John William Polidori MD (1795 - 1821)

Born 7 Sep 1795 in London, England

Ancestors

Died 24 Aug 1821 at age 25 in London, England

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Biography

John Polidori MD is Notable.

John Polidori

John William Polidori, M.D. was born September 7, 1795 to Gaetano Fedele Polidori (1764-1853) and Anna Maria (Pierce) Polidori (abt.1774-).

Residence

Marriage

John was never married.

Early Life

He was the son of an Italian political refugee. He studied at Edinburgh and received a degree from Ampleford in Yorkshire. John studied medicine and by the age of 19, he was an M.D. His thesis was about somnambulism.^[1] He was fascinated by the darker side of medicine.

Occupation

John became Lord Byron's physician, and the two traveled abroad. At the Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva, they met poet Shelley. His second wife to be Mary Godwin, and her step sister/companion, Claire Clairmont. Who at the time was Lord Byron's lover. That night, the group told ghost stories, famously leading to the creation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and John's The Vampyre.^[2]

The Vampyre

In The Vampire, John's main character, Lord Ruthven, is the first vampire to be portrayed as an attractive and mysterious aristocrat. Based on Byron himself. Ruthven is also the first English vampire. Link to book.^[3] The Vampyre went on to inspire Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Note: John Polidori was being paid to keep a journal of Polidori’s travels with Lord Byron. So Polidori was writing things down the whole time The Vampire and Frankenstein' were being written.

IMPORTANT: The Vampire was a story that was discarded by Lord Byron. It was Polidori that ADAPTED Lord Byron’s story into The Vampire. So The Vampire was not totally Polidori’s invention.^[4]

John often lacks credit, but he strongly influenced Frankenstein, by talking about reanimation of the dead, and his medical knowledge at the villa. John also wrote prose, drama, and other works.

An aside: John Polidori was hot-headed and once proposed a duel of himself and Poet Shelley. But Shelley was non-violent and declined. Lord Byron offered to take Shelley’s place in the duel. But the duel never happened.^[5]

After leaving Byron's service in 1816, John returned to London to work as a doctor in Norwich. He gave up medicine to study for the Bar. More can be read on a updated article.^[6]

Death and Burial

On August 24, 1821, John committed suicide four months after lodging formal complaints with publications that wrongly credited Byron for The Vampyre. They say he poisoned himself with prussic acid in his house in Soho. Two weeks before his 26th birthday. John's death was reported in The Traveller Monday evening on the 27th of Aug 1821. Sadly, the verdict of the corner's jury said it was due to, "death by the visitation of God". Without demanding any evidence no one will ever know the truth if he committed suicide or not.

Burial Record

He is now resting at St. Pancras Old Churchyard.^[7][8]

Memorial Green Plaque

There is a lovely Green Plaque that was erected by the City of Westminster on 15 July 1998.

John Polidori

The Diary

An extensive read on his life was recorded in this Diary. As well as Lord Byron.^[9]

The Diary

About Frankenstein, The Vampyre, Grave Robbing, illegal resurrectionists, Organ Theft, Heart Transplants

16 September 2022: Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), USA, apologizes for 1968 transplant in which Black man's heart was taken without consent.^[10]

In 1968, a team at the Medical College of Virginia led by Dr. Richard Lower performed the first human-to -human heart transplant in the American South.

A Black laborer, Bruce Tucker, arrived at the hospital with a severe head injury. The doctors deemed his condition too grave for him to survive.

The transplant team removed his heart and gave it to Joseph Klett, a white businessman. It was later determined that neither Bruce Tucker nor his family consented to the transplant.

The story became the focus of the 2020 book The Organ Thieves by former Richmond Times - Dispatch journalist Chip Jones.

Bruce Tucker's family didn't know the heart had been removed until they were told by a funeral director, Jones said.

In 1994, construction workers laying the foundation for the Kontos Medical Sciences Building made a discovery. Twenty-five feet below ground, near the end of East Marshall Street, they found a well filled with human remains, leather shoes, glass bottles and mud.

VCU called its chief archaeologist, L. Daniel Mouer, who could smell the decomposition. He found bones and what appeared to be hair and skin.

But VCU refused to delay construction and gave Mouer only a weekend to excavate the remains. When the deadline arrived, a backhoe plowed into the earth, pulling up the bones and dirt, and Mouer watched in disbelief. What couldn’t be collected quickly was left behind.

What was recovered included more than 400 bones belonging to at least 44 adults and nine children. Two rib bones belonged to an infant, and two more to a newborn. Many of the skeletons were incomplete.

Researchers studied the skulls and determined most of them were of African ancestry. It’s likely the individuals were robbed from their graves, used as medical cadavers for the medical department of Hampden-Sydney College — which later became the Medical College of Virginia and eventually VCU.

Throughout the 19th century, the school hired workers known as resurrectionists to illegally dig up bodies, often from the Shockoe Hill African burial ground, a mile north at the intersection of North Fifth and Hospital streets, wrote VCU archivist Jodi Koste in a report.

When the bodies served no further use, they were dumped in a well.

The bones show signs of medical examination — there are cuts and nicks from scalpels, suggesting students learned how to amputate a limb and saw a skull in half to remove the brain. The cut marks are crude and incomplete, the work of amateurs learning their craft.

Alongside the bones, Mouer found detritus — 25 leather shoes, olive green glass bottles, the remains of three dogs and a cat. The articles dated to the mid-1800s.

There are some records of bodies robbed from their graves.

There are still human remains under the Kontos building, and historical records suggest a second well of bodies exists under the Egyptian Building (Virginia Commonwealth University, USA). ^[11]

Lynchburg, Virginia, prostitutes, grave robbing, pauper burials, illegal resurrectionists, medical research, University of Virginia

Ella Jamerson and her teenage sister Nora Jamerson were prostitutes living in the same house in Lynchburg, Virginia, U.S.A.

On July 18, 1894, Nora took an overdose of laudanum, a mixture containing opium, and died.

Two and a half years after Nora's suicide, around noon on February 17, 1897, Ella Jamerson threw herself into the Kanawha Canal, and drowned herself.

Nora and Ella Jamerson were both buried in the potter's field at the Lynchburg’s Old City Cemetery. Unfortunately, Ella was not allowed to rest in peace. At the time of her burial, there had been rumors of paupers' bodies being dug up and sold to the University of Virginia's Medical College.

Shortly after Ella Jamerson's interment, police arrested a man taking a barrel to the railway station, which contained her body. An investigation revealed that the cemetery's superintendent had been selling bodies to the medical college. By law, the cemetery's superintendent had the right to do this with bodies TO BE BURIED at public expense.

However, the law stipulated that the transaction [transfer, exchange of the corpse, and payment] had to be completed before burial. Ella was reburied and rests in peace in an unmarked grave. ^[12]

Sources

1. ↑ https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/somnambulist
2. ↑ Wikipedia: John William Polidori
3. ↑ https://youtu.be/o4Od-igz51s
4. ↑ Richard Holmes, Shelley, The Pursuit, E.P Dutton and Company, New York, 1975.
5. ↑ Richard Holmes, Shelley, The Pursuit, E.P Dutton and Company, New York, 1975.
6. ↑ https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/john-polidori-the-vampyre-history
7. ↑ "England, Middlesex Parish Registers, 1539-1988", database, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:6825-VYRB : 11 July 2022), John Polidori, 1821.
8. ↑ Find a Grave, database and images (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/13248870/john-william-polidori: accessed ), memorial page for John William Polidori (7 Sep 1795–24 Aug 1821), Find a Grave Memorial ID 13248870, citing St. Pancras Old Churchyard, St Pancras, London Borough of Camden, Greater London, England; Maintained by indigo_rain (contributor 47077409) .
9. ↑ https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_Dr._John_William_Polidori/The_Diary
10. ↑ Richmond Times-Dispatch 16 September 2022: VCU apologizes for 1968 transplant in which Black man's heart was taken without consent.
11. ↑ Eric Kolenich, 03 April 2022, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Hundreds of human bones were found in a Richmond well. Now VCU hopes to learn their origins. https://richmond.com/news/local/education/hundreds-of-human-bones-were-found-in-a-richmond-well-now-vcu-hopes-to-learn/article_af9ec45f-ac5b-5467-95e5-c51f5c128769.html
12. ↑ Nancy Jamerson Leiland, The Bawdy Ladies of Lynchburg, Lynch’s Landing, Warwick House Publishing, Lynchburg Virginia, Fall/Winter/2001/2002, pgs., 37-38.