Dr. Bell might have been describing himself. But Bell was not the only model for Dr. Doyle’s half doctor, half virtuoso. And although the records are murky, it should come as no surprise that Sherlock Holmes owes as much to the Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table as to the admirable Dr. Bell. Doyle made it clear in his memoirs that he borrowed “Dr. Watson” from the surname of a fellow practitioner in Portsmouth, a Dr. James Watson. But extensive searches of Doyle’s memoirs, correspondence, and scrapbooks have yielded not a word as to the origin of the name “Holmes.” Is there a secret? And if so, what does the secret tell us about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his search for the genetically guilty?
Dr. Bell tells us that a medical diagnostician and a detective share an imagination “capable of weaving a theory or piecing together a broken chain or unraveling a tangled clue.” Well, it may be almost elementary—so to speak—to piece together a chain of evidence that traces the invention of Sherlock Holmes to the best-known doctor-writer of the nineteenth century: Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Autocrat, Poet, and Professor at the Breakfast-Table, to name but three of his volumes. Indeed, I would argue that the young Dr. Doyle not only appropriated Holmes’s last name for his hero but also followed the Autocrat’s path to literary fame by playing the patriot card. Unfortunately, he also carried the biological Darwinism of Holmes to its social extreme. Conan Doyle got into the business of looking for guilty genes early in his career.
In September 1892, when young Dr. Doyle was by no means a household name, it was announced in the press that the Foudroyant, Admiral Nelson’s old flagship, had been sold to the Germans—and for scrap, at that! Doyle boiled over and dispatched these verses to the press as “A Humble Petition”:
Who says the Nation’s purse is lean,
Who fears for claim or bond or debt
When all the glories that have been
Are scheduled as a cash asset?
If times are black and trade is slack,
If coal and cotton fail at last,
We’ve something left to barter yet—
Our glorious past . . .
There’s many a crypt in which lies hid
The dust of statesman or of king;
There’s Shakespeare’s home to raise a bid,
And Milton’s house its price would bring.
What for the sword that Cromwell drew?
What for Prince Edward’s coat of mail?
What for our Saxon Alfred’s tomb?
They’re all for sale!
What was it that prompted this outburst of poetry in a newspaper by a writer known to Dr. Bell and readers of the Bookman as “a born story teller” who wrote for magazines? It seems likely that the example, in both sentiment and meter, was that of Oliver Wendell Holmes. In September 1830 there had appeared a short notice in the Boston Daily Advertiser that the frigate Constitution, proud veteran of the American Navy, was about to be dismantled. Young Holmes—not yet a medical student, but already the class poet of Harvard ’29—dashed off a poem to the Advertiser. That poem, “Old Ironsides,” like Doyle’s plea for the Foudroyant, was an indignant response to a tightwad regime. It gained for Holmes an immediate national reputation. Indeed, until television stamped out juvenile literacy on this continent, generations of American schoolchildren knew Holmes’s poem by heart:
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky;
Beneath it rung the battle shout,
And burst the cannon’s roar;—
The meteor of the ocean air
Shall sweep the clouds no more.
Her deck once red with heroes’ blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o’er the flood
And waves were white below,
No more shall feel the victor’s tread,
Or know the conquered knee;—
The harpies of the shore shall pluck
The eagle of the sea!
The poem was so well known in America that several generations of medical students used to recite a parody that began “Ay, tear her tattered enzyme down . . . ”
Ample evidence suggests that Doyle was a close reader of American writers: the late John Dickson Carr was not the only critic to note the strong influence of Bret Harte on the doctor’s earliest adventure stories (see The American’s Tale, 1879), and Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue became Doyle’s immediate example. Doyle’s notebooks and the drafts for A Study in Scarlet clearly show that he turned his attention to a procedural puzzle after abandoning a murder tale inspired by Poe. In keeping with his Gallic model, Doyle was going to call that early effort The Lerouge Case; you’ll recall that the hero of Poe’s “The Gold Bug” is named Le Grand. But rouge turned scarlet, and Doyle’s notebooks show him groping for a method: “The coat-sleeve, the trouser-knee, the callosities of the forefinger and thumb, the boot—any one of these might tell us, but that all united should fail to enlighten the trained observation is incredible.”
Doyle knew that in order to turn clinical observation into a story he required not only a new method but also a new kind of character who might apply that method. He needed an observer, an experimentalist who would make criminal investigation an exact science. “By a study of minutiae, footprints, mud, dust, the use of chemistry and anatomy and geology, he must reconstruct the scene of a murder as though he had been there.”
While Joseph Bell was a good enough model for a detective who could observe the minutiae of evidence, clinical observation was only one talent required of a “stoop-shouldered wizard of lens and microscope.” No—Doyle needed someone of more quantitative bent, someone who might be scholar enough to write a monograph describing “one hundred and fourteen varieties of tobacco ash.” For that model Doyle required a specialist: an anatomist, a microscopist, a physiologist. And who was more qualified to serve as that model than the Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard, the doctor-poet who had introduced histology to America, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes? There is little doubt that Dr. Holmes must have been very much on Dr. Doyle’s mind in March and April 1886.
Sherlock Holmes makes his first appearance from behind a chemistry bench in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, where Dr. Watson mistakes him for a medical student—Holmes is working on a test for occult blood that will replace the time-tested guaiac method. The book in which the detective first appears is A Study in Scarlet, written in the spring of 1886. And in the spring of 1886 the life and times of one doctor were being celebrated in every British newspaper. Oliver Wendell Holmes ranked at the time with Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, and Hawthorne in British esteem. He had arrived on a triumphant hundred-day tour of England, in the course of which he received honorary degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, and—oh, yes—Edinburgh. The doctor’s doings on the London social scene were duly recorded; there were literary dinners with Robert Browning, Henry James, Walter Pater, and George du Maurier; state receptions with dukes and earls at the side of the prime minister (Gladstone); visits to the poet laureate (Tennyson) and to the Derby (with Prince Albert Edward); professional receptions where his companions were Sir James Paget (of the disease) and Sir William Gull (of the thyroid). Such were the joys—young Dr. Doyle must have noticed—of a successful career in literature and medical science.
Added to this celebrity was Holmes’s association with one of the most notorious criminal trials of the century. Every English connoisseur of murder was aware of the Webster-Parkman case, the Harvard Medical School murder of 1849. As Simon Schama has reminded us in Dead Certainties, John Webster, the Erving Professor of Chemistry, was accused of having killed, dismembered, and almost destroyed the remains of Dr. George Parkman. Parkman, a wealthy practitioner and sharp businessman, had given the land on which Harvard Medical School stood, and the university rewarded him by naming the chair of anatomy and physiology after him. Dean Holmes, who occupied that chair, testi
fied for the prosecution. As an expert witness he had confirmed that “a large mass of human bones, fused slag and cinders . . . the block of mineral teeth and the gold filling” found in the ovens of Professor Webster’s chemistry laboratory were the remains of the unfortunate Parkman. These residues were also identified by Holmes’s anatomical colleague Dr. Jeffries Wyman—he of the Philosophers Camp in the Adirondacks. Their careful analyses helped the prosecution to prove foul play and to uncover Dr. Webster’s postmortem high jinks with the body. (One might say he was the first Harvard biochemist found guilty of cooking the data.) Detailed accounts of the trial in the English press never failed to mention Dr. Holmes. A few years after Webster was convicted and hanged, Charles Dickens, one of many English followers of that grisly crime, persuaded Dr. Holmes to walk him through Harvard’s chemistry lab to view Webster’s furnace, proof that every English literary gent knew that the Parkman Professor was privy to the secrets of the Parkman case.
We have ample reason, therefore, for supposing that Doyle conflated several aspects of Dr. Holmes in his detective hero. The name, certainly. The doctor-author model, probably. The forensic bent, surely. But the scientific urges? That numerical drive? Do these derive from Bell the surgeon or from Holmes the physician? Holmes, on the evidence, one might argue. Holmes had been trained in the quantitative methods of Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis and drilled in Louis’s motto, “Formez toujours les idées nettes. Fuyez les à peu près.” Dr. Holmes paraphrased it as: “Always make sure that you form a distinct and clear idea of the matter you are considering. Always avoid vague approximations where exact estimates are possible; about so many—about so much—instead of the precise number and quantity.” Those words might have dropped from the mouth of Sherlock Holmes when Watson lowered his newspaper, as he did in The Resident Patient, to look up at an unframed picture on the wall of Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, lifelong friend and correspondent of Dr. Holmes). They do, in fact, practically drop from the mouth of “young Stamford” in A Study in Scarlet as he describes Holmes to Watson: “He appears to have a passion for exact and definite knowledge.” Fuyez toujours le à peu près, Stamford might have said.
Dr. Holmes returned from his studies in France fully aware of his responsibility for introducing new methods into a medical backwater: “I have lived among a great, a glorious people; I have thrown my thoughts into a new language; I have received the shock of new minds and new habits.” Once at Harvard, he inaugurated the study of medical microscopy in the United States. He went on to design a number of teaching and research microscopes, inventing a portable microscope for use in the classroom. Following the lead of Samuel F. B. Morse, who had brought the daguerreotype back from his own Paris sojourn, Holmes became an ardent photographer. The best-known portraits of Dr. Holmes depict him in his study, posed in front of a microscope or the odd optical instrument. He was proudest of his achievements in histology, of what the achromatic lens had wrought, asking his Harvard students in 1861:
Now what have we come to in our own day? In the first place, the minute structure of all the organs has been made out in the most satisfactory way. The special arrangements of the vessels and the ducts of all the glands, of the air-tubes and vesicles of the lungs, of the parts which make up the skin and other membranes, all the details of those complex parenchymatous organs which had confounded investigation so long, have been lifted out of the invisible into the sight of all observers . . . Everywhere we find cells, modified or unchanged. They roll in inconceivable multitudes (5 million or more to the cubic milliliter) as blood whisks through our vessels . . . they preside over the chemical processes which elaborate the living fluids [and] the soul itself sits on a throne of nucleated cells.
Professor Holmes throbbed with satisfaction at the new world under his lens. He did not foresee that, in less than a generation, the routine use of portable and powerful microscopes in the field would turn the sanitary revolution into the bacteriological revolution. He did anticipate Dr. Bell’s tribute to the importance of the infinitely little. Indeed, the passage leads us to suspect that a lean sleuth with lens and microscope was exactly what a young medical writer would come up with who had been weaned on the teachings of Bell and the writings of Holmes. For Holmes was more than a sedentary professor of anatomy. As a physiologist he had moved to more kinetic studies. He had written scholarly and popular articles on the gait of man and beast: footprints on the sands of time. Lens in hand, he pointed out to his Harvard classes that anatomy studies the organism in space, whereas physiology studies it in time. And when the illustrator Sidney Paget drew the restless Sherlock Holmes, he often showed him before a microscope or with lens in hand. There, fixed on the pages of childhood, the lean sleuth will forever peer through the lens at the spoor in the mud, or exhort his companion, “Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot.” Dr. Doyle took from Dr. Holmes’s thirteen volumes of writing the lesson that experimental science could produce a popular literature. Private investigation could bring popular fame. And is it no accident that by the end of the nineteenth century, doctors who studied disease began to call themselves clinical investigators rather than clinical observers? Sure enough, by the time the American Society for Clinical Investigation was founded at the beginning of the twentieth century, both doctor and detective had become investigators; both used the microscope to study the importance of the infinitely little.
THE SHIFT FROM OBSERVATION TO INVESTIGATION also took place in the nineteenth-century novel. The literary scholar Lawrence Rothfield has observed in Vital Signs (1992) that the displacement of realism (Balzac) by naturalism (Zola) correlated in time and sensibility with the “displacement of one form of scientific thought (that of clinical medicine) by another (that of experimental medicine).” What Rothfield has called the “invasive aspects” of clinical and criminal investigation led him to explore the Freudian roots of detective fiction. He suggested that the pleasures of criminal investigation are almost erotic. Holmes sloshes through bog and moor to glimpse—at last—the primal scene. The detective, with nostrils dilated, cheeks flushed, hot after the scent of a criminal—or the literal denouement of the family romance—resembles in his rush of excitement the scientist who has snared an offending microbe: “Yes, I have found it!”
But Poe was always ahead of Doyle, even in the Freudian sweepstakes. Here is his portrait of the Chevalier Auguste Dupin in deductive rapture at the moment of discovery: “His manner at these moments was frigid and abstract; his eyes were vacant in expression; while his voice, usually a rich tenor, rose to a treble . . . ” Poe precedes this orgasmic description with another that tells us as much about Watson and Holmes as about the narrator and Dupin: “He boasted to me . . . that most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms, and was wont to follow up such assertions by direct and very startling proofs of his intimate knowledge of my own.” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote what he called his medicated novels to provide popular, sensational entertainment, and Rothfield could have had Holmes of Boston, rather than Doyle of Edinburgh, in mind when he describes the “sensational effects that detection can produce in the detected, the detective and the reader—effects that themselves are being given a scientific, even medical, status at the very moment when the detective story comes into its own as a genre: the moment of Holmes.” But the moment of Holmes—which was also the moment of naturalism—had Darwinian as well as Freudian undertones. Doctor and detective alike used the tools of science to root out the abnormal in body or body politic. It is probably again no accident that Francis Galton (1822–1911), who founded the science of eugenics, developed fingerprinting by microscopy as part of his campaign of racial classification (1891). And eugenics turned out to be the applied science of social Darwinism. As Dr. Bell pointed out, “Racial peculiarities, hereditary tricks of manner, accent, occupation or the want of it, education, environment of all kinds, by their little trivial impressions gradually mold or carve the individual, and leave finger marks or chisel sores w
hich the expert can recognize.”
Here then was a new scientific method to find the ape beneath the skin, to search in the odd thumbprint for those racial peculiarities that only the expert can recognize! Galton himself makes an appearance in the penultimate paragraph of Dr. Bell’s review. Galton’s fingerprint method, Bell argued, renders “the ridges and furrows of the stain visible and permanent.” Those stains were racial and indelible. No wonder that we nowadays call the technique used to identify DNA fragments by restriction enzymes (RFLP) “fingerprinting.”
Informed by hindsight, we can accuse a literature based on Galtonian eugenics of social Darwinism. In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and its sequels, moral flaws are signified by physical abnormalities. Doyle offers us stock villains aplenty: the Gipsy, the Moor, the Levantine, the Man with the Blue Carbuncle. Those others. The detective ferrets out their guilt not from behavior alone but from Bell’s “myriads of signs eloquent and instructive which need the educated eye to detect.” Each twist of the spine, droop of a lid, bend in the nose, or blotch on the skin is an outward sign of a deeper flaw in the flesh. Those racial stains, which offend the physical standards of a settled race, are as visible and permanent as a fingerprint. The genes they express are the genes of guilt. Sherlock Holmes presided over the most thrilling gene hunt of his century and became a hero of adolescents worldwide. Meanwhile, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became the staunch dean of empire loyalists and—like Yeats and William James before him—lapsed into spiritualism in old age. But as a student of Dr. Bell and fan of Dr. Holmes, Dr. Doyle put on the map forever the notion that doctors and detectives are after the same game: “Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot.” It was the moment of Holmes indeed.
The Fevers of Reason Page 10