John Seward

fictional character appearing in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula.

Dr. John Seward M.D. is a character in Dracula by Bram Stoker. Dr. Seward is a psychiatrist. Seward asks a woman named Lucy Westenra to marry him but she says no. Seward starts focusing on studying a mentally ill man named R.M. Renfield who eats bugs to make himself immortal. When Lucy starts to get sick, Seward tries to help her but he can’t so he writes to his teacher Doctor Abraham Van Helsing and asks for his help. Van Helsing treats Lucy with blood transfusions but she still dies and is buried. Van Helsing tries to convince Dr. Seward that Lucy came back as a vampire but Seward doesn’t believe him. But after Van Helsing shows Seward Lucy as a vampire, Seward believes him and tells Lucy’s financé Arthur. Arthur and the others see Lucy as a vampire attacking a child, so they stab her through the heart and cut her head off.

Renfield then begs Dr. Seward to let him go but Seward doesn’t. Renfield later tells Seward that Count Dracula tricked him into inviting him into Seward’s house by offering to feed him mice and because of that Dracula could go into Seward’s house and attack anyone there. Renfield says that Dracula bit Mina Harker and that when he realized that he attacked Dracula but Dracula escaped. Dr. Seward and Dr. Van Helsing go to Mina and see Dracula attack her in front of her husband Jonathan. When Seward goes back to Renfield, he finds out that Dracula has already murdered him. Then Seward helps Van Helsing and the others hunt down Dracula.