A Brilliant Void, ep 2: The Professor's Experiment
Episode 2 of the audio drama podcast, A Brilliant Void, is now available: You can find it at this link below, or on various podcast platforms.
This story is The Professors Experiment, by Margaret Wolfe Hungerford. It is based in Dublin and takes part over the course of one evening, in 1895, when a Trinity Professor attempts to test his proto-anaesthetic - with little scruple - on a vulnerable young woman.
Reading up on this, I was surprised to learn that anesthesia was common enough in the late 1800s. But dedicated anaesthetists were rare and monitoring was primitive in the absence of modern heart monitors, pulse oximeters, or ventilators, so the risks associated with the use of anaesthetics were very real. The professor in this tale has developed a drug that can send people under for very precise periods of time - be it hours or days, or even weeks. He speculates that it could work over a period of several years.
Refused permission to test on condemned prisoners in Kilmainham, he focusses on the young woman who turns up on his doorstep. Which brings the real scientific focus on the story to the fore: the man is driven not by a love of discovery and learning, but by a yearning for respect and status. He dreams of presenting his findings to learned institutions and basks in the imagined acclaim they will bring.
It's probably not giving too much away to say that things don't work out quite as he intended. Find out more by listening in at the link above, or...
on spotify:
itunes:
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