by Thomas Goetz
Conan Doyle echoed the thought years later speaking to medical students, acknowledging the benefits of medical training. “It tinges the whole philosophy of life and furnishes the whole basis of thought,” he said. “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.” The words could have been spoken by Sherlock Holmes himself.
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SCIENCE RUNS DEEP IN SHERLOCK HOLMES STORIES, AND AS MUCH as that reflects Conan Doyle’s background, it also reflects the age. Despite the labors of antivivisectionists and antivaccinationists, despite the denials of those who refused to grant the existence of germs, despite the doubters of Darwin, science was soaring in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was the most potent force in European culture, revealing invisible worlds and offering new ways to see the visible world. Electricity arrived in 1873, first with the discovery of electromagnetism, and soon thereafter with a series of inventions with profound cultural implications: 1876 brought the invention of the telephone; 1877 brought Thomas Edison’s phonograph; 1879, Edison’s incandescent lamp. Cash registers, dishwashers, fountain pens, and the internal combustion engine were all soon to follow.
The pace of progress amazed even chroniclers of science. The Popular Science Monthly, founded in New York in 1872, editorialized in 1890, “We have frequent cause for astonishment at the rapidity with which modern life is being transformed under the influence of scientific invention and discovery. . . . The telephone makes its way everywhere without pause or check, and the same is true of electric lighting and traction.”
The revolution wasn’t just one of household conveniences. All at once, civilization seemed to break free from centuries of tradition and secondhand wisdom and emerge into the bright light of ascertainable truth. Increasingly there was a sense that science was no longer just a tally of things people could now understand, the province of Isaac Newton and the Royal Society; rather, it was a method, an approach to the natural world that could be deployed to address a broad range of social problems, from poverty to education to disease. With the scientific method as a weapon, researchers and inventors might tackle any outstanding riddle of the ages and, in short order, produce a solution, an answer. A remedy.
How does a scientific revolution build toward social change? This is perhaps the central question of the past 150 years, a period when science has, time and again, transcended a eureka moment in the laboratory to compel a broader cultural shift. This trajectory lies behind everything from nuclear energy to plastics to the Internet. But as essential as this trajectory is to the fabric of our daily lives, the process too often slips by without our noting it, or even our knowing how, precisely, the progress actually happens.
The germ theory is one of history’s most vivid examples of this trajectory, rising from Koch’s work in Wöllstein to immunology to antibiotics to a new understanding of cancer and heart disease. Along the way, the germ theory also demonstrated what standards of evidence society, rather than scientists, required. In fact, it’s worth burrowing a little deeper into the process here, in order to spell out the stages from science to society, in order both to better grasp the consequence of Koch’s work and to better understand the role that Conan Doyle, as one sympathetic to science, played.
Both Koch and Sherlock Holmes viewed science as a tool, an instrument with impact. Freeman Dyson, the Princeton physicist and mathematician, has made this case most emphatically, pointing to astronomy (where the telescope was the revolutionary force) and genetics (where the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 is only now being exploited with miniaturized sequencing and synthesis technologies). Science, Dyson argued, generates “unpredictable new ideas and opportunities. And human beings will continue to respond to new ideas and opportunities with new skills and inventions. We remain toolmaking animals, and science will continue to exercise the creativity programmed into our genes.”
Dyson’s emphasis on tools, it needs to be acknowledged, is a direct refutation of Thomas Kuhn’s concept-based theory of science. Where Kuhn argues that science is the progress from revolutionary idea to idea, Dyson insists that the revolution lives in the industry, not the idea. But they’re both useful concepts. If Kuhn helps us understand how revolutionary ideas such as the germ theory gain primacy among scientists, Dyson helps us see how such a theory leads to technologies that have profound cultural impact.
In our technology-saturated twenty-first century, it’s easy to grasp the powerful simplicity of Dyson’s idea. It’s manifest in the way we read about science in the newspaper, with today’s physics discovery becoming tomorrow’s amazing microprocessor. But this transformation of science into technology and technology into cultural change was altogether novel in the 1880s. The profusion of new gizmos, from typewriters to player pianos, was unprecedented. As T. H. Huxley, a celebrated English biologist known as “Darwin’s bulldog,” wrote in 1866, science had enabled the invention of the great ships crossing the ocean and the railroad crossing the landscape; it had born an infrastructure of factories and printing presses, “without which the whole fabric of modern English society would collapse into a mass of stagnant and starving pauperism.” Suddenly, science mattered; it was something people wanted to know about, to keep pace with, and to understand.
The editors of thousands of periodicals recognized science as something that had appeal for readers. Science journals, including Nature (founded in 1869), bridged the intellectual gap between the publications for scientists and those for lay readers. Book publishers also jumped into the game with scientific primers for general readers: the Nature Series, the Contemporary Science Series, the Manuals of Elementary Science, and dozens more. These publications aimed to popularize science, to make its discoveries evident and comprehendible to all.
In A Study in Scarlet, Conan Doyle touches on this enthusiasm in the popular press when Watson picks up a magazine and reads an essay titled “The Book of Life.” Though Watson doesn’t realize it, the essay is by Holmes. Science, Holmes’s essay argues, can yield profound insights simply by reasoning from one point of evidence to the next. “From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. . . . By a man’s finger nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt cuffs—by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.”
Though Watson dismisses the essay as “ineffable twaddle,” Holmes’s argument draws from legitimate science. Darwin serves as one example, but there are others. In 1839 the British naturalist Richard Owen was presented with a scrap of bone found in New Zealand. Remarking on its resemblance to an ostrich bone, he conjectured that giant flightless birds once lived in New Zealand. A few years later, he was able to confirm his theory with a skeleton of the ancient moa bird. Similarly, in 1863, T. H. Huxley explained in a widely circulated lecture how French naturalist Georges Cuvier had been able to reconstruct “entire animals from a tooth or perhaps a fragment of bone.”
Holmes was working from the same playbook, as Conan Doyle makes clear in “The Five Orange Pips,” a later Holmes adventure. “As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after,” Holmes explains.
But Conan Doyle looked not just at science broadly, but at microbiology specifically. The work of Louis Pasteur and, even more so, Robert Koch provided the template for Sherlock Holmes’s fascination with minuscule detail.
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IF CONAN DOYLE’S EPIPHANY WAS TO TURN LABORATORY ANALYTICS toward real-world problems, there were few co
ncerns more acute for Victorian England than crime. Particularly in London, crime seemed to seep through every neighborhood, oozing throughout the city streets as steadily as slaughterhouse canals and sewers drained into the Thames. The bounty of words for “criminals” gives a sense of the scale of the problem. There were maltoolers and cly fakers, flimps and dippers (all pickpockets), macers and magsmen (cheats), dragsmen and sharpers and buttoners and gonophs (varieties of thieves), and nobblers and bludgers (violent criminals who might use chloroform to knock out a victim before robbing him). At night, “mutchers” would go “bug hunting” (robbing drunks), or they’d bash a citizen with a “holy water sprinkler” (a cudgel spiked with nails). The 1850s and ’60s saw panic over garrotting, with victims being jumped from behind, a rope drawn across their throats. Even children were at risk, as well-dressed youths would be pulled into alleys and stripped of their clothes. (Poor children were organized into gangs of pickpockets by criminals known as kidsmen, à la Fagin in Oliver Twist.) Prostitution was rampant, most prominently in theater alleys and along the banks of the Thames—not coincidentally, places that also were frequented by thugs waiting to rob a would-be customer. The prostitutes themselves were inevitably at risk as well, as the five brutal murders attributed to Jack the Ripper brought to light in 1888.
Whether the streets were, in fact, growing more dangerous was unclear to many Londoners. The Metropolitan Police was founded in London in 1829, though the force was for decades afflicted by drunkenness, ineptitude, and corruption. At best, some fourteen hundred police officers patrolled daily over a population greater than five million. Certainly, the rise of media helped fuel a sense of lawlessness. During the garroting panics, from 1855 to 1860, the circulation of daily newspapers increased threefold.
In fact, crime may have been going down by the time Sherlock Holmes appeared on the scene, at least according to the statistics available. In the 1860s there were six property felonies for every 1,000 Londoners, but by the late 1880s that rate had fallen to 2.5 per 1,000 citizens. Violent crimes fell similarly, despite the headlines generated by the Ripper murders. Though crime was still greatly feared in London and elsewhere, it no longer seemed the inevitable ulcer of a much deeper cultural corruption. By the late 1880s, the topic of crime didn’t provoke despair so much as action. There was increasingly a sense that crime could be fought and criminals prosecuted.
This was the spirit that Conan Doyle brought to the subject, and it was a key appeal to his Sherlock Holmes. Rather than offer one more stock detective who stumbled his way through a crime, Conan Doyle gave Holmes a way to assess it, scrutinize it, and attack it. Holmes puts science to work, revealing clues others miss. He demonstrates that crime is no match for science.
And notably Holmes doesn’t just apply science to crime solving; he develops it himself. Holmes makes his first appearance at 221b Baker Street in his makeshift lab, with a test tube in hand. “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!” he exclaims.
I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by hoemoglobin, and by nothing else. . . . Criminal cases are continually hinging upon that one point. A man is suspected of a crime months perhaps after it has been committed. His linen or clothes are examined, and brownish stains discovered upon them. Are they blood stains, or mud stains, or rust stains, or fruit stains, or what are they? That is a question which has puzzled many an expert, and why? Because there was no reliable test. Now we have the Sherlock Holmes test, and there will no longer be any difficulty.
In truth, it would be nearly twenty years before the “Sherlock Holmes test”—known as the Kastle-Meyer test—would be able to identify bloodstains accurately. But Holmes’s enthusiasm shows Conan Doyle’s passion for applying science to crime solving and for the science of criminology just emerging all over Europe, often with specious claims. In Italy, Cesare Lombroso argued that criminals were a racially distinct class of savages and that they could be identified by a taxonomy of physical characteristics. In France, Alphonse Bertillon unveiled what he called “anthropometry,” a system for classifying criminals by their physical appearance, tattoos, and scars. More practically, Bertillon advocated taking two photographs of a suspect, in both frontal and profile portraits—inventing what we recognize today as the mug shot.
In Nature in 1880, a Scottish physician named Henry Faulds had noted “skin furrows of the hand,” particularly on the fingertips. These patterns, he reckoned, seemed to be unique to individuals, leading Faulds to speculate upon their value: “When bloody finger-marks or impressions on clay, glass, etc., exist, they may lead to the scientific identification of criminals.”
Though it would be several decades before fingerprints became a standard tool of police work—they first appeared in a 1903 Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder”—Faulds’s insight aligned with the methods that Conan Doyle bequeathed to his fictional detective. In Scarlet, for instance, Holmes explains to Watson how footprints might be analyzed, identifying not only a suspect’s shoe but his weight and height as well. “There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps,” he suggests.
Regardless of whether Conan Doyle was anticipating forensic science or simply keeping up with its pioneers, he created in Sherlock Holmes a textbook demonstration of how to put science to work. In this, the stories seem ideally suited to their historical moment, when science was recognized as a force for good and when the public was hungry for stories that reflected their increasingly modern world. What is surprising to realize today, then, is that when Sherlock Holmes did first appear, he was paid so little notice.
• • •
CONAN DOYLE HAD LET HIMSELF HOPE THAT A STUDY IN SCARLET would be a triumph, the story that would make his name. Instead, it barely registered.
“I had high hopes,” Conan Doyle wrote in his memoirs, confessing that he had imagined that “my little Holmes book” would change his lot. But although it “attracted some favourable comment, the door still seemed to be barred.” For the moment, at least.
After A Study in Scarlet appeared and disappeared in 1887, Conan Doyle went back to his desk at Bush Villas and resolutely began work on another novel, this one more ambitious and more deliberately literary than anything he had done previously. This was his historical novel Micah Clarke. Set in the seventeenth century, it was an adventure story in the style of Sir Walter Scott. Conan Doyle thought it was the best thing he’d ever written (and indeed he would long consider it his best work). Even before it was published, he was already dreaming about how it might allow him to move forward in his life. If it succeeds, he wrote to his sister, “we may then, I think, take it as proven that I can live by my pen. We should have a few hundreds in hand to start us. The next step would be to quietly sell the practice”—the first admission that he wanted out of medical practice. He imagined that he might tour Europe (Berlin, Paris, Vienna), studying ophthalmology, and at last return to London to “start as an eye surgeon, still of course keeping literature as my milk cow.”
“But of course all this is mere dreamland tho’ it may take shape,” he acknowledged. “All depends on Micah.”
Micah Clarke was published in February 1889, and it earned more than forty reviews, most of them favorable. Conan Doyle dutifully bought each newspaper and magazine that featured a mention of the book, clipped out the reference, for good or ill, and pasted it into a notebook. But “it was not a boom book,” as Conan Doyle later admitted. There was no quitting Southsea, at least not yet, and there was certainly no quitting medicine.
The novel did enable him finally to sell another novel, The Firm of Girdlestone, which had languished in a desk drawer for two years. Things turned brighter still when, on August 30, Conan Doyle received an invitation from Joseph Stoddart, the American publisher of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, to have dinner in London. Conan Doyle “gave my patients a rest for a day” and headed to the city. At the appointed hour, he s
howed up at the grand Langham hotel and was pleased to see that Stoddart had also invited another writer, Oscar Wilde. At the time, Wilde was best known for his witty journalism, his essays on the arts, and his fashion élan. Five years older than Conan Doyle, he was most definitely a writer, someone dedicated to the craft, which was more than Conan Doyle could claim.
The dinner went splendidly; Wilde mentioned that he had read Micah Clarke and enjoyed it—a tremendous boost to Conan Doyle’s ego. Stoddart was impressed by both writers, and he ended the evening by commissioning each of them to write short novels of “not less than 40,000 words.” The fee would be a hundred pounds, more than Conan Doyle had earned with his writing the entire year previous. “It was indeed a golden evening for me,” Conan Doyle wrote.
Wilde’s contribution would be The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel, and one that would scandalize Victorian London with its thinly veiled homoeroticism and amoral hero. For his part, Conan Doyle had the idea to “give Sherlock Holmes of A Study in Scarlet something else to unravel.” He took just two months to dash off his effort, The Sign of Four.
The short novel, published in the United States and the United Kingdom in February 1890, was controversial in its own right, opening with a scene of Holmes languidly injecting a 7 percent solution of cocaine into an arm already scarred with “innumerable puncture marks.” Even more than Scarlet, the story is suffused with science, starting with the title of the first chapter, “The Science of Deduction.” (This is also the title of chapter 2 in Scarlet; the author assumed that many of his readers would be meeting Holmes for the first time.) “Detection,” Holmes tells Watson, “is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner.”