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scientist'. Dr. Rappaccini is a physician at the University of Padua “very
long ago”, who is experimenting with vegetable poisons - as chemical
physiologists actually did in France at that time. According to his col-
league Professor Baglioni, “he cares infinitely more for science than for
mankind. His patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some
new experiment. He would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest,
or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a
grain of mustard seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge.”
In the story, Rappaccini's main experimental subject is his daughter,
whom he has fed with poison from an early age, to the effect that the
touch of her body is poisonous to any other living being. Owing to a
misunderstanding, she takes an antidote prepared by Baglioni and, be-
cause she somehow embodies the poison, the antidote kills her. The hu-
bris theme plus moral perversion is still important in the story, since
Rappaccini's so-called “experiment” is an effort to “improve” the physi-
cal nature of his daughter according to his own ideals of perfection and
power, i.e . “to be endowed with marvelous gifts against which no power
nor strength could avail an enemy […] to be able to quell the mightiest
with a breath […] to be as terrible as thou art beautiful.” However, the
hubris theme is combined with moral criticism of the obsessed and un-
scrupulous scientist who knowingly runs the risk of doing harm to other
people. Unlike in the examples discussed above, the harm is no longer
superimposed clumsily or in fable-like manner, but is presented, without
too many surreal elements, as the plausible outcome or risk of narrow-
minded research. From Dr. Cacaphodel's self-destructive obsession via
the 'al-chemist's hubris in The Birth-mark to the unscrupulous and hu-
bris-driven Dr. Rappaccini, Hawthorne transformed the 'mad alchemist'
step by step into the 'mad scientist'. 49
49 Taylor Stoehr (1978) has argued that Hawthorne's mad scientist stories reflected the
contemporary rise of “pseudosciences”, such as mesmerism, homoeopathy, and phre-
nology, rather than that of science. However, Stoehr's distinction between science
and pseudoscience is, like the term 'pseudoscience', rather an ex-post-facto projec-
tion onto early nineteenth-century popular American culture. As the reference to Dr.
Cacaphodel's “researches in chemistry and alchemy” illustrates, Hawthorne com-
bines rather than distinguishes between traditions. In 'The New Adam and Eve'
(1842), he even goes as far as to equate the entire Harvard University library with
“the fatal apple of another Tree of Knowledge”. Stephanie P. Browner (2005, chap.
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