I Am Become Frankenstein

(Warnings: medical abuse, mentions of abortions, mentions of organs, Frankenstein God Complex, and other mental health issues.)

“Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” -Bhagavad Gita, later quoted by Robert Oppenheimer at the Trinity Test.

Obsession is a dark, and dangerous thing. Sometimes, you don’t even realize you’ve fallen into it until it’s too late. And by the time you do realize it, you can’t back out.

My name is Mallory St. Germain, and I am become Frankenstein.

I didn’t mean to. I didn’t go through the excruciating process of applying to medical school, uprooting my whole life, and getting a job as a Police Coroner’s Assistant to become an ethic-less immoral maniac. In fact, it isn’t even my fault. It’s Dr. Richard Lackington’s. He was the one that created the premise of my downfall.

“What is Life?” He asked us, that first day in class. A few hands raised, and he ignored them. “Is it a heartbeat? A brain? Is it a soul?” He asked with a scoffing laugh. A few of us smiled, huffing quiet gusts of laughter. “Life is chemical. It is electric!” He leaned on his cane and flipped his chalkboard to reveal Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Carefully drawn brains and chemical equations crowded the rest of the board.

“The Frankenstein Theory!” He boomed, hitting the center of the board with the tip of his cane. “The theory of a mad man, yes. But a mad man ahead of his time. How many of you know this?”

No one raised a hand.

“Ah,” Dr. Lackington sighed. “I see nobody has opened their textbooks past the first page.”

We squirmed in appropriate contrition.

“The Frankenstein Theory is the theory that, if one were to find the exact balances, the exact ratios of chemical to electricity, you could create life where there was nothing. Maybe even create Life from Death. After all, we are powered by brains that ooze slime and electricity. Can we not just make more slime and electricity and call it a day? Women do! Women make life cell by cell in scientific precision without even trying. That’s how we’re all here.”

There were three girls in class, and we all laughed.

“But Dr. Lackington, you might be thinking, this is the Frankenstein Theory. Yes. It is still a Theory. In science and medicine, there are many theories about many things. This is just one.”

Though that was my first introduction to the theory, that was not where my obsession began. It began when I was assigned a paper.

Life Begins When? The Role of Philosophy and Rhetoric in Medical Ethics.

It was our final essay of the semester, worth twenty percent of our grade. And it wasn’t even for Lackington’s class. It was for Ethics, a class I personally didn’t feel I needed. Medical ethics are simple. Save when you can, don’t play God.

But there I sat, arguing that as doctors, we are inherently playing God.

The Frankenstein Theory reduces humanity to nothing more than sludge and electricity. If one can make life so easily, and watch it die in seconds, is that not playing God with a Petri dish? If we take a modern Christian stand point, then life begins at conception, when cells first begin to multiply. But what life is a simple clump of cells? In the 1980’s, an abortion provider in Switzerland, with permission from the mother, sold a fourteen week aborted fetus to a pharmaceutical lab to research the use of fetal stem cells in skincare. Is that not Playing God? Using the beginning of a life to extend youth? If we believe the Frankenstein Theory, then this fetus was nothing more than underdeveloped chemicals with no power.

The medical oath says We Must Not Play God. But what is medicine if not playing God in the small scale?

I got a B.

My Ethics professor said that I “understood but did not appreciate” the assignment.

At my Coroner’s Assistant job, I was no longer learning to Play God. Instead, I was assistant to the Grim Reaper. I pulled people open to see what stopped their electric and chemical interactions. I dug bullets from brain matter and cast knife tips from bone. I obsessed over the skin cells from under nails and perfected my sutures with no worry for blood loss. My hands had no need of gentleness.

“What makes a person themselves is gone,” I argued in Ethics debates about organ donation. “Why shouldn’t we all be compulsory organ donors? If my liver is perfectly good, and I’m gone, then by all means, take it. Viable transplant organs are at an all time low, and the rich use their money to get ahead. If organ donations were no longer a choice, we could solve that problem.”

The Devil’s Advocate is a much abhorred position. Yet more and more I found myself playing it with no remorse as we moved into the neurosurgery units.

What makes a brain? Fat, for the most part. The same stuff that clings to organs and rounds out the belly is also what controls the body. More than half of the brain is made of fat. The rest is a number string of protein, all of it coiling together into gray or white matter. The brain is then suspended in water, plasma, and blood. It pumps out electricity, and commands the body like a dictator.

When broken down, it looks simple. The right chemicals, the right electricity.

Life is easy to make, and easy to destroy.

It’s easy to steal from a police morgue. When you’re the assistant, they delegate gross or unappealing tasks to you. And they don’t question the thermoses you bring so long as you keep things sterile.

When a hospital takes an organ for donation, it’s flushed clean of the donor’s blood with ice cold saline, wrapped in sterile plastic, and put on ice for transport. Many organs can be donated after death with no visible change to the body. But you can’t be greedy. One kidney here, another there. The real challenge is making sure all the organs are compatible, that if you were to transplant one organ, that it would match the other.

This is also shockingly easy, given the amount of tests run on each corpse.

You’re supposed to transplant each organ within a certain number of hours after removal. But if you can set them up with handmade “life” support, you can extend your time.

Organs are easy. Bodies are not. After all, our chemical slime and bio electricity live in something, not just Petri dishes. So sometimes, you have to make do, and take a body piece by piece as well, and learn how to glue bones together before you can stitch the flesh. The unidentified arm found in a junk yard. The foot of a man left for coyotes in the desert.

Sometimes, you’re very very lucky, and you make friends with a man who is convinced his body is not his own, and he happily agrees to let you take his right leg, up to below the hip.

“All the docs say I’m a nutcase,” he confided, watching me prep a localized anesthetic to deaden the limb. “But this leg isn’t mine. I’m not sure whose it is, but it isn’t mine.”

I just smiled, and nodded.

By the time I realized what I had done, it was too late. Percy was stitched up, a stump under his hip. He thanked me for it, and offered to “share the flesh”.

I have some lines.

There’s an easier way to create life than this. I have a uterus. I could clone a sheep. But that’s easy. Growing a baby takes no thought on the mother’s part, and cloning is nearly as effortless once the embryo is implanted.

I can prove the Frankenstein Theory correct. I’m smart enough. I’m smarter than Victor. I’m smarter than Lackington and his pompous lectures. Sometimes, you have to sacrifice Ethics in the name of progress.

I’m a woman. I can play God simply by getting pregnant. I’m a doctor. I can play God by getting hired as a surgeon. I could stop now. I could destroy everything I’ve collected, take it somewhere remote and burn it all with no one the wiser. I could stop. I could stop. I could stop I could stop I could stop I could stop I could stop I could stop.

Or I can prove a theory right, and show everyone how easy it is to play God with the pieces left behind.

I am become Frankenstein, creator of Life from Death.