humber river regional hospital, toronto; the island of doctor moreau

So I wasn't being intentionally macabre when choosing reading material for my wait-time in Emergency last week; it just so happens that H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau was the only text I had yet to pick up for my courses, and I anticipated a long wait (16 hours was a bit excessive, but c'est la vie!). This wait was in the week leading up to Hallowe'en, no less, and as I was in the hospital I discovered that my grandmother had just passed away the previous day, so it was a spooky experience all around.

My oversharing, I promise, is going somewhere. It certainly informed my reading of the text, especially as I brooded on the potential reinstatement of Warfarin and its roots—and continued use—as rat poison. I thought about animal testing and the kinds of practice we as a species have engaged in while preparing ourselves to be surgeons of bodies and ecosystems. Given their proximity in the course, it seems only logical that this text would remind me of Neil Evernden's The Natural Alien, and in particular his discussion of vivisection. Indeed, it characterized tendency toward cutting vocal cords while dissecting live creatures, using the characters of Moreau and the protagonist to contrast the two approaches:

The crying sounded even louder out of doors. It was as if all the pain in the world had found a voice. Yet had I known such pain was in the next room, and had it been dumb, I believe—I have thought since—I could have stood it well enough. It is when suffering finds a voice and sets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us. But in spite of the brilliant sunlight and the green fans of the trees waving in the soothing sea-breeze, the world was a confusion, blurred with drifting black and red phantasms, until I was out of earshot of the house in the stone wall. (38)

The narrator's honesty about the effects of silence on his willingness to torture resonated uncomfortably with me. My initial disgust at his confession was quickly mediated by my setting; not only was I surrounded by howling, sobbing people and wishing they might be quieter, but was also fetishizing through the means of obtaining that quiet all sorts of non-human animal suffering, as well as human medical environmental injustice. So I found myself continually struggling with the ethics not only of the novel, but of the academic, and of my constructed self as well, and can sympathize from different angles with the existential angst of Prendick's companion: "Are we bubbles blown by a baby?"(106). Though not an especially new reaction, either personally or critically, my profound discomfort was certainly compounded by where I happened to be sitting.