Deadly Nausea and Monstrous Ingestion: Moral-Medical Fantasies in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

This analysis explores Robert Louis Stevenson’s use of the dual languages of infection and ingestion in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The languages are contextualized within the nineteenth-century’s preoccupation with controlling psychological and physiological health, invasive contagion, and the dangers of urban food production. By examining Victorian sources on invisible chemical impurities in adulterated food, as well as physicians’ conceptions of the conscious monstrosity of contagion through medical theories and practices of the time, this discussion suggests that Stevenson knits two different kinds of ingestion terror into intertwined operations of moral and medical revulsion in Strange Case.