Doctor Muñoz is a fictional character created by the late American author H. P. Lovecraft. He made his first appearance in the 1928 short story "Cool Air."
Description[]
A Spanish physician of "striking intelligence and superior blood and breeding", Muñoz is described as "short but exquisitely proportioned", with a "high-bred face of masterful though not arrogant expression", "a short iron-grey full beard", "full, dark eyes" and "an aquiline nose". He calls himself "the bitterest of sworn enemies to death", and one who had "sunk his fortune and lost all his friends in a lifetime of bizarre experiment devoted to its bafflement and extirpation." Saying he feels a "repugnance" on first meeting Muñoz that "nothing in his aspect could justify", the narrator remarks on "the ice-coldness and shakiness of his bloodless looking hands" and that fact that his breathing was imperceptible. (HPL: "Cool Air")
Biography[]
Dr. Muñoz and his mentor, Dr. Torres of Valencia, spent years experimenting and trying to find ways to overcome death. Muñoz believed that "will and consciousness are stronger than organic life itself", and that a human consciousness might be preserved indefinitely, as long as the body frame is properly conserved, even after the irreversible failure of major organs, such as the heart. Although a man of science, "he did not scorn the incantations of the mediaevalists, since he believed these cryptic formulae to contain rare psychological stimuli" that could have "singular effects" on the nervous system.
When Muñoz died in 1905, his body was retrieved and reanimated by Torres, who died himself soon afterwards.
Following his revival, Muñoz moved to the United States, where he rented an apartment in New York. He lived as a recluse and converted part of his apartment into a laboratory, while keeping his room refrigerated by "an absorption system of ammonia cooling", powered by a gasoline engine. His landlady and fellow lodgers believed him to suffer from some kind of illness. In addition to keeping his room at about 55 °F (~ 12.7 °C), Muñoz also took "funny-smelling baths" and used rare spices and Egyptian incense to keep his body preserved and functional.
Although he no longer practiced, Muñoz remained a skillful and compassionate physician, as demonstrated when he fixed the broken arm of a plumber, and successfully treated the narrator's heart condition. While he never left his house, he maintained a correspondence with other scholars, which the narrator describes as "for the most part lettered East Indians, but including a once celebrated French physician now generally thought dead, and about whom the most inconceivable things had been whispered".
Despite all his efforts, Muñoz's body continued to deteriorate slowly. His voice weakened, as did his fine motor skills. With the help of the narrator, he modified his refrigerating machine to keep his room at 28 °F (~ minus 2.2 °C), and isolated the connecting door to prevent the coldness from spreading to the other apartments, as one neighbour started to complain. When the pump of the machine broke down one night in October, 1923, the narrator left to find a replacement piece while paying another man to keep Muñoz supplied with ice. Unfortunately, when he returned, accompanied by the landlady and two mechanics, they found Muñoz already dead, as the sight of his body drove the man who brought the ice away screaming. Likewise, the landlady and the mechanics also run away when they see it. (HPL: "Cool Air")
In Providence[]
According to Alan Moore's comic book series Providence, Muñoz is the literary equivalent of Doctor Emilio Alvarez based on Robert Black's Commonplace Book. (EXP: Providence)
Behind the Mythos[]
According to An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia Muñoz may have been modeled on Lovecraft's Brooklyn neighbor, "the fairly celebrated Dr. Love, State Senator and sponsor of the famous 'Clean Books bill' at Albany, New York...evidently immune or unconscious of the decay." (HPL: Selected Letters 2.265) This is presumably William Lathrop Love, a Brooklyn physician and freemason who was a state senator from 1923 until 1932.[1]
References[]
- ↑ "Index to Politicians: Love to Lovegrove", The Political Graveyard.