I, too, grew up among the deaf. I learned to use my hands for understanding, to change my face to exaggerate emotions. Sometimes I used glue or wires. Sometimes I used putty. I moved from silence into speech. I changed my name to something shorter. I pretended to curse my house, pretended to …
Maybe I’m the only one who sees the pelt across your bare face. I know a quiet man like you, a man who’s quick with a laugh and a fist, the first to break a vase across his rival’s head. You lean and smile and hold yourself in amiable check. I see your hands around …
London is a time-machine. As you walk through the city, you move through different eras: there is the house where Dickens lived, the hospital where Keats received his medical training, Shakespeare’s theater. You experience all the Londons that have existed, superimposed as in a palimpsest. I was in London to research a particular time: …
One morning, when Natalie Carver woke from troubled dreams, she found herself transformed in her bed into a Kafka story. At first she thought perhaps no one would notice. She had noticed instantly upon waking that something was wrong, that the allegories were slithering just under the skin in a way that made it painful …
They found the first one behind an old abandoned barn. It was tangled up in a mess of barbed wire and leaking opaque purple liquid from holes in its stomach. Tim tried to call Tracy on his cell phone, but couldn’t get reception. Byrd hit it in the face with a stick while Charlotte screamed. …
A lot of your work in medical history examines people and conditions which are considered by the larger society to be “monstrous” or “freakish.” What do you think it means to “monsterize” these people? I think humans are fascinated by differences, including extreme differences, and also have a tendency to want to say to themselves …
Sarah McCord can’t quite remember when she discovered that PubMed was still calling conjoined twins “monsters.” She does, however, remember being startled. “It bothered me,” she wrote to me, “because it seemed like there were all kinds of news stories about conjoined twins being surgically separated, and I knew that there would be more searching …
Monsters are on the rise. People can’t seem to get enough of vampires lately, the giant monsters (Kaiju) are resurfacing, and zombies have a new lease on life. The reasons for this increased monster culture are hard to pin down. Maybe it’s social anxiety in the post-9/11 decade, or the conflict in Iraq—some think there’s …
When I was a child, there was a monster under my bed. It was there when I was born, and when I was old enough to move from my mom’s bedroom to my own it moved in with me. I thought sometimes that together we took up too much room, but neither of us wanted …
In the movie, when Dracula moves from Transylvania to London, the first thing he does is crash the opera, and starts making the moves on the ladies. In particular he’s interested in Miss Mina (Helen Chandler), though Mina’s friend Miss Lucy (Frances Dade) has the hots for Dracula just a little bit more. Soon after …