[dracula] you know, for all this time i've thought Dracula Daily was someone (singular) who was reading and liveblogging their experience and everyone was just reading them discuss their feelings on the thing, and now I discover I've basically missed out on a 200k strong bookclub and i'm just gutted
and you know while i understand people getting upset about how dr seward runs the asylum and his relationship with renfield and such as so many people seem to be i also like
i feel like a lot of people who are so rabid about how terrible he is for abusive treatment or whatever do not know enough about the history of medicine and specifically the history of how mental illness was treated
and just the fact that he seems to genuinely regard his charges as some cross between a fascinating study and children he's genuinely fond of is just leaps and bounds better than most could have expected in a historical asylum
which again doesn't really mean it's great but it's one of those product of its time things he really does look pretty darn progressive if you start looking at it from the angle of How Things Actually Used To Be
like that is what followed this as best practice and acceptable and desirable treatment that is after half a century of progress that's where the state of mental health care was at
anyway if this all got transposed strictly as is to modern times then yes a doctor treating his patients like dr seward does would frankly be very shocking and alarming but the world in the past like 130 years has made a great deal of progress on the 'mentally ill people have dignity and humanity too' front
but yeah just the fact that dr seward seems to be genuinely invested in keeping his patients physically safe IS HONESTLY SUPER PROGRESSIVE OF HIM and it sucks that this is where the bar was set back in ye victorian times but also like
i have in the past 12 hours seen so many 'how could the harkers have remained friends with him after hearing the contents of his diary and knowing how he acts' and 'au where mina and renfield become friends after he survives but then how does he deal with the kindest person he knows metaphorically holding hands with the cruelest person' and i'm like
................................I got today's update and it's literally just a telegram reporting the ship location /shakes u I NEED TO KNOW WHAT IS GOING ONNnnnnnn etc
... which is also progressive in its own ways. Like Watson describes himself with symptoms of PTSD and regards cocaine and morphine (not used for pain management) as bad. When most still believe that's good medicine
or else amazon would have been even more insane