God bless you, Dr. Kevorkian (24 page)

inventions of posion gas, tanks and airplanes, flame throwers and land mines, and barbed-wire entanglements everywhere. I hoped to get Mary Shelley's opinions of the atomic bombs we dropped on the unarmed men, women, and children of Hiroshima and

promise to try again. This time, though, she would only rhapsodize about her parents, who were, of course, William and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and about her husband, Percy

Shelley, and his friends and

hers, John Keats and Lord

I said many

people nowadays thought

"Frankenstein" was the name of the monster, and not of the scientist who created him.

She said, "That's not so ignorant after There are

two monsters in my story, not one. And one of them, the scientist, is indeed named Frankenstein." This is

in Huntsville, Texas, signing

off.

65

i nave

from

having interviewed the poet Dr. Philip Strax, S-T-R-AX. He died at the age of ninety on the same day as the baseball player Joe Dimaggio, and was the author of this charming couplet:

better to have love and lust
Than let our apparatus rust.
Author of three volumes of poetry, Philip Strax was also a radiologist. He refined the use of x-rays, previously useful mainly for looking at bones, so they could detect malignancies in the soft tissue of breasts. The number of women's lives extended by early detection of cancers, thanks to mammograms, in baseball terms might be called thousands upon thousands of or runs batted in.

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