Who Was Herbert West?

Herbert West was a brilliant and thoroughly amoral medical researcher who studied at the Miskatonic University medical school, at Arkham, and spent years refining a reagent capable of restoring life to fresh corpses. The Archive files him as a physician and reanimator, regionally dangerous, and deceased, the last on the strength of his disappearance. He treated the ethical wreckage along the way as an acceptable research cost.

The record

The account of his career was written by his assistant and filed in six installments. It runs from the first experiments in the school's dissection room through the plague year at Arkham, in which the dean of the medical school, Dr. Allan Halsey, died and was entombed, to West's later work in the mill town of Bolton and on the battlefields of Flanders, and back to Boston and the end.

What the reagent did

It worked only on subjects who were very fresh, and its results were seldom sane. West's subjects rarely returned fully themselves. A number of them survived him in a state that the Archive calls reanimated, and several came looking for him personally. The one whose capture is described in the second installment had been the dean.

What became of him

He vanished, and the account does not claim to know where.

The record has been filmed more than any other chronicle on file. Re-Animator (1985) and its two sequels are filed as DECOY: the production keeps West and drops the register, making the matter into an entertainment, which the Archive considers a deliberate piece of discouragement.