Elphaba and Doctor Dillamond's mentor-student relationship

Elphaba and Doctor Dillamond's mentor-student relationship begins during her first year at Crage Hall, Shiz University, and quickly becomes the most intellectually and politically significant bond of her young life. Dillamond, a Goat and a Fellow of Shiz University on the Faculty of Biological Arts, is the first Animal professor Elphaba has ever encountered. Their connection is forged in a climate of escalating oppression: the Wizard of Oz has recently proclaimed the Banns on Animal Mobility, restricting Animals from travel, professions, and public life. Dillamond is fighting this with science, trying to prove that there is no inherent biological difference between humans and Animals. Elphaba, a green-skinned Munchkinlander outcast, finds in him a kindred spirit—another being judged by appearance, another who refuses to accept the world as it is given.

Intellectual Partnership and Secret Research

Elphaba becomes Dillamond's amanuensis, taking dictation and filing his research because his hooves cannot manage a pen. She is not merely a secretary; she is a collaborator. She grasps the political implications of his work: if he can prove scientifically that no inherent difference exists between human and Animal tissue, the Banns on Animal Mobility cannot be upheld. She recruits Boq, Crope, and Tibbett to smuggle ancient manuscripts from the Briscoe Hall and Three Queens libraries, documents that Dillamond, as an Animal, is now barred from accessing. The group meets secretly in a cafe at Railway Square, and Elphaba drives the research forward with passionate intensity. When Dillamond makes a scientific breakthrough—using paired lenses to peer at tissue samples backlit by candlelight—he is so excited that he sings his findings, composing arias about structure, color, and the basic shapes of organic life. Elphaba sings along with him, reading his notes back like a student of musical composition. She later tells Boq that this was the moment she understood the power of what they were doing: "I sang with him, I read his notes back to him like a student of musical composition."

The Murder and Its Aftermath

Dillamond's murder is the pivotal trauma of Elphaba's young life. One morning, his body is found on a stretcher, his throat slit "as thoroughly as if he had wandered into an abattoir." The official story—that he broke a magnifying lens and stumbled against it, cutting an artery—is believed by no one. Elphaba is the only dry-eyed face among the weeping students. She tells Boq, "Somehow the bastards found out." That same day, she sneaks into Dillamond's lab before it can be locked and padlocked, and she recovers his notes. She hides them away and, despite colossal gaps in her training, begins studying them on her own. When Boq asks to see the findings, she refuses, saying, "Whoever killed Doctor Dillamond doesn't want his findings made public. What kind of a friend would I be to you if I put you at risk too?" She takes the burden entirely onto herself.

Legacy: The Work Continues

Dillamond's theories outlive him. Elphaba never abandons his core question—the biological and spiritual continuity between species. Years later, at Kiamo Ko, she uses the Grimmerie and her memory of Dillamond's work to teach the snow monkey Chistery to speak. She tells him, "There is a universal design among us all, could we get in deeply enough to see! Everything is not in vain! Spirit, my friend, spirit!" When Chistery manages to say "spit," she hugs him and weeps with joy. She also perfects a surgical procedure to stitch wings onto snow monkeys, a direct practical application of Dillamond's theories about the plasticity of organic life. She reflects that her "practical applications are directly derived from Doctor Dillamond's theories." Decades later, when she visits Boq, she tells him that Dillamond's findings "outlived him; they still do" and that "the philosophical basis for the resistance grew out of his pioneering hypotheses." The mentor-student relationship, severed by murder, continues as a haunting and a mission: Elphaba spends the rest of her life trying to prove that Dillamond was right, that the boundaries between species are not fixed, and that the world he imagined—a world without those cruel divisions—is still worth fighting for.