response suggests an anxiety that fiction might expose the scientific world as morally compromised, challenging the very respectability that, in this turbulent moment of vivisection debates, it was desperately seeking to sustain.