by Michael Sims
James Thin’s siren call to impecunious Arthur was a window card informing him that for threepence he could purchase any volume in the large tub beneath the sign. Thruppence was precisely his daily budget for a midday meal and beer. As he neared the bookshop on his way for food, Arthur wrestled with two kinds of hunger, and most days his body bested his mind. About once a week, however, he skipped lunch and stopped at the tub of books.
Unable to even aspire to fine editions, he would happily sort through these volumes, which had been evicted from more valuable real estate within the shop. Patiently he exhumed logarithmic tables, deceased almanacs, and the annotated navel-gazing of Scottish theologians, setting each book aside, digging deeper in the hope of treasure. Often he found some. One day he would take home Jonathan Swift’s dense satire on Christianity, Tale of a Tub, and the next Alain-René Lesage’s picaresque novel Gil Blas—tomes whose thick leather bindings and faded gilt recalled better days in the library of a gentleman.
One day he picked out a stubby volume armored in dour brown leather: a treatise on warfare, written in Latin. He opened the front page and found on the flyleaf, in a firm angular hand, a signature that had faded to yellow—Ex libris Guilielmi Whyte 1672—from an era that had already captured his imagination, and in a handwriting that seemed to begin writing a story in his mind. The past seemed deliriously romantic to him. He bought the book. In general, however, despite his endless drilling in Latin and Greek at Stonyhurst and before, he felt that an English translation was an irresistible shortcut to ancient greatness. To that end, in this tub Arthur found all four volumes of Thomas Gordon’s acclaimed edition of the Roman historian Tacitus, battered but no less readable.
He ran across the essays of Joseph Addison, who founded an age of literate journalism when he launched The Spectator in 1711 with Joseph Steele. Further fueling his passion for British history, Arthur read the classic account of the English Civil War by Edward Hyde, the first Earl of Clarendon. He enjoyed the poems of the seventeenth-century courtier George Villiers, the second Duke of Buckingham, and those of the eighteenth-century satirist Charles Churchill. Although he ranged widely, he turned most often to the writers of Scotland, Ireland, and England for his instruction and entertainment.
Arthur’s appetite for books had begun at an early age. However much he fought other boys during his rambles on the streets, at home in the evenings and on weekends he dived into books as a refuge. As a child he read so quickly that the nearby library informed his mother that he would not be allowed to borrow more than two books per day.
In 1874, at the age of fifteen, Arthur had spent his three-week Christmas holiday with relatives in London, where he saw the renowned actor Henry Irving play Hamlet and where he admired the glittering swords in the armory of the Tower. Foremost on his pilgrimage, however, was Westminster Abbey. Despite his passion for British history, Arthur first sought out not the gilt-bronze supine Edward III on his sarcophagus, not the marble effigy of Mary, Queen of Scots with her white hands eerily raised in prayer, but the South Transept, nicknamed “Poets’ Corner.” There, below the grand rose window, near the grave of Chaucer and the bust of Milton, he paid his respects to the mortal remains of Thomas Babington Macaulay. “His body is buried in peace,” read the gravestone, “but his name liveth for evermore.” It was the kind of antique diction and heroic sentiment that quickened Arthur’s pulse.
The Scottish historian and politician had, for Arthur, opened a window in the formerly opaque wall of history. For years, moving from school to school, Arthur had packed in his luggage a tired copy of Macaulay’s 1843 collection Critical and Historical Essays. These diverse writings had first appeared in the Whig journal Edinburgh Review. Macaulay was typical of the Review’s commitment to a serious and stylish engagement with literature and history in longer, more thoughtful essays.
Macaulay had long since become Arthur’s favorite writer. At the bookshop’s discount bin, forgoing lunch one day, he found a newer but still tattered and lovingly read copy of the Essays. With its dramatic big-brush portraits of figures such as Machiavelli and Frederick the Great, Francis Bacon and John Bunyan, the collection fed Arthur’s appetite for history but also sparked a yearning to imitate Macaulay’s grandeur and sweep. Although some critics complained about Macaulay’s smug patriotism, especially in his somewhat fictionalized history of England, as a young man Arthur admired Macaulay’s authoritative tone and his curiosity about different levels of society. The adolescent boy had lingered particularly over his idol’s grand flourishes, provocative asides, and vivid attention to the texture that brought a scene to life. Later Arthur agreed with the criticisms.
But other writers also appealed to his imagination. Before he could even understand them as a child, Arthur was given a set of Walter Scott’s novels bound in olive-green cloth. Later, despite his mother’s advice that he ought to sleep instead, he read them in bed by candlelight, unable to tear himself away from the heroics. He admired Scott’s adventurous tales so much that his first copy of the author’s 1820 novel Ivanhoe suffered an untimely demise. Carrying it about with him as a boy, Arthur absentmindedly left it on a grassy creek bank and found it days later downstream—washed ashore like a drowning victim, muddy and bloated.
Critics such as John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle argued that Ivanhoe, set at the end of the twelfth century, inspired the revival of English interest in medieval history that still flourished during Arthur’s time. It also established a mental image of the fabled Robin Hood, appearing for the first time in this novel under the name Locksley, as a merry outlaw so adept with a bow that he can split another’s arrow. “This must be the devil, and no man of flesh and blood,” whisper the yeomen; “such archery was never seen since a bow was first bent in Britain.” Arthur thrilled at such scenes.
From an early age, he was aware that Scott could be long-winded and discursive, but Arthur thought that once he turned his attention to the action at hand, he conjured scenes like a sorcerer—the texture of everyday life in Elizabethan England in Kenilworth, the treacherous rivalries of the Byzantine Empire during the First Crusade in Count Robert of Paris. Only a few years before Arthur discovered Scott, a commentator had praised the national icon, “whose novels have not only refreshed and embellished the incidents of history, but have conferred on many a spot, formerly unknown to fame, a reputation as enduring as the annals of history itself.” Since these early days of reading, Arthur had sometimes wished that Scott had turned his imagination to the figures of his own time rather than spent so many years conjuring the past.
Arthur also loved martial poetry. He found nothing more inspiring than a vision of a stout-hearted soldier marching into battle against the odds. He admired valor the way he loved all things that struck him as manly—boxing, patriotism, hunting. At Stonyhurst he had finally succeeded in memorizing all seventy eight-line stanzas of Macaulay’s heroic lay “Horatius,” which opened with a driving meter that Arthur found irresistible:
Lars Porsena of Clusium
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.
By the Nine Gods he swore it,
And named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
East and west and south and north,
To summon his array.
He loved reading about adventures as much as he loved adventuring. As a young child, he admired above all other writers the Irish American novelist Mayne Reid, especially such works as his 1851 dime novel The Scalp Hunters: A Romance of the Plain. Its opening words helped conjure Arthur’s romantic view of the American West:
Unroll the world’s map, and look upon the great northern continent of America. Away to the wild west, away toward the setting sun, away beyond many a far meridian, let your eyes wander. Rest them where golden rivers rise among peaks that carry the eternal snow. Rest them there.
You are looking upon a land whose features are un-furrowed by
human hands, still bearing the marks of the Almighty mould, as upon the morning of creation; a region whose every object wears the impress of God’s image. . .
Follow me, with the eye of your mind, through scenes of wild beauty, of savage sublimity.
After several pages of ecstatic description, Reid exclaimed, “These are the Rocky Mountains, the American Andes, the colossal vertebræ of the continent!”
Immersed in such books ever since he had learned to read, Arthur as a boy spent his time imagining hand-to-hand combat with fierce Red Indian braves and finding his wounds nursed by a charming squaw. Having mentally voyaged from Hudson Bay to Cape Horn, he knew how to behave aboard a ship. In his mind he carried a long-barreled Kentucky rifle and was sure he understood how to elude pursuers by running down a brook to throw bloodhounds off his scent. He still bore with him these stirring tales—and a vision of himself as an adventurer—when he strode along Edinburgh’s hilly streets toward the university.
CHAPTER 7
Ode to Opium
The healthy skepticism which medical training induces, the desire to prove every fact, and only to reason from such proved facts—these are the finest foundations for all thought.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “THE ROMANCE OF MEDICINE”
By the time Arthur enrolled in 1876, the University of Edinburgh was a renowned center of medical education. The Royal College of Surgeons was founded in 1505, during the reign of James IV, its “Seill of Cause” granted in response to a bill of supplication presented by “Surrgeanis and Barbouris within the Burgh of Edinburgh.” At the time, alongside scourges and hanging, other royally approved public torture included vise-pinching noses, boring holes through tongues, and nailing ears to a log. In the 1870s the College of Surgeons looked back respectfully on the temerity and foresight of its founders—who, in the school’s genesis myth, dared to found an enclave of learning amid barbarism.
Youngest of the Scottish universities, Edinburgh had been teaching surgery and anatomy since early in the sixteenth century. The notion of a qualified professional physician, however, was relatively recent. Not until 1858, the year before Arthur’s birth, did the British medical establishment publish a register of accredited medical men. The profession had been advancing dramatically throughout the first half of the century, and all around Arthur were the recent fruits of research and experimentation. Shedding the cobwebs of the past, the largely progressive university was defining itself in opposition to more conservative Anglican institutions such as Oxford and Cambridge, where many influential faculty members still opposed such flourishing new ideas as Darwinian natural selection.
Like astronomy and geology and biology, medicine was growing in its understanding and in its technologies. Since their infancy in the seventeenth century, microscopes had become more advanced, enabling the detailed study of cellular structure, from tree xylem to human blood. The idea of inoculation—the introduction of smallpox virus into individuals who were not immune—had been explored earlier in China, Africa, and India, but not until 1796 did Englishman Edward Jenner effectively demonstrate the value and methods of inoculation in ways that the European medical community could no longer mock. In the 1840s a steel hypodermic syringe was first used to administer a subcutaneous injection—physicians having overcome two centuries of opposition to the method after early attempts had sometimes been fatal.
One of the great names in Edinburgh University’s recent history was James Young Simpson, who announced the anesthetic virtues of chloroform in 1847, sixteen years after its discovery. The new painkilling tool was quickly adopted in many areas. In the mid-1840s, dentist Horace Wells revived a notion originally proposed half a century earlier by the great chemist Humphrey Davy: the inhalation of nitrous oxide for pain relief. A colleague administered the so-called laughing gas to Wells while another colleague extracted one of his teeth without causing great pain. About the same time, a patient requesting to be mesmerized before surgery on his ulcerated tooth instead found himself inhaling sulfuric ether—one of many new weapons in the ancient struggle against pain.
Joseph Bell was not the only Edinburgh professor who inspired Arthur with the thrill and the modern relevance of medicine. For example, the renowned Charles Wyville Thomson, a professor of natural history in his mid-forties, taught zoology. In 1876 he returned from serving as Chief Scientist aboard HMS Challenger, having persuaded the Royal Society to fund adaptation of a naval vessel into a floating laboratory for study of the world’s barely known ocean life.
William Rutherford was the professor of physiology after serving as Fullerian Professor of Chemistry. He was short but broad-shouldered, and his enormous barrel chest projected a stentorian voice not softened by a beard that reminded Arthur of Assyrian bas-reliefs. He turned forty about the time Arthur met him. Having grown up in the tiny village of Ancrum Craig, in rural Roxburghshire on the southeastern coast of Scotland, and gone on to study in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin, Rutherford spoke with a curious accent. Dissecting a frog, he would exclaim, “Ach, these Jarman frags!” He had the presence and authority to cope with winter class sizes—250 students in his practical physiology course and twice as many in systematic physiology. He was famously adept at combining lecturing and demonstration. Often Rutherford began almost shouting his lecture from the hall, before reaching the classroom and his desk, not yet visible when he began, “There are valves in the veins . . .”
Arthur studied chemistry under Alexander Crum Brown, whose many contributions to science included a system of diagramming chemical compounds by denoting atoms with their symbols inside circles linked to the nucleus with a dashed line. Brown was known for his kindness and his unflappable manner. When a chemistry experiment that was supposed to result in a fire or explosion failed to do so, some men in the class were guaranteed to supply a shout of “Boom!” Brown would emerge from where he had taken refuge against the expected blast, calmly say, “Really, gentlemen!” and proceed with the class.
Henry Littlejohn was in his late forties when Arthur enrolled. Like Joe Bell, he was Edinburgh born and an alumnus of the university and of the Royal College of Surgeons. He had also studied at the Sorbonne. In 1854 the Royal College of Surgeons elected him a fellow and the Edinburgh Town Council appointed him Police Surgeon. The next year, he presented his first lecture in the School of Medicine and soon became known for his theatrical persona at the lectern. Gesturing dramatically, he presented with clarity and startling wit his perspective on topics ranging from the hygiene of slum dwellers to the drainage system of ancient Rome. Soon he was lecturing on forensic medicine. In 1861, following the collapse of a tenement that resulted in thirty-five deaths and countless injuries, the Edinburgh Town Council appointed Littlejohn as Edinburgh’s first Medical Officer of Health. His career partnered science and law enforcement.
Some professors influenced Arthur more by reputation than by presence. Robert Christison, for example, retired in 1877, but his legacy haunted the classrooms. He studied in Paris with the chemist Pierre Jean Robiquet and the Minorcan-born French toxicologist Mathieu J. B. Orfila, who was renowned for his studies of arsenic poisoning. Christison began teaching by following criminal investigations and trials in Scotland’s State Trials, informed by the best French texts. He first became known to the general public for his role in the 1828 trials of William Burke and William Hare—the notorious grave robbers who turned murderers to supply anatomists’ need for corpses at a time, prior to the Anatomy Act of 1832, when only executed criminals were available for dissection. Christison served as a medical witness in the trial; later, as medical advisor to the crown for Scotland, he formulated guidelines for the examination of corpses. Beginning on the side of prisoners in the Justiciary Court, sought by king’s counsel seeking loopholes for their clients, he was soon retained as a regular counsel across the aisle, on behalf of His Majesty’s courts.
Christison was legendary by the time Arthur entered his realm. Besides serving often as a forensic witness, he had extended a
nd surpassed Orfila’s pioneer work in toxicology. And, like his colleague Joseph Bell, Christison had not hesitated to gamble his health—even his life—on research. After reading accounts of traditional “ordeal by poisoning” rituals among the natives of Old Calabar, a British colony along the Niger River on the southwestern coast of Africa, Christison experimented with the so-called Calabar ordeal-bean. In response to overwhelming evidence of the legume’s toxicity, including eyewitness accounts of grisly deaths, Christison prevailed upon his colleagues, including Syme, to cultivate it and supply him with fresh beans. He first tested the poison on animals, including a rabbit, every detail of whose death within five minutes he noted, and he recorded that slugs who nibbled the first fleshy cotyledons that pushed up through the soil from the vegetating bean were dead within twenty-four hours.
Despite noting that “this poison is one of great intensity of action,” Christison ingested some of it himself, and when he experienced few symptoms he increased the dosage. He compared the sensations’ progress with his previous experience of Indian hemp, opium, and morphia. “Being now quite satisfied that I had got hold of a very energetic poison,” he told the assembled members of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1855, “I took immediate means for getting quit of it, by swallowing the shaving water I had just been using, by which the stomach was effectually emptied.” Arthur paid close attention to such stories of scientific daring.