by Thomas Goetz
As Europe raced toward the twentieth century, science became an outright fad, the prism through which the rest of the culture viewed itself (not unlike technology today). The popular literature was filled with scientific stories, among them Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and most of all those of H. G. Wells, who in the course of ten years wrote The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and War of the Worlds. But even Wells himself, in an essay titled “Popularising Science,” published in the journal Nature in 1894, acknowledged that it was Conan Doyle, through his character Sherlock Holmes, who had best captured this spirit. The Holmes stories, Wells wrote, “show that the public delights in the ingenious unraveling of evidence, and Conan Doyle need never stoop to jesting. First the problem, then the gradual piecing together of the solution. They cannot get enough of such matter.”
Part of Holmes’s appeal was that his science wasn’t mere erudition. Rather, he applied it always with utility and purpose, with tangible rewards and results. When he turned his magnifying glass upon footprints or his microscope on tobacco ash, he typified the pragmatic spirit of the age. At last science was revealing a more immediate world, one that had profound human consequences.
For contemporary observers, Holmes’s debt to science was unmistakable. “Holmes is a true product of his time,” an 1896 literary review stated. “He is an embodiment of the scientific spirit seeing microscopically and applying itself to construct, from material vestiges and psychologic remainders, an unknown body of proof.”
Scientists, too, found Holmes’s methods captivating, and the detective a worthy representative of their work. A 1903 textbook titled The Teaching of Scientific Method recommended that budding researchers “read The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Conan Doyle, and see how, by noticing a number of small signs, he ‘puts this and that together’ and gathers important information. This, again, is precisely our method—the scientific method.”
Even the bacteriologists back in Germany adored Holmes and his creator. Paul Ehrlich reportedly filled the margins of Holmes stories with comments and formulas. When Conan Doyle heard that Ehr-lich was a fan, he sent him a note of appreciation and a signed photograph, which Ehrlich proudly hung on the wall in his study.
Conan Doyle may have found Koch’s remedy wanting, but he had learned something in Berlin, watching the consumptive masses stream into the city: how much people now expected of science, how much the public was open to its power to improve their lives. Conan Doyle’s great insight was to see that openness as an opportunity to turn science into entertainment.
• • •
BY SEPTEMBER 1891, WHEN CONAN DOYLE DELIVERED THE SIXTH Holmes story to The Strand, it was clear that he had a phenomenon on his hands. On the day a new story was due, readers would queue up in front of shops, waiting for the magazine issue to be delivered. Many readers assumed Sherlock Holmes was real and went on pilgrimages to Baker Street, only to find there was no such address as 221b. Conan Doyle was buried in fan mail, with many correspondents asking for an autograph from Sherlock Holmes. Even his mother asked him to sign a note for a friend using the name “Sherlock Holmes,” a request Conan Doyle took as the worst possible insult. Not even his mother, of all people, could distinguish between the fictional character and his flesh-and-blood creator. Others proposed plots for the next mystery, and some wrote to Holmes asking the fictional detective to take up their own case of missing relatives or pets. Strand editor George Newnes estimated that having Conan Doyle’s name on the cover of his magazine ensured he would sell a hundred thousand more copies. Greenhough Smith quickly commissioned six more stories from the writer.
Conan Doyle soon finished up the series and spent the next year away from his detective. Instead, he embraced his status as one of England’s most popular authors. Friendships with other authors—among them James Barrie, author of Peter Pan, and Bram Stoker, author of Dracula—followed. His family life was comfortable, even leisurely.
The only wrinkle came with Touie, whose gentle disposition seemed perhaps somewhat more vulnerable. She was afflicted, as they said then, with a weak constitution. Always a vigorous sportsman himself, Conan Doyle would coax her to join him on bicycle rides, and they’d venture into the countryside on the new tandem cycle he’d splurged on. But Touie was quick to tire. On one such jaunt into the country, she made it only halfway, returning home by train. She slept often, and while she insisted to her husband that she was happy, she seemed deeply sad.
In October 1892, the first twelve Holmes stories were collected in book form as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It was an immediate bestseller, with nearly 250,000 copies sold over the next three years. Considering how long Conan Doyle had worked for success and acclaim—he had now been writing professionally for nearly fifteen years—it’s rather remarkable how quickly he came to quibble with it. He wanted to be recognized as a serious literary author, not a peddler of mere detective stories. Too many of the letters he received in South Norwood were to Holmes, he complained, not to him, a mistake Conan Doyle took as an insult instead of a testament to the power of his imagination. As early as November 1891, he complained to his mother that the detective was a distraction, referring to Holmes almost as a real person. “I think of slaying Holmes . . . and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.”
She was aghast. “You can’t! You won’t! You mustn’t!” She admired the stories but was also offended that he would deprive his family of such an opportunity.
He assured her he would keep at it. “He still lives,” he wrote her the next January, “thanks to your entreaties.”
In early 1892, Greenhough Smith asked—begged, really—for a second series of Holmes stories. By this point, Conan Doyle had had a few months off from the demands of crafting a Holmes story, but the thought of it, he said, made him nearly physically sick. He wanted to move on to the real literature he was capable of, the stuff he’d written in The White Company and Micah Clarke. This was the work Conan Doyle was proud of; instead, he was being pushed backward toward more detective yarns.
He considered turning Greenhough Smith down outright, but pragmatism got the better of him. He suggested what seemed like an outrageous proposal: twelve stories for a thousand pounds. It was an unheard-of sum, and he expected the request would be quickly rejected, allowing him to move on. No such luck: Greenhough Smith quickly agreed. Conan Doyle was back on the hook for more Holmes.
The second series began with “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” which appeared in The Strand in December 1892, followed by other stories monthly. Conan Doyle was nearly done writing them when, in July 1893, he and Touie left for a holiday in Switzerland. The official purpose was a lecture in Lucerne, but Conan Doyle hoped, too, that they could spend some time in the mountains, which might restore Touie’s health. She had seemed in particularly poor spirits, with little energy or enthusiasm ever since their son, Kinglsey, was born the previous November. The mountain air, Conan Doyle hoped, would benefit her.
One morning, Conan Doyle left Touie at their hotel and went on a ramble with some friends. The destination was Meiringen, in the Bernese Alps. They climbed a ridge and came upon Reichenbach Falls, a cascading series of waterfalls with a total drop of 250 meters, or more than 800 feet. “The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss,” Conan Doyle later described, “from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house.” He gazed down at the falls, taking in the violence below, and he knew, almost instantly that this would be a “worthy tomb” for Holmes, “even if I buried my bank account along with him.”
Back in South Norwood, he began writing the tale, the last installment in The Strand’s second series. “I am in the middle of the last Holmes story,” he wrote his mother, “after which the gentleman vanishes, never to return. I am weary of his name.” Finally, one evening, he sat down at his desk, opened his diary, and wrote
just two words: “Killed Holmes.”
• • •
IN THE FALL OF 1893, TOUIE’S HEALTH TOOK A BAD TURN. SHE BEGAN to cough constantly and sometimes violently, forcing up mucus tinged with blood. With every breath, a coarse crackle resounded deep in her chest, like a wet log cast onto a hot fire. Her side began to hurt, an ache that no amount of bed rest seemed to lessen. These were unmistakable symptoms, the all-too-routine indications of an all-too-common disease. This was consumption, plain as day.
Perhaps Conan Doyle had seen the signs for years and denied them; perhaps he believed that Touie simply had a weak constitution. Regardless, whatever he had missed before was now manifest. One day, when she couldn’t leave bed for coughing so hard, Conan Doyle sent for a doctor. He arrived at the house in South Norwood, spoke with Conan Doyle, and then went upstairs to see Touie. Conan Doyle stayed downstairs, and after what seemed like an eternity, the doctor came back down looking stern. His verdict: galloping consumption.
“To my surprise and alarm he told me when he descended from the bedroom that the lungs were very gravely affected, that there was every sign of rapid consumption and that he thought the case a most serious one with little hope, considering her record and family history, of a permanent cure.” Not yet prepared to face a disease with no real remedy, a few days later Conan Doyle sent for a second doctor, “one of the first men in London.” The second opinion was the same as the first. “He seemed to think that the mischief must have been going on for years unobserved,” Conan Doyle wrote his mother, telling her the sad news. “The cough is occasionally troublesome & the phlegm very thick—no hemmhorrhage yet, but I fear it.”
Of all diseases, it had to be tuberculosis—this most tenacious of infections, one that Conan Doyle was well familiar with. This same affliction had drawn him to Berlin, a trip that inspired him to break free of medicine. And now tuberculosis was back in his life.
However close Conan Doyle had been to tuberculosis scientifically, he couldn’t quite fathom it coming so close to him personally. Despite the years he’d admired Koch’s work, despite his investigations in Berlin just two years prior, he had missed the clues right in front of him. But Conan Doyle was never a man for second thoughts. Within the week, he’d begun making arrangements to give up the house in South Norwood, sell the furniture, and leave for Davos, Switzerland, home of the most famous tuberculosis hospitals in Europe. By early November, Touie had arrived at the Kurhaus Hotel, a favorite retreat for well-off English consumptives. For his part, Conan Doyle had a series of lectures around Europe; he would arrive in Davos in early December.
Conan Doyle didn’t choose the Brompton Hospital in London, still the most celebrated consumptive hospital in England. And he didn’t place his hopes on chemical cures or treatments. If there was any hope of improvement, it was in the dry mountain climate of the Alps. And not once did Conan Doyle even seem to consider that supposed cure, tuberculin. In all his letters and recollections, Koch’s remedy never appears to have come up.
• • •
THE STORY WAS ENTITLED “THE ADVENTURE OF THE FINAL PROBLEM” (later shortened to “The Final Problem”). In it, Holmes and Watson travel to Switzerland, hoping to snare Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty. A man of fierce intellect put to nefarious purposes, Moriarty is “the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city,” as Holmes describes him to Watson. Still, Holmes can’t help but admire Moriarty: “He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.” The story, in fact, isn’t a mystery at all, insofar as there is any detective work or deduction. Rather, Conan Doyle presents it as a kind of coda, Watson’s personal explanation of the great detective’s last days. He includes a curious detail to the story: While climbing up to the Reichenbach Falls with Holmes, Watson is met by a man from their hotel; an Englishwoman there is deathly ill with consumption. She had just left Davos, he is told, when “a sudden hemorrhage had overtaken her,” and she demanded an English doctor.
There is no sick woman, however. The message is just a ruse by Moriarty to get the great detective alone. With Watson out of the way, Moriarty races up the cliff to confront Sherlock Holmes, they tussle, and then both tumble over the side, into the falls, to their mutual and certain death.
When the story appeared in mid-December, in The Strand’s Christmas double issue, it caused an immediate reaction bordering on scandal. In London, men reportedly wore black armbands. Women wrote outraged letters. “You brute!” one chastised Conan Doyle. The Literary News took the tidings with umbrage: Conan Doyle may have invented the character, they felt, but Holmes was not entirely his. “What excuse Dr. Doyle can present for such summary exhaustion of this rich mine of adventure is hard to conceive. Dr. Doyle may have become tired of Holmes, but his readers have not.”
The Strand received bushels of angry correspondence and lost twenty thousand readers. The magazine tried to stand with its audience. “Like hundreds of correspondents, we feel as if we have lost an old friend whom we could ill spare.” The editors promised that more stories would appear shortly, after “only a temporary interval.” But it was wishful thinking. For years afterward, the story recounting Holmes’s death would be known in The Strand offices as “the Dreadful Event.”
But Conan Doyle was no longer in London to witness the outrage; by this time he had arrived in Davos to care for his sick wife. After a few weeks in Switzerland, Touie seemed somewhat improved. She had gained back some weight and some cheer. While she rested in the hotel, Conan Doyle tried his hand at winter sports. When descriptions of the reaction back in England reached him, he was embarrassed, even flummoxed. It was more than he’d expected, to be honest, and he wondered a little what it was about Holmes that proved so damned appealing. Frankly, he had felt no alternative. In an 1894 interview with The Bookman, an American journal, he defended himself. “I have come to take you in custody for the killing of Sherlock Holmes,” his interviewer said when they sat down.
“Ah, but I did it in self-defense,” he replied. “And if you knew the provocation you would agree with me that it was justifiable homicide. When I invented this character I had no idea he would give me so much trouble. But when ‘Holmes’ Adventures’ began to appear in the Strand Magazine, its circulation went up by leaps and bounds until it reached the phenomenal figure of four hundred thousand. No sooner had one story appeared than I was set upon for another, and such considerable sums of money were offered by the publishers, indicating a popular demand so imperative and so flattering, that I was tempted repeatedly from other work which I greatly desired to finish. I went on from one case to another until, as you know, there are now two volumes of the Memoirs and Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. At last I killed him, and . . . if I had not done so I almost think he would have killed me.”
That was that. He was done with Holmes. His attentions were back on tuberculosis, where they had been two years earlier in Berlin. Back then, the horrific power and tenacity of the microbe served as an intellectual puzzle, requiring him to apply both his scientific training and his gift for words to explain to the world why this tiny germ was impervious to the great Robert Koch’s cure. But now, Conan Doyle felt the bacterium’s nastiness firsthand. He could see how it devoured hope and left only helplessness. He pined for some sort of cure, even as he knew how impossible one would be. His mind went back to the riddles of bacteriology and how geniuses such as Koch had failed to sleuth their way to a remedy.
“What an infernal microbe it is!” he wrote to a friend back in England. “Surely science will find some way of destroying it. How absurd that we who can kill the tiger should be defied by this venomous little atom. . . . They gnaw at you as cheesemites do into cheese. . . . Could we not impregnate every tissue of the body so that they could not live?”
CHAPTER 10
1900 • The New Century
A poster campaign to stop tuberculosis, circa 1925
Koch’s arrival in South Africa in December 1896 was well-timed. A plague of rinderpest was taking a deadly toll on the nation’s cattle, and Koch was greeted like a hero come to save the day. He was flattered and impressed by the faith the local medical community placed in science. “In Europe,” he remarked to the audience, “it was never very easy to persuade people to . . . utilize modern science.” He was ever the faithful rationalist.
Koch spent a year and a half in South Africa, working on a rudimentary rinderpest vaccine. Then he and Hedwig were off to India to investigate an outbreak of bubonic plague, and then to German East Africa (now Tanzania, Burundi, and Rwanda) to tackle plague and malaria. Malaria took him next to the Dutch East Indies (today’s Indonesia), then under German control. Koch spent nearly a year there, formulating a new method for the control of malaria based on the therapeutic and prophylactic use of quinine. His technique captured no headlines, but it would remain the world standard for more than forty years.
He spent nearly four years on these journeys, with only a brief return to Berlin. Despite the months-long ocean voyages and days of waiting in port for the next passage, he took to the sojourns as a relief. He was, in part, running away from the mess he had created in Berlin. But he also saw Africa as an opportunity, a place where he could once again simply pursue science. “At home,” he wrote an old colleague, “there are so many demands on my time, and controversies are so fierce, that it is virtually impossible to get any work done. Out here in Africa, one can find bits of scientific gold lying on the streets.”