Dr. Acula vants to draw your blood.
A monster of some type who works in a profession their own dietary needs and compulsions make extremely difficult and unexpected. The individual in question may be a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire struggling with the fact that Warm Bloodbags Are Everywhere for them, someone who has enough control to use such a job to better disguise what they are or even someone who has found a way to take advantage of their job for personal gain. They might have overcome the temptation of their Horror Hunger and are using a position helping those they naturally consider food as penance for consuming people in the past, or are part of a wider community using their position to help their fellow monsters such as by acquiring blood donated for medical use.
Not to be confused with someone Supporting the Monster Loved One.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Tamayo and her assistant Yushiro are demon doctors who live peacefully amongst humans, being able to satisfy their hunger on small dosages of blood taken from willing donors. They help Tanjiro to find a cure for Nezuko's demonism using blood taken from Muzan Kibutsuji and his officers.
Comic Books
- In Captain America #253-254, a servant of Dracula, Dr. Jacob Cromwell, is sent to revive Baron Blood, whose bones are stored in the Tower of London. Although Cromwell is successful, Blood betrays and kills him and one of his daughters, turning the other one into a vampire (who later becomes Baroness Blood). Assuming Cromwell's identity, Blood commits a series of murders that arouse the suspicions of his now very elderly brother James.
- The Tomb of Dracula: Dr. Deacon Frost, the doctor summoned to help Blade's mother during childbirth, was really a vampire. He was in the process of draining her when Blade was born, resulting in Blade having vampire enzymes in his bloodstream that made him a Dhampir and immune to most vampiric powers.
Film — Live Action
- Subverted in Bordello of Blood. One of the vampires, Tammy, poses as a nurse at the hospital where Rafe is taken to after he's arrested. Largely to try and kill him on Lilith's orders. He instead manages to expose her backside to sunlight which kills her.
- Dr. Terror's House of Horrors: In "Vampire", Dr. Bob Carroll returns to his home in the United States with his new French bride, Nicolle. Soon there is evidence that a vampire is on the loose, and Carroll seeks the aid of his colleague, Dr. Blake. They find that Nicolle is the vampire. Following Blake's advice, Carroll kills Nicolle. When the police come to arrest Carroll for his wife's murder, Blake denies giving any such advice. As the police take Carroll away, Blake says to himself that the city isn't big enough for two doctors or two vampires, and he turns into a bat.
Literature
- The Dresden Files: Thomas Raith gets a job where he poses as a gay hairdresser in order to feed on non-harmful bits of his clients' emotions without harming anyone, save himself. This level of feeding leaves him constantly starved but is just enough that he can keep his Hunger in check and not give in and feed more deeply on anyone or manipulate their emotions so that they want him to.
- My Babysitter Is a Vampire: Vincent volunteers at a Blood Bank despite the inherent temptation of being near bleeding humans in order to abuse his position to steal blood.
- The Twilight Saga: The vampire Carlisle Cullen has managed to attain such perfect control over his blood lust that he can operate as a medical doctor for humans without issue, despite it being incredibly difficult for vampires to hold themselves back from attacking when they smell human blood.
- Vampire High: The vampires basically run the blood bank and handle blood donations, treating the bank like a supermarket.
- Regis from The Witcher books introduces himself as a village medic and herbalist when Geralt first meets him, but is eventually revealed to be a Vegetarian Vampire. All the herbs he always has with him are mainly there to prevent dogs and other animals from picking up his vampiric scent — although he has also become a legitimately good doctor after decades, if not centuries, of practice.
- Kim Newnan`s character, Genevieve is a powerful vampire and a paramedic\MD\combat medic. She even has a Sorbonne diploma of MD in "Anno Dracula" series and feeds by her lovers, never from patients.
Live-Action TV
- Being Human (UK): Mitchell and George, a vampire and werewolf, both work at the same hospital. It isn't much of a problem for George except when he's scheduled for full moon nights since he cannot at all control himself transformed, but Mitchell is constantly struggling not to kill people.
- Blood: Dr. Park Ji Sang has sworn to save lives rather than take them and struggles against his nature as a vampire that needs to drink human blood to survive while working with patients. He steals his blood supply from the hospital where he works.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In "The Dark Age", Buffy and Angel dust a pair of vampire doctors who attempt to steal a blood shipment to Sunnydale Hospital.
- Parodied in Scrubs. It comes out in one episode that J.D. has written a screenplay about a vampire doctor called ''Dr. Acula". He takes a blood sample the usual vampire way: by sucking the blood from the patient and spitting it into the test tube. He also diagnoses the patient through tasting the blood.
- Multiple such monsters appear in Supernatural:
- In "Something Wicked", the Monster of the Week is a shtriga (a spirit that feeds on life force) that uses its sinister powers to hospitalize and feed upon the life force of various children while posing as a doctor trying to cure them.
- In "Sam, Interrupted", a wraith poses as a nurse at a mental hospital, taking full advantage of the fact that the patients there are supposedly 'insane' so that she can feed on them without having to at all worry about anyone believing her targets' attempts at warning others about her actions.
- In "The Purge", a Peruvian fat-sucking monster called a Pishtaco works at a fitness center and takes advantage of the fact she feeds on human fat to harmlessly feed by giving people special treatments at a spa. Her brother, also an employee, also attempts to take part in such a style of feeding, but ends up unable to keep control of himself while feeding.
- Tales from the Crypt: In "The Reluctant Vampire", the main character, Mr. Longtooth, works at a blood bank, though as a security guard. He does know some medical procedures though like asking if a person has taken drugs or has any diseases and what not and managed to refill the so-called missing quota the bank seems to be going through.
Stand-Up Comedy
- Mitch Hedberg has a related bit:
I went to the doctor. All he did was suck blood from my neck. Do not go see Dr. Acula.
Video Games
- Arknights: Warfarin is one of Rhodes Island's resident doctors and combat medics. She (naturally) specializes in hematology, and has authored many landmark books on the subject. In normal circumstances she is professional enough to separate "work and food." However, when confronted with unusual blood, like that of the Doctor or any of the Abyssal Hunters, she starts showing Mad Scientist tendencies, and before she was reigned in by her superiors she would frequently experiment on other Rhodes Island Operators. In combat her talents come out in the form of being able to boost the offensive power of herself and a random Operator in her healing range at the cost of constant life loss.
- Back-Alley Doctor Dr. Nusakan in SaGa Frontier is a Mystic, which is basically a cross between vampires and The Fair Folk. Despite this, he's actually one of the most reasonable Mystics in the game, aside from having a really creepy waiting room.
- Vampyr (2018): Jonathan Reid, the main character, is a doctor specialized in blood transfusions and has been turned into a vampire shortly before the start of the game. He can see people's health conditions using his Vein-o-Vision. The best way to level yourself up quickly is by feasting on any of the unique civilian NPCs. They all have placards over their heads showing how much experience they're worth, so it tempts the player as much as the thirst tempts Jonathan.
Visual Novels
- Havenfall Is for Lovers: Diego Escalona is a Vegetarian Vampire who only drinks from blood bags and became a doctor in order to help people.
Webcomics
- In Last Res0rt Qin Xu was a doctor, citing it as a profession where his long lifespan would be an asset. His coworkers
also gave him a reliable source of blood.
- Both averted and Played for Laughs in Oglaf. The vampire "doctor" Navaan doesn't seem to suffer from Horror Hunger, but is so bad at medicine that she ends up killing her patients anyway, or at best not fixing their original affliction.
- Third Shift Society: Simon Strauss is a vampire who acts as a doctor to the supernatural community, and humans tied to it. He uses his profession in order to get blood without endangering the humans it comes from.
Western Animation
- A Robot Chicken sketch involves vampires taking over TV media. One of their shows was about a hospital where all the doctors and nurses are vampires. They try to treat a patient by giving him a blood transfusion, but since they're, well, vampires, they keep drinking all of it. Ultimately, they just decided to drain the patient of his blood, instantly turning him in the process.
