SOURCE: Bierman, Joseph S. “Dracula: Prolonged Childhood Illness, and the Oral Triad.” American Imago 29, no. 2 (summer 1972): 186-98.

In the following essay, Bierman contends that Dracula “mirrors Stoker's early childhood in that it is essentially a tale of medical detection of puzzling illnesses, of obscure diagnoses, and unusual cures in which the phenomenon of the ‘undead’ person is prominent.”

In the early summer of 1895, Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, had a nightmare which he attributed to eating too much dressed crab at supper one night. He dreamed about a vampire king rising from the tomb to go about his ghastly business (Ludlam, 1962). Inspired by this dream, he set to work writing the novel, Dracula. By the fall of 1895, he was writing his first draft. Since it first appeared in London in 1897, Dracula has not been out of print. I would like to present one key answer, summarized from...