Daddy Issues: Parental Consent and Scientific Responsibility in Shelley’s Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein provides an important framework for thinking about modern medical ethics problems, such as those posed by the cases of Charlie Gard and Stephanie Ann Beauclair (Baby Fae). The novel also poses problems we are only now coming to understand in their full complexity on its bicentennial, such as how to resolve questions of agency possessed by beings composed of multiple parts whose donors did not give consent for their use. This article addresses these questions through a close reading of the novel and a historical review of scientific and medical experimentation, and asks what we, in our “era of miracle and wonder . . . when medicine is magical and magical is art” might do now to make a better, more just life for “the baby with the baboon heart” (Paul Simon and Forere Mothoeloa, “Boy in the Bubble,” Graceland, Warner Brothers, 1986).