4

Oneirodynia

By 1814, Polidori was in his third year at the University of Edinburgh, but
he did not feel ready to graduate. In February, he wrote to his father:
I do not think that I can graduate this year; I would have to be
examined next month, and I am not prepared - the more I read,
the more I find that I do not know enough. I know the general
doctrines, but there are so many things in the materia medica
and in chemistry which I don't know sufficiently and which
they always ask about, that I am not up to it. I do not want to
expose myself to a failure [?], because everyone would soon
know it, and it would be a shame for the rest of my life.1
Accordingly, he put off his examinations for a year.
Medical examinations in Edinburgh began in March, but they were
divided into five stages and spread over five months. The first stage was
the submission of the candidate's thesis, which was due before 24
March. If it was approved, the candidate was examined orally some time
before 24 June. In the third stage, by 4 July, the candidate had to write a
commentary on one of the aphorisms of Hippocrates and answer a
'medical question'; in the fourth, by 22 July, he had to write commen-
taries on two case histories.2 Finally, on 1 August, the candidate de-
fended his thesis in another oral. All this had to be done in Latin,3 but
only the first oral was considered difficult: the written exercises could all
be done at home at the candidate's leisure - and were often actually
written by the candidate's 'grinder' or private tutor.4 In a letter to his
sister Frances, Polidori called the first oral 'the examination ... that settles
all for at the first examination before the professors if I am successfull I
may laugh at the others - but that is a dreadfull one for that may last an
hour or more and you are taken upon any subjects that the vast field of
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32 Before Byron: 1795-1816

medicine & its branches comprehend.'5 Robert Christison, who was

examined only four years after Polidori and had three of the same
examiners - Gregory, Monro, and Rutherford - gives some idea of what
Polidori would have had to fear:
The custom then was for the Medical Faculty to meet for the
examinations successively at one another's houses, and for the
host to bear the chief brunt of the duty. Dr Gregory examined
me for an hour on the anatomy, physiology, and diseases of the
stomach - their treatment, and the chemistry of some of the
remedies mentioned. I have not since heard so masterly an
examination - so thorough, and yet so fair a scrutiny. Each of
the five other professors then put a few questions on desultory
subjects.
Monro's questions concerned 'concretions in the stomach.' Christison
had never heard of such things, but he improvised an answer and even
drew on his 'engineering propensities' to invent an instrument for their
extraction.
Monro thereupon wound up the dialogue by asking -
'Vidistine unquam, domine, tale instrumentum usitatum [Have
you ever seen, sir, such an instrument in use]?' To which I
replied, somewhat coolly, and in doubtful Latin, too - 'Nee
vidi, nee audivi [I have neither seen nor heard of one].'
That, apparently, was good enough for Monro. Rutherford, 'probably
regarding me as too confident and easy,' was more demanding. He did
not ask Christison about botany, his official subject, 'which it was said he
never cared for,' but about kidney stones, 'a subject very much out of a
tyro's way.' Luckily, Christison had seen a case a fortnight before.6
Polidori did not spend all of his last year at Edinburgh preparing for
his examinations; indeed, this is the first year in which his letters refer to
any extra-curricular activities. (This may be because his earliest surviv-
ing letters to Frances date from this year: he seems to have written to her
with less constraint than to his father.) He continued to write poetry. In
May 1815, he sent Frances a sonnet in Italian condemning Napoleon for
the looting of Italy, and asked her to 'Ask Papa if [it] has errors of Italian'
(it does).7 He also went to the theatre. In March 1815, when the famous
actor John Philip Kemble, a former student and good friend of his
father's,8 played in Edinburgh for two weeks, Polidori reported: T saw
him and [had] a free entrance to the theatre for the fortnight he] was here
- I was generally there for an h[our or] two every evening to meet my
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Oneirodynia 33

acquaintance - [He] was very fine in some parts.'9 Polidori found Kemble
personally disagreeable: 'I am not very fond of seeing him for he seems
to think, me either a person below him in rank or else a boy neither of
which I count myself.'10 His rather condescending connoisseur's attitude
towards Kemble's acting may have been a kind of revenge for this
personal condescension. He also made a point of reminding his sister
that Kemble was not the only great actor of the day: 'At present Edin. is
nearly emptied by Kean who is acting at Glasgow many families and
immense numbers of young men are gone there to see him - the theatre
here being extremely small could not give 100 guineas a night as he
asked & hence he could not be engaged.'11 Kemble, presumably, had to
put up with the small theatre and a small fee. He was then near the end of
his career: he would retire in 1817. Kean was near the beginning of his
career - his sensational debut as Shylock at Drury Lane had taken place
only a year before - and Kemble was known to be jealous of the younger
man's success.
Polidori also went to parties. At one of them, he had a contretemps of a
kind that was to become characteristic of him:
I heard at a party some nights ago. an Italian Lady Gabrini I
think play upon a violin which she is said to play exquisitely it
did not however affect me as it appeared too duro Is that a
musical term? I found myself almost the only one speaking
Italian and hence was always near her - there was Bianchi who
knows Papa - There was a curious thing happened when I was
speaking to this lady in Italian a person came up to me and said
il devroit etre bien difficile de faire mouvoir les bras ainsi
speaking of fiddling I turned round and answered in English
on account of the pronounciation seeing he was not french
then he spoke stammering some words in English blundering -
I suddenly said est ce que vous etes francois he said no not
quite why so - because your pronunciation of both is so bad I
did not know whether English or French was your language he
turned on his heel & said are you an Italian no I am English -
as soon as he went away I asked a friend near who he was
Lord Leven!! One of the 16!!! an old man of 50 - 1 2

This was the seventh Earl of Leven, whom the Scots peers had chosen in
the general election of 1806 as one of their sixteen representatives in the
House of Lords. He was actually sixty-six in 1815.13
These letters to Frances are notable for Polidori's references to their
mother. All his letters to (and from) Anna Maria herself have been lost,
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34 Before Byron: 1795-1816

so it is difficult to assess his relationship with her, and almost impossible

to avoid underestimating it. But he refers to her with a relaxed good
humour entirely absent from his dealings with his father. One of her
letters, for example, was apparently burned rather than mailed;14 this
seems melodramatic, but Polidori makes it an occasion for a cheerful
meditation on eternal recurrence: 'Remember me kindly to Mama & tell
her that as soon as the cinders of her last shall have come again round [in]
the course of nature to paper ink & wafer I suppose I may expect a
letter.'15
It seems to have been around this time too that Polidori met William
Taylor (1765-1836), the Norwich intellectual who became the first in a
series of virtual foster-fathers to him. He introduced Taylor to Frances in
his letter of 22 March 1815 as 'an old man of 45 the best german scholar in
England counted by every body & excellent Italian & french one.' 16
Taylor was actually fifty. Polidori's concern with the ages of these 'old
men' suggests his partly vain, partly insecure sense of himself as a young
one; his tendency to get their ages wrong may be an unconscious attempt
to narrow the gap between them and himself, or to identify them with
his father - who, like Taylor, was a scholar and translator, and who was
then forty-six. Polidori seems to have divided his ambivalence between
them, giving Leven his resentment and Taylor his love.
Taylor had learned German while travelling on the Continent be-
tween 1779 and 1782, and had become famous for his translation of
Burger's 'Lenore' (1790), which not only influenced Scott's but (accord-
ing to Scott himself) inspired Scott to become a poet.17 Between 1793 and
1824, he published 1,754 articles in the Monthly Review, the Monthly
Magazine, and other periodicals; he later incorporated many of them,
and some of his translations, in his Historic Survey of German Poetry
(1828-30). Harriet Martineau, a younger and sterner Norwich intellec-
tual, recalled: 'During the war, it was a great distinction to know any
thing of German literature; and in Mr. Taylor's case it proved a ruinous
distinction. He was completely spoiled by the flatteries of shallow men,
pedantic women, and conceited lads.' Moreover, alcoholism 'coarsened
his morale, and drowned his intellect':

William Taylor was managed by a regular process, - first, of

feeding, then of wine-bibbing, and immediately after of poking
to make him talk: and then came his sayings, devoured by the
gentlemen, and making ladies and children aghast; - defences
of suicide, avowals that snuff alone had rescued him from it:
information given as certain, that 'God save the King' was sung
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Oneirodynia 35

by Jeremiah in the temple of Solomon, - that Christ was

watched on the day of his supposed ascension, and observed to
hide himself till dusk, and then to make his way down the
other side of the mountain; and other such plagiarisms from
the German Rationalists. When William Taylor began with 'I
firmly believe,' we knew that something particularly incredible
was coming.18

In 1821, Taylor taught German to George Borrow, who found his conver-
sation unsettling, but whose account of him is more indulgent than
Martineau's. Like Martineau, Borrow mentions Taylor's preoccupation
with suicide, which Taylor apparently thought defensible if it harmed no
other person, and if it observed decorum - according to Borrow, he
praised a Quaker who had cut her throat over a bucket so as not to spill
any blood, 'thus exhibiting in her last act that nice sense of neatness for
which Quakers are distinguished.'19 He is also said to have composed an
epigram on a coroner who had killed himself: 'By suicide / He lived &
died.'20
At some point early in 1815, Polidori visited Taylor in Norwich, and
apparently made an impression on Taylor's friends there; in March 1815,
Taylor wrote to tell him:

Sharpe drew your head on a card with the attributes of Apollo;

somebody wrote under the likeness:
Apollo here his every gift imparts
His form verse brilliance & his healing arts.
I do not tell you this to make you vain, but to show you are
remembered ...21
The portraitist was probably Michael William Sharp (d. 1840), who was
living in Norwich at this time and who, in 1820, would read 'An Essay on
Gesture' to the Norwich Philosophical Society, of which Taylor was a
prominent member. The compliment did, excusably, make Polidori a
little vain: he sent the couplet on to Frances with the satisfied comment
'See how I must have caught them.'22
Taylor also helped Polidori with his doctoral thesis. Polidori had
decided to write on somnambulism, or, as he termed it, oneirodynia. The
term strictly means nightmare: it is a compound of the Greek oneiros
(dream) and odyne (pain). But William Cullen, the great nosologist of the
previous century, had extended it to include somnambulism,23 and
Polidori, under the impression that the second half of the compound was
a (non-existent) Greek verb dyno (walk), thought it should refer only to
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36 Before Byron: 1795-1816

somnambulism.24 He was following the nosology, if not the etymology,

of Francois Boissier de Sauvages, 'the Linnaeus of diseases.'25 Sauvages
classed somnambulism among the hallucinations; nightmare, because
its symptoms include a shortness of breath as well as terror, he included
with the anhelations or respiratory disorders - in the same class, for
example, as the hiccups. Like Cullen, he had in mind the classical
nightmare (now technically called a night terror) depicted by Fuseli.
Sauvages derived his term for it, ephialtes, from the Greek 'epi and
allomai, to mount on, because the sufferer dreams that some creature is
mounting on his chest' and choking him.26 Erasmus Darwin included an
account of the nightmare in The Loves of the Plants (1789). Like Fuseli, he
thought that the term referred to the creature's horse, rather than to the
creature itself:
So on his NIGHTMARE through the evening fog
Flits the squab Fiend o'er fen, and lake, and bog;
Seeks some love-wilder'd Maid with sleep oppress'd,
Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast.

Back o'er her pillow sinks her blushing head,

Her snow-white limbs hang helpless from the bed;
While with quick sighs, and suffocative breath,
Her interrupted heart-pulse swims in death.

In vain to scream with quivering lips she tries,

And strains in palsy'd lids her tremulous eyes;
In vain she wills to run, fly, swim, walk, creep;
The WILL presides not in the bower of SLEEP.
- On her fair bosom sits the Demon-Ape
Erect, and balances his bloated shape;
Rolls in their marble orbs his Gorgon-eyes,
And drinks with leathern ears her tender cries.27
Darwin, a student of Cullen's, thought that the nightmare and somnam-
bulism were related phenomena, both contingent on 'the abolition of all
voluntary power' during sleep.28
Polidori's use of the Sauvagesian nosology is not only, from a modern
point of view, regressive;29 it is also inconsistent with his later literary
interest in the nightmarish, and with the Gothic tradition linking som-
nambulism and nightmare. (As a student at Edinburgh, he may not have
been able to escape Cullen's influence, even though he tried to rebel
against it.) If Ximenes had been inspired partly by Wieland, then Pol-
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Oneirodynia 37

idori's thesis may have been inspired partly by another of Brockden

Brown's novels, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), in
which one of the somnambulists, Clithero Edny, is also a nightmare
figure. Having inadvertently killed the brother of his patroness, he
enters her bedroom, in a somnambulistic trance, to stab her and so save
her from dying of a broken heart. He is caught looming over her bed
much like Fuseli's demon. In Sheridan LeFanu's 'Carmilla' (1871), the
title character pretends to suffer from somnambulism; she turns out to be
the vampire responsible for the narrator's nightmares - a literal version
of Darwin's metaphorical presentation of the nightmare as like a vam-
pire, drinking in its victim's tender cries. In James Malcolm Rymer's
Varney, the Vampyre; or, The Feast of Blood (1847), Flora Bannerworth
sleepwalks into the arms of the nightmarish Varney (whom we have first
seen looming over her bed) - an incident copied by Bram Stoker in
Dracula (1897). In Dickens's little Dorrit (1857), the first of Mrs Flint-
winch's dreams - which turn out, of course, not to be dreams - begins
with her somnambulistically leaving her bed, and ends with her being
choked by her husband, as if he were an incubus.
Brockden Brown and LeFanu evoke a fear of the uncanny behaviour of
somnambulists; Rymer, Dickens, and Stoker, the fear felt by somnam-
bulists themselves at their own helplessness. Robert Wiene's The Cabinet
of Dr. Caligari (1919) combines the two: the somnambulist Cesare is a
nightmarish monster only because he himself is a victim of Caligari. A
vampire, too, is both a nightmarish monster and the somnambulistic
victim of another vampire. Charles Nodier makes a rationalistic version
of this point in his review of Polidori's tale for Les Debats (1819):
If a man subject to nightmares is a somnambulist, if he is free
to leave his house at all hours, ... if chance or some terrible
instinct leads him into cemeteries in the middle of the night
and he is met there by a passer-by, by a traveller, by the widow
and orphan who come to weep for a husband or a father, the
history of vampirism is explained in its entirety.30
Somnambulism seems to have been an unusual subject for a medical
thesis. It certainly was not the object of much medical interest: Cullen
had more or less dismissed it: 'Many may think the genus Oneirodynia
altogether unnecessary, as being no disease ... This is true.'31 Polidori's
uncle Luigi, however, had submitted to the Royal College of Physicians a
report of a case of somnambulism he had treated in 1793: a ten-year-old
boy who walked about in his sleep, talked, prayed, threw his cap at the
ceiling, used his chamber-pot, attacked a servant, and went to consider-
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38 Before Byron: 1795-1816

able lengths to frustrate the physician's examination. Polidori devoted

ten pages, more than a quarter of his thesis, to quoting his uncle's case
history. Taylor drew his attention to another case history in Diderot's
Encyclopedic This was a much more remarkable case than Luigi's, but it
was vouched for by the archbishop of Bordeaux: it involved a young
seminarian who wrote and revised sermons and music in his sleep, and
who, one winter night, dived into his bed, dreaming that he was rescuing
someone from an icy river. Taylor also treated Polidori to a ribald
anecdote about a French landlady who sleepwalked to the bed of one of
her lodgers, who 'received her with the utmost hospitality, & [like
Varney or Dracula] embraced the opportunity & the person,' but, per-
haps because Taylor could 'produce no vouchers' for its authenticity,
Polidori did not use 33it.32
Taylor's letter is dated 12 March, and Polidori submitted his thesis to
Monro on 23 March, so the part of it based on the Encyclopedic - almost
another quarter - must have been written in less than eleven days. But
most of this is simply translated from the original French into academic
Latin. Luigi Polidori's case history is 'set forth in his own words, the
better to retain the author's meaning.'34 Much of the rest of the thesis is
quoted or translated directly from the works of Cullen and theNosologia
Methodica (1761) of Boissier de Sauvages. It is not an original piece of
research; nor, with its variety of sources, is it a coherent piece of writing.
Theses were not taken seriously in Polidori's time; like the rest of the
examination exercises, they were often written by the students' grinders.
Christison remarks, T even composed the Latin of my thesis,' as if this
were an unusual accomplishment.35 Polidori's later pride in his thesis
suggests that he too wrote it himself, but there is no other proof.
The orientation of Polidori's thesis is more unusual, and more interest-
ing, than the quality of its research or writing, and for this (unlike,
perhaps, the actual Latin), he was presumably responsible. His approach
is more epistemological than medical. Luigi Polidori carefully notes that
his patient's 'mother had suffered from repeated and lasting headaches,'
that his 'aunt was prone to attacks of epilepsy,' and that his episode of
somnambulism was preceded by three months of epileptoid spasms and
tremors. But Polidori, though he concedes that the 'disease ... evidently
arose from an affection of the brain,' immediately adds that 'what this
affection of the brain is can by no means be understood,'36 and proceeds
to what really interests him: how the disease affected the patient's
understanding and memory, which of his senses he used, and why. The
article in the Encyclopedic, though written by a physician, Jean-Jacques
Menuret de Chambaud (1733-1815),37 is itself devoted mostly to prob-
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Oneirodynia 39

lems of perception. About the causes of somnambulism, Polidori has

little more to offer than a quotation from Sauvages;38 about its treatment,
nothing but a jumble of suggestions from Sauvages and the Ency dope die:
Perhaps tonics could be given, such as Peruvian bark, iron, and
similar things, but how much, and when, can be known only
from experience ...
In an attack, first the doors and windows should be shut, and
every exit should be obstructed. For a certain sleepwalker,
believing that he saw Aristotle and other philosophers leaving
by the window, would have followed them if his friends had
not restrained him. Then those things should be supplied
which rouse the sufferer from his sleep with terror. Whips,
electricity, and cold baths - if they should be placed so that the
sufferer falls into them when he leaves his bed sleepwalking -
will perhaps prevent a recurrence of the attacks.39
This looks like a prescription for replacing somnambulism with
nightmares.
Polidori's interest in epistemology - as expressed in his empiricist
scepticism, for example - functions partly as a cover for his lack of
interest in medicine. He begins his discussion of the causes of somnam-
bulism by listing the three Boerhaavean categories of cause (proximal,
remote, and predisposing),40 and then more or less gives up, on the
grounds that medical science does not know much about any of them.41
His excuse for not discussing treatment adequately is similar, though
briefer: 'we should do everything we can, but, as usual, we do not know
what would drive out the disease.'42 At other times, however, his scep-
ticism seems more serious, a reasoned rejection of contemporary medi-
cal reductionism. (A certain scepticism is characteristic of the more old-
fashioned medical thinking to which Polidori adhered.)43 He concedes
that it is desirable to reduce a phenomenon such as somnambulism to its
first causes, but doubts that this is possible:
Indeed, all the actions of the soul, and of external bodies, on
the organic body are so obscure, that it seems we shall never
know the first causes of things. For when in chemistry and
even in mechanics we are ignorant of many and great things,
how are we to believe that we shall come near to grasping the
principles of vegetable life, much less those of animal life and
of the soul?44
The rejection of reductionism, the concern with the action of the soul on
the body, and the reference to the principles of life show that Polidori is
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40 Before Byron: 1795-1816

aligned with the vitalist school of medicine (I shall discuss this further in
chapter 9).
The question that interests Polidori most is why somnambulists per-
ceive some things but not others. He decides that '[they have no sensa-
tions except those pertaining to the very thing they are engaged in.' Thus
his uncle's patient 'saw only when his imagination provided him with
some idea which he needed vision to follow up appropriately'; he could
see to throw his nightcap up to the rafters of his bedroom, but he could
not see a torch held unexpectedly before his eyes 'because his mind was
intent elsewhere.' The seminarian, 'like the other, used his vision when
something struck his imagination rather vividly,' and in general, 'unless
his imagination had already presented the image of something to his
mind, he did not have the use of his other senses either. The reason for
this restriction on perception is that 'the mind can think about only one
thing at a time': 45 sleepwalkers are, simply, preoccupied with their
dreams, and are no less perceptive than people preoccupied in other
ways: 46
And if one may say so, oneirodynia is the same state of sleep as
anger or some other perturbation is of waking; for in both, the
mind and body are applied to one thing so that external things
do not excite any sensation in them ... We also see an example
of this in affections of the body, for someone who suffers from
gout will not feel a lesser pain. The senses whose work it is to
explore the object of thought, however, are open to the small-
est influences, which also happens in waking states when the
mind is occupied, for we see that the more intent we are on
something, the more the senses we have used to examine it are
sharpened, and our other senses are more and more dead-
ened. 47
Because Polidori believes that this combination of imperceptiveness
and heightened perceptiveness, though characteristic of somnam-
bulism, is neither unique nor inexplicable, he takes issue with some of
the anti-empiricist points made by Menuret de Chambaud in the En-
cyclopedic For example, he defends the empiricist doctrine that 'there is
nothing in the mind which was not before in the senses' against 'some
who have not considered the matter well' but think that the phenomena
of somnambulism disprove it - namely, Menuret de Chambaud. 48 The
seminarian who dreamed that he was freezing to death after rescuing
someone from an icy river 'may not have been in cold air; nevertheless,
this would by no means disprove the doctrine, for there might have been
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Oneirodynia 41

a sensation of cold in his senses any number of times, which might have
been renewed again and again by his memory.' Even if 'the effects of
cold were greater than he had ever experienced,' this could be accounted
for by the narrowly focused but otherwise 'excessive irritability' that is as
characteristic of somnambulism as it is of other states of preoccupation.
Besides, Polidori adds, 'it must be remembered that he was not healthy,
but sick,' and it is not valid to base general arguments on atypical cases.49
Just before he submitted his thesis, Polidori wrote to Frances: 'as the
time approaches for my first examination so also my anxiety increases.'
But he was somewhat more confident than he had been a year before:
I am however doing all I can to hinder a rejection and so begin
to hope - Indeed If I might judge from those I see round me in
full confidence of gaining their diploma I might be certain of it
for to say that I knew more medicine than they would indeed
be to say little but then they are men who will not feel a beat-
ing of the heart or a confusing of the head by entering into a
room with six inquisitors much less six professors - but nil
desperandumlook in a latin dictionary - for nil & despero
[Polidori had a pet project of teaching Frances Latin by corres-
pondence] - I have begun examining myself by question-
ing your brother & making John answer - but john s head
is very often very thick & dull - he stutters stammers & often
brings out the wrong answer -
In May, he wrote to Frances anxiously: 'ask Mama what I am to do if
flunked' - it is worth noting that he did not want her to ask his father.50
But his examinations went well. His first oral, the one he dreaded, was
held
the 31 of may at 4 o clock in the house of Dr Hope. I was there
examined by Drs Hope Gregory Home & Monro. After my
examination having been put out of the room Dr Hope came to
me and said that I had not only passed but passed with the
utmost satisfaction to all the professors and upon my going out
Dr Monro complimented me upon my extraordinary clear head.
Next morning I called upon Dr Gregory about my thesis who
told me that upon going from my examination he had read it
with satisfaction and told me that in my case there was no fear
of rejection in my ulterior trials so that my thesis might be
delivered to the printer, which I accordingly did.51
As he had predicted, he could now more or less afford to laugh at the
rest of the examinations. On 24 June, he was given his medical question -
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42 Before Byron: 1795-1816

on the origin of pain in inflammations, Gregory's favourite topic - and

his aphorism from Hippocrates: 'A shivering fit and delirium following
excessive drinking is bad.'52 On 4 July, he submitted his answer to the
question (which he prefaced with a reiteration of his medical scepticism:
'The nervous system is wrapped in so much obscurity that it would be
fruitless and unwise to say much about the causes of pain in an inflam-
mation') and his commentary on the aphorism; Gregory and Rutherford
conducted his oral examination. On the same day, he was given his two
case histories to comment on: one involved nerve blindness, the other, a
'pseudosyphiloid' sore apparently caused by the treatment of a venereal
infection with mercury. He submitted his comments and was examined
on 22 July.53
And on the 1st of August I was examined upon my thesis by
Dr Gregory who after prefacing that it was quam maxima
ingenuitate & quam lucide scripta [written as lucidly as pos-
sible, and with the greatest possible ingenuity] defended his
predecessor Cullen [against Polidori's attack on the association
of somnambulism with nightmare] & attacked my derivation of
Oneyrodynia which I however supported [Gregory, of course,
was right about this]. On that day I received the reward of all
my troubles and was by the imposition of the velvet cap raised
to the degree of Doctor of medicine.54

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