author
Best remembered for a curious blend of medical ambition and imaginative fiction, this 19th-century American writer brought a physician’s eye to strange expeditions and early science-fantasy adventures.
by R. Elton Smile
R. Elton Smile was the working name of Elton Romeo Smilie (1819–1889), an American physician and author from Wakefield, Massachusetts. He is also remembered in medical history for his association with early anesthesia research, which gives his writing an unusual backdrop for a novelist of the period.
His best-known book is The Manatitlans (1877), a fantastical adventure about a scientific expedition in South America. Reference works on speculative fiction note that his stories mix exploration, satire, lost-race ideas, and odd scientific speculation, giving them a distinctive place on the edge of early American science fiction.
Only a small body of fiction is firmly associated with him, including The Manatitlans and Investigations and Experience of M. Shawtinback, at Saar Soong, Sumatra (1879). Even with that short list, his work has continued to attract interest from readers of obscure speculative fiction and from historians curious about the overlap between Victorian science, medicine, and imagination.