What is the name of the doctor who participated in the 1816 ghost story contest?

The doctor who participated in the 1816 ghost-story contest was John William Polidori. An English physician and writer, Polidori was serving as Lord Byron’s personal doctor when Byron, Mary Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Polidori gathered at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva.

During the rainy summer—later called the “Year Without a Summer”—the group read translated German ghost stories from Fantasmagoriana. Byron then suggested that they each write a supernatural tale. Mary Godwin’s idea eventually became Frankenstein, while Byron began a fragment that influenced Polidori’s later story, The Vampyre.

Polidori’s medical background makes him easy to overlook beside the celebrated poets. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and received his medical degree in 1815. The 1816 contest is also described somewhat differently in contemporary and later accounts: Percy Shelley’s 1818 preface emphasizes three participants, while Mary Shelley’s later introduction describes four. That variation does not change Polidori’s identity as Byron’s physician and the doctor associated with the gathering.