Doctor Moreau (The Island of Doctor Moreau)

Dr. Moreau is the main antagonist in H. G. Wells's 1896 science fiction novel The Island of Dr. Moreau. He is a brilliant surgeon forced to relocate to a deserted island when it was discovered that he was performing vivisection (live dissection) upon animals. His ultimate goal was to form animals into human beings. Dr. Moreau began his experiments when he was a respected surgeon living in London. Purely out of curiosity, he began experimenting with using vivisection as a means of restructuring animals into humans. He chose the human form simply because he thought it would make an interesting challenge. However, Moreau was forced to halt his experiences and leave London when a dog he had been operating on escaped from his lab and ran screaming into the streets. While leaving London, he recruited Montgomery, an alcoholic medical student who had killed a man in a drunken stupor to be his assistant. Knowing that he faced exile or prison, Montgomery gladly went with Moreau. Moreau and Montgomery moved to a deserted island in the South Pacific where they resumed Moreau's experiments. They acquired animals to experiment on from unscrupulous traders, including the captain of the ship Ipecacuanha. Moreau continued trying to perfect his process, but the animal nature of his subjects kept returning to them. He released these failures into the jungle, where they constructed a village to live in. In order to keep them under control, Moreau established a series of laws that included a ban on eating flesh and various animalistic activities, such as clawing bark and sucking up water. While Moreau simply viewed these creatures as failed experiments, Montgomery pitied them and even took one called M'ling to be his personal servant. All these aspects of life on Moreau's island were witnessed by Edward Prendick, an English traveller who had become stranded on the island. Although Prendick disapproved of Moreau's activities, he accepted them out of necessity. While on the island, Prendick witnessed one of the creatures known as the Leopard Man break the law by eating one of the rabbits Montgomery had brought to the island for his own consumption. Prendick's testimony caused Moreau and the other creatures to give chase to the Leopard Man, whom Prendick killed to spare him the punishment of death by vivisection. It was not long after this event that a puma Moreau had been experimenting on broke its shackles and ran off into the jungle. Moreau gave chase, and not long after both man and creature were found dead in a clearing. Although the killer's identity was unknown, Prendick thought that it was the Hyaena-Swine, one of the creatures he believed to be an accomplice of the Leopard Man. Montgomery was killed in the chaos following Moreau's death, and although Prendick eventually managed to escape the island, he suffered from acute paranoia long after he returned to England, seeing the animal in every human.