John Polidori

John William Polidori was born in London in 1795, the son of an Italian scholar and translator, Gaetano Polidori. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and received his degree in 1815, at nineteen, writing a thesis on sleepwalking. In 1816 he was hired as the personal physician of the poet Lord Byron and traveled with him to Switzerland, where they spent the summer near Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, later Mary Shelley, and her stepsister Claire Clairmont. One stormy evening Byron proposed that each of them write a ghost story; the contest led to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Polidori developed an idea of Byron's into The Vampyre. Byron dismissed Polidori later that year. The Vampyre was published in 1819 under Byron's name, to the anger of both writers. It presented the vampire as an aristocratic and charming villain, Lord Ruthven, and became very popular, influencing later vampire fiction. Polidori's medical career did not succeed, and he fell into debt. He died in London in 1821, aged 25.

John Polidori is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Faith not well documented. Source: Wikipedia