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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Deset Gled" data-source="post: 8060416" data-attributes="member: 7808">You're absolutely correct about this.  This book was written in 1896, to put it in historical context.  Moreau wasn't editing DNA or even doing anything at the cellular level.  He was literally taking the arm of an animal and surgically cutting it, breaking bones, reshaping it, and restitching it to turn it into the arm of a human.  Repeat for the rest of the body.  Obviously, the science doesn't hold up perfectly today, but it still makes for a good story.I think it's important to keep in mind that the late 1800s were a kind of a renaissance for surgery*. Anesthesia (by which I mean really putting some in a forced sleep with chemicals, as opposed to a swig of whisky and biting a bullet), germ theory, and the practice of sanitizing surgical equipment all took off after the American Civil War.  Shorly before IoDM, the idea of surgery by itself was horror; it was unimaginably painful and odds were you would get an infection and die.  IoDM is one of the first books to look past those aspects and focus on the psychological horror of surgery; imagining falling asleep, and waking up with your body modified without your consent, with no power to return to your original form.  Like of lot of Wells stuff, it was very forward thinking, he just didn't know how the details would turn out.*Disclaimer: I am not a historian and gets most of my facts through science fiction and wikipedia.</blockquote>

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