The Mother of Horror: Grief, Creation, and Medicine in Frankenstein

Mary Shelley’s life began in the shadow of medical loss. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died eleven days after childbirth, most likely from infection introduced during delivery. Shelley’s first connection to medicine was therefore through an act that was meant to welcome life, but instead caused death. This kind of loss, which I refer to as iatrogenic grief, shaped Shelley’s creative expression and defined her impact on the world. 

Frankenstein can be read as an attempt to understand that grief. The novel grew from a woman who had experienced repeated bereavement: a mother who died in her birth and three children who died in infancy. Scholars have noted that Shelley’s story is about her experience with immense loss and her wish to reverse it, her fear of repeating it, and the isolation that follows when grief cannot be shared.

In the 1818 text of Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein’s story is spurred by his mother’s sudden death in his childhood. In an attempt to process his grief, he becomes preoccupied with mastering life and death, searching for meaning and answers in long abandoned philosophies and mysticism. As he grows older and enters university, his work takes on the fervor of someone doing everything to escape the weight of grief.

When Victor finally succeeds in conquering death through the mastery of reanimation, the result is unbearable. The creature is the embodiment of his grief, the culmination of everything he tried to undo and everything he tried to run away from. He cannot look at it. He abandons it. His rejection mirrors what often happens when grief becomes too much to face: anger, avoidance, and distance. 

We later learn of the impact of Victor’s actions through the eyes of what is only referred to as the “creature.” Abandoned and left without guidance, he learns about human connection through a series of rejections. The creature’s monstrosity grows out of his longing for someone to acknowledge his suffering. Both creator and creation become trapped in a cycle of grief and retaliation, each unable to acknowledge the pain of the other. Frankenstein’s horror lies not in the act of creation itself, but in what happens afterward when the maker turns away from the life he has made.

Shelley’s own experience of medical loss gives this story its emotional force. Frankenstein is a musing of how easily medical advancement and harm can become entangled. Medicine continues to live within that tension. Every clinician encounters moments when the line between help and harm blurs—when a decision, an intervention, or an unavoidable outcome leaves behind loss for patients, families, or the clinician themselves. These moments produce their own form of iatrogenic grief.

When grief goes unacknowledged, it reshapes relationships on both sides of the clinical encounter. Patients whose losses are linked to medical experiences may approach future care with mistrust or guardedness. Clinicians, faced with anger or avoidance, may respond with detachment. The result can be a self-perpetuating loop of distance and misunderstanding. Each side feels betrayed by the other, much like Victor and his creation who are bound by shared pain but unable to meet across it.

Shelley’s novel offers no repair for this cycle, only the truth that grief denied becomes destructive. What begins as the desire to heal or to master loss ends in estrangement. Intergenerational trauma is perpetuated when met with anger, avoidance, or distance.  

Mary Shelley is often called the mother of horror, a title that takes on added weight in light of her own maternal losses. With Frankenstein, she didn’t inspire the genre—she created it. Horror was borne of the contemplation of what happens when human striving, especially through science or medicine, collides with our mortality.

The themes introduced in Frankenstein continue to shape the horror genre across mediums. From the surgical anxieties of early Gothic fiction to contemporary films about contagion, bioengineering, and bodily transformation, horror returns again and again to medicine’s borderlands—the spaces where care crosses into harm, where the desire to heal or control life exposes its fragility.

Seen this way, Frankenstein is not only the origin of modern horror but also one of the early and formative examinations of medical trauma. It captures the aftermath of medicine’s innovation, the grief that lingers when intervention fails, and the silence that follows when we cannot face that loss. Shelley’s novel, and the genre she founded, continue to ask what happens when we try to master what should be mourned, and what it costs us when we deny the humanity of others, and ourselves.