The Soul of the Professor by Bernard Capes
Professor John Stannary, a brilliant and utterly unscrupulous anatomist, waits in his laboratory for a body needed to complete experiments that will secure his triumph before the Royal Society. His lifelong progress has been marked by cruelty, cynicism, and a belief that individual lives, conscience, and sentiment are worthless beside scientific discovery. He regards the dead as truthful material and accepts any means of obtaining them. Two shady suppliers bring him the body of a young woman. When they leave, Stannary recognises her as Nancy, a woman whose life he had formerly ruined and degraded. Seeing marks around her mouth, he understands that she has been murdered, apparently to meet his urgent demand. Though he coldly resolves that the killers should eventually be brought to justice when legitimate bodies are more available, he treats Nancy chiefly as the final specimen required for his work. As he prepares to dissect her, he notices slight signs that she may not be dead: a tremor or suspended return of life after the shock of the attack. He realises she may yet be saved, but his promised scientific achievement and the importance he assigns to “the Cause” overcome any hesitation. He persuades himself that Nancy, who had once hoped for his greatness, would sacrifice herself for it. Disturbed by memories and by a sparrow’s repeated cries outside, he cuts off her hair, seeks another knife, and finally goes to the door. Finding the weak bird gasping on the pavement, he crushes it beneath his foot before returning resolutely to Nancy. The next day Stannary’s treatise brilliantly solves a difficult physiological problem. He receives great honour and the Society’s gold medal for a discovery of the first importance, having sacrificed Nancy’s possible life, and symbolically his own soul, to scientific ambition.
By Bernard Capes · First published 1901 · Genre: Gothic Horror, Psychological Horror, Medical Horror · 3,265 words
First lines
John Stannary hungrily paced his laboratory, awaiting an expected advent. A brilliant coronal of candles, concentrated within a shade and pendent from a black beam over the dissecting table, regularly identified him as he came within its radiance, and as regularly, when he had passed without it, returned to its scrutiny of the empty slab beneath, as if it were trying to trace on that blank surface the unwritten hieroglyphics of his development. Yet, if each of its half-score fiery tongues had been as polyglot as the Apostles' tongues of flame, it could have found among them all no voice to dispute his lifelong consistency with himself. From the hard, ungracious child, who had rejoiced to discomfit the love which sought to hedge him; from the cynic schoolboy, to whom to awaken and analyze pain in the living had been the only absorbing sport; from the unimpassioned student, who had walked the hospitals like a very spectre of moral insensibility; from the calculating libertine, whose experimental phase of animalism had been as brief as it was savage; from the lust of life, soon spent, to the bloodless analysis of its organic motives; from the soulless child to the virile monster of science; from nothingness to a great early reputation, to honours, to a fine house, to his present self and condition, in short, Professor Stannary's progress had been entirely and unerringly consistent. He was one of those born to account for results, not by any means with a view to clearing the stream of tendency by cleansing its source. On the contrary, he never would have hesitated further to contaminate it, could he by so doing have evolved some novel epidemic.
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Genres
- Gothic Horror — The story uses a shadowed laboratory, corpse procurement, death imagery, moral monstrosity, and an atmosphere of dread characteristic of Gothic horror.
- Psychological Horror — Its central terror arises from Professor Stannary's cold reasoning, suppressed memories, and deliberate choice to sacrifice a possibly living woman to his ambition.
- Medical Horror — Dissection, anatomy, vivisection-like detachment, body trafficking, and the treatment of human life as experimental material dominate the plot.
- Science Horror — The narrative presents scientific ambition as corrupting and destructive, making the laboratory and the pursuit of physiological discovery sources of horror.
Tags
Victorian Gothic · nineteenth-century London · anatomical laboratory · medical horror · scientific ambition · unethical experimentation · dissection · body snatching · murder for science · resurrection men · physiological research · moral corruption
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The Soul of the Professor is listed on Textopian as a short story by Bernard Capes, dated 1901 CE.
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- Work type: Short story
- Author: Bernard Capes
- Date: 1901 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Gothic Horror, Psychological Horror, Medical Horror, Science Horror, Victorian Gothic Fiction
- Length: 3,265 words
- Structure: 1 section, 36 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)
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