The 1844 Warning American Medicine Ignored
Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote “Rappaccini’s Daughter” as a parable for the mid-1800s, when the Industrial Revolution was giving way to the first Big Tech wave. Tech back then meant infrastructure and communications. Telegraph (later telephones), railroad, electrical grids. It also meant scientific discoveries by controversial means, such as vivisection, autopsy, and Louis Pasteur’s lab-produced vaccines — all precursors of modernity.
But as many comforts as science offered, it often seemed like a menace. Railroads meant bloodshed and noise, the machine rumbling through Eden. The telegraph aided Western conquests. And a fearful public did not trust that scientists probing the depths of the body or psyche cared as much about humanity as they did about their own discoveries.
Hawthorne felt all this deeply. He expressed his fears in the most timeless form he knew: the allegory.
The story opens like a fairy tale, “very long ago” in Italy. But Hawthorne gives his mad scientist, Giacomo Rappaccini, the enormous power that he saw in the nexus of science and industry.
Hawthorne’s fears have become our own. There are now many Rappaccinis promoting AI in medicine, placing more faith in technology or pharmacology than in human connection, all in the name of profit or efficiency. Some of them are physicians, some are hospital administrators, and some are tech or Big Pharma bros.
All are driven by utopian fantasies that could just as easily spell disaster for humanity.1
But let’s return to the story.
