Dr. Alfred Schuyler Clarendon is a fictional character created by H. P. Lovecraft and Adolphe de Castro for their short story "The Last Test".
Clarendon is a famous physician, "one of the greatest biologists and physicians" of the 1890s, he is an authority at twenty-five and an international figure at thirty." He is said to be researching a "basic antitoxin combating the whole febrile principle at its very source...ensuring the ultimate conquest and extirpation of fever in all its diverse forms."
A native of New York City, he is the son of Old Clarendon, "a Wall Street pirate of the ruthless elder breed," and Frances Schuyler Clarendon, known for her gentleness. His only sibling is his sister Georgina. The family lived in an old mansion on East 19th Street.
His closest friend from childhood, who called him "Little Alf", was James Dalton, his protector at Phillips Exeter and Columbia University.
He travels throughout the world to study diseases, including to North Africa, the Middle East, India, and China, including Tibet. In Tibet's U-Tsang, he acquires a team of eight servants of "skeletonic leanness" and "grotesque" aspect, whom he dresses in "the loose black silk robes of Bonpa priests". In the Hoggar Mountains of Algeria, he meets the mysterious Surama, who becomes his chief factotum and clinic-man.
On his travels, he picked up a considerable amount of eldritch knowledge. "I didn’t go to China for nothing," he warns Surama--that's where he "heard an old man...calling on Yog-Sothoth"--and he "talked in Yemen with an old man who had come back alive from the Crimson Desert," who "had seen Irem, the City of Pillars, and had worshipped at the underground shrines of Nug and Yeb." He was familiar with "Alhazred’s Azif", which contains lore unknown in Atlantis. He claims to be able to call on the "Nemesis of Flame", and to be able to appeal to Shub-Niggurath.
After relocating from New York to San Francisco, he reconnects with his friend Dalton, who has been out of touch for ten years, since Old Clarendon refused his request to marry Georgina. In the meantime, Dalton has risen in California politics to the point of becoming governor, a position that allows him to appoint Clarendon to become medical director of California's San Quentin Penitentiary. This appointment is seen as bringing prestige to the state.
Clarendon is described as "lean and ascetic, with steel-rimmed pince-nez and pointed brown beard". He lives with Georgina in "the gloomy old Bannister place near Goat Hill, overlooking the bay...a rambling, French-roofed relic of mid-Victorian design and gold-rush parvenu display." (Goat Hill is better known today as Portrero Hill.)