It’s difficult to say what’s more surprising: that one of the leading surgeons in Chicago from the 1900s through the 1940s was named Victor Frankenstein, or that after Victor Frankenstein was born in Chicago in 1869, this poor child’s parents still named him Victor Frankenstein — 51 years after Mary Shelley first published her literary landmark, “Frankenstein.” The book sold slowly at first, though by 1869 it had outsold the works of her husband, poet Percy Shelley, and the Frankenstein monster was well on his way to becoming shorthand for every patched-together invention threatening to kill its inventor.
Indeed, by the time of Victor Frankenstein’s birth, this newspaper was routinely reviving the Frankenstein monster as a handy metaphor for British colonialism, the Confederacy, the arguments of Stephen Douglas (“dangerous and grotesque”), the founder of the city of Zion and the federal bureaucracy; in 1972, Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH told a reporter that corruption in Chicago was now Richard M. Daley’s Frankenstein monster.
But then, few works of literature are as infinitely mutable as “Frankenstein.”
This week, Guillermo del Toro’s relatively faithful adaptation of Shelley’s novel took home three Oscars at the Academy Awards. One week earlier, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” premiered, a remake of “The Bride of Frankenstein,” albeit set in 1930s gangland Chicago; on that same day, the new Pixar movie “Hoppers” opened, telling the story of a scientist who creates a way to insert a human consciousness into the body of a feral animal. A fast scan through just the past 12 months of media finds the Frankenstein’s monster used to explain a hockey coach, a Christmas tree, ICE agents, dating TV shows, Congress, AutoTune, Serbia, the Chicago Bears, MAGA, and, yes, AI.
We flip open “Moby-Dick” when we need a lesson in obsession and fate.
“Pride and Prejudice” is useful when discussing social class and love.
“The Great Gatsby” is great when you’re eager for a conversation on idealism and moral rot.
But “Frankenstein” has become everything all at once, and always right now, forever a contemporary encapsulation of what ails us, be it 19th century Europe or 21st century America.
“Frankenstein” grunts loudest.
Rarely has a week of 2026 gone by when I haven’t instinctively thought about “Frankenstein,” regardless of whether there’s a new film or not. Ambition, technology, mortality, creating life, ending life, parenting, nurture, nature, free will, unleashing bold creations, not taking responsibility when bold creations upend society — more than 200 years after publication, it resonates endlessly. What is the tech-bro credo of “Move fast and break things” but an echo of “Frankenstein”? Have you seen those videos of Chicagoans bullying the new delivery robots that roll around downtown? I think of “Frankenstein” — but from the vantage of the creature as well as the POV of those frightened villagers.
“There’s good reason ‘Frankenstein’ was once used as a parable of what could happen if there were a slave rebellion in the United States, and conversely as a metaphor for unfreed people treated as monsters, determined to get free,” said Eileen Hunt, a political science professor at University of Notre Dame who has written two books on “Frankenstein,” one about political philosophy in the novel and one on artificial life after Shelley. “There’s a reason it’s become the most taught novel in the world today, the one most likely to be on syllabi. It used to be people only knew the story from the Boris Karloff version, but that’s totally flipped in 2026. I need to explain Boris Karloff to my students now, most of whom already read the book. It’s taught the way past generations read ‘Of Mice and Men,’ that great literature can’t be boiled down to a single lesson. We now see the world through ‘Frankenstein‘ — it is the common myth of our modern age.”
For the novel’s 200th anniversary in 2018, on Chicago stages, there were productions of “Frankenstein” featuring puppets (Remy Bumppo), shows focused on Shelley and childbirth (Manual Cinema), adaptations that remade mad genius Victor Frankenstein as Victoria (Lifeline Theatre). Since then, the Joffrey Ballet staged a steampunk retelling. Last spring at Chicago Shakespeare, the A.B.L.E. Ensemble, which produces shows starring and conceived by performers with intellectual disabilities, retold Shelley through a disability lens, to riff on who gets to tell a story.
“We could have done this as a parenthood story, or as an allegory for the trans community,” said Katie Yohe, A.B.L.E.‘s executive artistic director, who co-directed the show. “You could focus on how an idea can take on a life of its own, which is relatable to anyone creative who has a considerable ego. But ‘creature-centric’ is how we kept seeing this. We thought of how Shelley never calls Frankenstein’s creation a monster — Victor calls him that. The conversations we had with the ensemble! The creature wants a partner to go through the world with, but he’s told he doesn’t know what a relationship is, he can’t handle the responsibility, yet he’s deserving of love. That resonates in a community that often feels more disabled by society than by their condition.”
Unlike most classics, “Frankenstein” exists to be rebuilt, over and over.
“The Bride!” — which bombed in theaters, though showed a very Victor Frankenstein-like eagerness to experiment — used Al Capone’s Chicago as little more than an aesthetic backdrop. (Think the Gold Coast as a hedonistic “Cabaret.”) But where it got intriguing was by recasting the Bride (who barely exists in the book) as a creation of unrepentant female autonomy. She refuses to be defined by the people who assembled her against her will.
Ironically, had that Bride (played by Jessie Buckley) existed in the real 1930s Chicago, she might have sought sympathy from the actual Victor Frankenstein, who, as far as the scant details of his life tell us, was a respected, thoughtful professional and a resident of Hyde Park and Kenwood, a doctor known for unwavering decency and his popular home practice. He treated the victims of a bombing at the home of a local judge. When a woman fainted in court after being arrested for running an underground abortion ring, he stepped in to treat her for weeks. He had been one of the first internists at the fledgling Michael Reese Hospital in Bronzeville, which was then known as the primary hospital in Chicago for the treatment of the city’s growing immigrant population. He studied science at Northwestern University, then transferred to medicine at the Chicago Medical College. According to a “Frankenstein” exhibit in 2024 at the Galter Health Sciences Library at Northwestern, one of his first titles was “assistant demonstrator of anatomy” at Chicago Medical, which meant that one of his first jobs likely included finding corpses to dissect.
Remember, the man’s name was Victor Frankenstein.
At the peak of his medical career, the 1931 “Frankenstein” of Boris Karloff and neck bolts and villagers thrusting pitchforks was a blockbuster. That couldn’t have been easy for Victor. By the time he began practicing at the turn of the century, grave robbing was largely legislated out of existence in Chicago. (There’s no evidence Victor indulged.) But it didn’t vanish. As Shelley knew, you can’t move fast without breaking open a few coffins.
Just as we stand at the pivot where AI is likely to transform society, “Frankenstein” was released two centuries ago at a similar transition of thinking; Shelley was playing into arguments between the steady rationalists of the Enlightenment, who favored social rank and an orderly universe, and a rising class of experimental individualists. Modern medicine — with its new anesthetics and vaccines and innovative equipment — emerged around this time. And more medical breakthroughs meant more need for fresh bodies.
“I call it the ‘anatomical dilemma,’” said David Kendall Casey, a medical student at Northwestern who is writing his thesis on grave robbing. “You have all these new medical professionals who have to work on a body to be licensed, but they don’t have a legal means of finding bodies. It’s a morally repugnant task, yet what is the alternative?”
By the mid-19th century, cemeteries around Chicago were often raided for new bodies. Medical students were paying morally flexible cemetery staff around $20 a corpse. And since Illinois was emerging as a railway hub, graves around Kane and DeKalb counties were being emptied and their bodies shipped throughout the Midwest. There was even a riot at a St. Charles medical college when nearby farmers heard what was happening.
Medical students, who were often responsible for their classroom corpses, had a couple of sources, Casey said.
“They’d hear who was on the brink of death or just died and they would carry out actual surveillance of homes. Or they traipsed through graveyards, pretending to be hunters, from midnight to four in the morning. Unlike movies, they were not standing beside meticulously dug graves. They were digging small, fast holes and using hooks to fish out the bodies, going under chins and shoulders and tugging.”
Chicago was of two minds about this.
Laws are passed outlawing unauthorized grave digging, albeit after laws were passed requiring the poor and “friendless” to offer their bodies to medical schools. Not everyone saw the big deal here. Doctors at Rush Medical School told the city they had a right to the bodies of the freshly dead. A letter to the Tribune in 1857 argued that when a corpse is “undistinguished and undistinguishable” and buried in a potter’s field, “there to decay or be eaten up by worms, it is absurd to claim that it remains the property of anyone.”
Chicago medical history, remade as “Frankenstein,” only real.
Today, you would be just as likely to see medical students operating on a simulated corpse with VR technology as on an actual corpse. But Shelley resonates just as intensely, said Catherine Belling, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. She teaches medical humanities and bioethics and is writing a book about the connections between the horror genre and modern medicine.
“It’s still generated real tensions in medical schools,” she said. “The idea of good intentions facing unintended consequences? Remember, Victor is still mourning the death of his mother when he decides to bring back the dead. We used to believe doctors need to be detached and not horrified to cut into flesh. Now we argue there are benefits to a student who feels it’s weird to have permission to do this and knows they are expected to do it, though maybe still thinks something’s wrong here. Just the accumulation of knowledge: Where’s the responsibility? Should Victor have done this because he could? We end up in long conversations on genetic determinism because of Shelley — Is her creature disabled? A lot of medical students have ambition issues and imposter syndrome, which leads to: ‘Am I good enough for all this power I am getting?’”
There’s no shortage of local bioethic nightmare studies: In the 1940s, doctors at the University of Chicago gave patients contaminated water to study the digestion of plutonium. Even more infamous: For 30 years, the University of Chicago, the U.S. Army and the State Department collaborated on a series of experiments using psychiatric prisoners at Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, injecting them with malaria. (When Third Reich doctors were on trial at Nuremberg, they used the Stateville study as part of their defense.) It’s a short walk from there to the so-called Ugly Laws, which partly inspired A.B.L.E.’s “Frankenstein.” As in many big cities after the Civil War, the Chicago City Council passed an ordinance in 1881, intending to remove “the diseased, maimed and mutilated” — or anyone with a disability — from using Chicago streets. It wasn’t repealed until 1974.
Broader still, just as it became a cliche to use Frankenstein’s monster in reference to the development of atom bombs beneath Hyde Park in the 1940s, the creature now stomps through every conversation on the unintended consequences of AI. (Actually, by 1950, when Alan Turing, the scientist who pioneered artificial intelligence, created a test for gauging whether a machine was “thinking,” the novel’s warnings were part of the intellectual ether.) Shelley subtitled the book “The Modern Prometheus” for a good reason: Even as the latest scientific wonders dazzled the 19th century, she understood that we would be incapable of learning from our hubris and leaving the fire of the gods alone.
Daniel Cook, chair of the English department at the University of Dundee in Scotland, and author of “Frankenstein Retold,” a new book on the endless reframing of Shelley, expects AI to dominate the next century of “Frankenstein” tales. But there’s also a surge of new takes using race at the center. Two of the most acclaimed literary adaptations of recent years, Jeanette Winterson’s “Frankissstein” and Ahmed Saadawi’s “Frankenstein in Baghdad,” focus on gender and culture clashing. “Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep,” the upcoming novel from acclaimed horror writer Paul Tremblay, finds Silicon Valley putting AI into the brains of coma patients, with military implications.
Cook sees the book as almost elemental by now, “a kind of scientific fairy tale.”
Except, as other new adaptations point out, there was little about “Frankenstein” that Shelley found fanciful. The book’s invention, often considered the greatest literary story ever told, dates to a vacation that Shelley took with her lover, poet Percy Shelley. She was just 18, he was a few years older. They went to Lake Geneva in Switzerland with poet Lord Byron; Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont; and Byron’s doctor, John Polidori. But the weather was so bad they stayed inside and to pass the time, they created a contest: Who could write the best ghost story? Polidori wrote a novella titled “The Vampyre,” considered the inspiration for Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, “Dracula.”
And Mary Shelley began “Frankenstein.”
David Catlin, who adapted Lookingglass Theatre’s 2019 version, used that background as his play’s framework: “I was struck by how young and haunted by death Shelley was, how her own mother (pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft) died 10 days after giving birth to her, and how she lost a child herself at 19, her stepsister died of an overdose, and Percy’s estranged wife drowned herself — Shelley learned to read because her father took her so often to her mother’s grave, she would study the letters on the stone.”
She filtered a life full of tragedy through the image of a scientific community still wrestling with the concepts of galvanism (shooting electric currents through human tissue) and resuscitation. If you’ve ever been to the International Museum of Surgical Science on Lake Shore Drive in the Gold Coast, her 19th century tableau of medical students clustered over bone-white cadavers in anatomical theaters is found in many of the exhibited paintings, depicting the early stepping stones of contemporary medicine.
In fact, the only part of “Frankenstein” truly out of date in 2026 is the name Frankenstein, which was once a fairly common German name — until Shelley lent it an ominous vibe.
Only a handful of Frankensteins remain in Illinois.
“By now, most of our family has changed their names,” said Susan Frankenstein of Glencoe. “But I married into it, and I never felt like it was mine to change.” Her husband, Robert Frankenstein, a well-known Chicago attorney, died in 2014. Their daughter Jamie Steckler, whose own name changed through marriage, speaks warily of her birth name: “When I was in school, it would never fit the ovals on the Scantrons. Then there were the kids who asked, like, ‘What? Like you’re a monster or something? Seriously?’”
They had never heard of Victor Frankenstein of Chicago.
He died in 1955. He was a gardener. He grew mint. As a kid, he sold the Tribune on street corners. If “Irma,” scholar Ellen Steinberg’s 2004 book about the extensive diaries of Victor’s wife, Irma Frankenstein, is any indication, Victor was “manly and reliable,” with a fondness for Emerson and Shakespeare. There’s not, however, a single mention of Shelley, or monsters or even how he felt about his name. But there is an aside about a home laboratory where Victor would “mess around with his specimens.” And a mention that Victor was a big believer in the philosophical concept of elan vital, the idea that all organic material holds an intangible force willing it into being.
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If you want to visit, he’s in Rosehill Cemetery in Ravenswood.
There’s a small marker surrounded by damp leaves and patrolled by a family of deer, like a permanent autumn. There’s nothing remarkable here but the name itself, which stops you cold, and which contains multitudes, meanings and lessons, without even trying, as if coming across the grave of Huckleberry Finn or Sherlock Holmes. Just “Victor S. Frankenstein, MD,” chiseled, weathered and gray, and the distinct sensation that a century from now, you’d feel the same way.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com