ABSTRACT
One image of melancholy, a looser term, which in the early nineteenth century carried both medical and general emotional connotations, associated it with refined, learned and civilised men. To have a well-developed intellect could be seen as a mark of status, a way of differentiating mental refinement from cruder skills based on manual capacities, but it was also a precondition of a particular kind of pathology – introspection, melancholy, obsession. In Mary Shelley’s treatment, what is common to the different pursuits Frankenstein is enthused by is their capacity to open up nature’s secrets, or at least they are designed to do so. Medical writers imagined doctors in a quasi-divine role, shedding new light on nature’s processes. Certain biographical traits were commonly picked up in accounts of students of nature. The unveiling of nature, that profoundly unstable term, was a source of valued insights, but it could also unleash that which was dangerous.
