Can Frankenstein be read as an early research ethics text?

In his article ( Med Humanit 2004;30 :32-5 ), H Davies asks whether Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, can be read as an early research ethics text. ¹ It is misguided to give the impression, as the author does at times, that Shelley was ghost-writing for a future institutional review board: there are reasons for believing that the novel's theme of overreaching was a largely unintended rebuke to the fame-seeking writers who made her early life such a heady but wary one: her dead mother Mary...