Heart and Science

"Yes, it’s British Victorians saying they want its benefits, but don’t want the experimentation itself in their own garden. Which is why Benjulia in Heart and Science is so frightening, because he’s right there on the outskirts of London doing his work on monkeys and dogs in a warehouse. It’s very much a thesis novel. Heart and Science is Collins’s 1883 attempt to enter directly into the anti-vivisection debates, which were very hot at that moment. There had been a number of texts by continental doctors published in translation, which were very explicit about the vivisectionist as this artist of murder who doesn’t hear the cries of pain. This scared the hell out of middle-class England, and even many in the mainstream medical establishment in Britain. Collins was sensitive to animals, and sensitive generally to suffering, as his novels show. He wanted to show in this novel that there’s a fine line between disregarding animal suffering and being cruel as a human. Just. It does work as a novel, in fact it’s a lot of fun in places, it has great characters but it is very didactic. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t tell a good story. It’s about a young student of medicine who is working himself into the ground and needs to take a break, and when he’s going to do that runs into a woman who could be a romantic interest, and they begin a complicated plot whereby she becomes disabled (she suffers a medical ailment) only to be stalked by Dr Benjulia, the experimental doctor, hoping to learn something that will help him in his experimental aims by artificially prolonging her illness. It’s a contest to save her but to also find a solution to the medical problem she presents, and whether experimental means or other means are best suited to that purpose. “There’s a fine line between disregarding animal suffering and being cruel as a human” Benjulia’s brother serves as a means of vocalising the plight of the vivisectionist. They have conversations about whether the dog will complain, whether animals have a language in which to address their complaints about being operated on. At the end of the novel there’s a famous scene in which he lets the animals go and they all come flooding out before his demise. He showed us not to be afraid to experiment with narrative form: you don’t have to tell it either from the conventional first-person, eye-witness perspective, the conventional Bildungsroman formula, or from the omniscient narrator’s perspective. You can have characters speak for themselves, you can have lots of them, you can mix them up, and the readers will be excited by that. You can have non-conventional characters front and centre and readers will be compelled by something other than normal men and women moving towards marriage."