Dracula
Dr. John Seward
The asylum doctor
A careful young psychiatrist who runs the Purfleet asylum, records his cases on a phonograph and calls in his old teacher when Lucy begins to fade.
Dr. John Seward is twenty-eight and runs the asylum at Purfleet. He is serious, melancholic, methodical, and dedicated to scientific reasoning. He keeps his diary on a phonograph and treats his patients with real compassion, even the strangest of them.
He is also one of Lucy's three suitors. Rejected, he stays her loyal friend and her doctor. He is a trusted former student of Van Helsing, which makes him the person who sends for the professor when ordinary medicine fails. His rational mind is tested hard by what he is asked to believe. He is a man who feels things quietly, and he carries his disappointments without complaint. His faith in careful observation is both his strength and the thing the story most challenges.
“If anyone in all Europe can solve this mystery, it is Professor Van Helsing.”
In the story
Contains spoilers.
Seward notes the odd habits of his patient Renfield, who eats flies, spiders and sparrows and speaks of a coming Master. When Lucy sinks without any visible cause, he cables Van Helsing, and helps with the transfusion. He is skeptical about the professor's claims until he looks into Lucy's empty tomb with his own eyes.
He joins the hunting party, helps sterilize the earth boxes at Carfax, and finds the dying Renfield. In the final chase, he and Arthur take the steam launch up the Danube, and he rides in to the clash at the castle pass alongside the others.
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