The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective's Greatest Cases

by E. J. Wagner

  At this juncture, Sir Kenelme had his groundbreaking idea. He would treat the clothing of the wounded, thus avoiding the tiresome search for the weapon, and would apply a powder made mostly of copper sulfate, avoiding the similarly tiresome search for crocodiles and eunuchs. The experiment worked—the death rate among the troops plummeted, and in 1658, the proud Digby published A Late Discourse, Made in Solemne Assembly of Nobles and Learned Men at Montpellier in France, Touching the Cure of Wounds by the Powder of Sympathy, with Instructions how to make the said powders whereby many other Secrets of Nature are unfolded. Originally written in French, it was translated into English by “R. White, Gent.”

  The “Digby effect” is the sort of erroneous reasoning that Holmes warns about when he says in “The Reigate Squires”: “It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital.”

  Holmes, however, is not completely immune from accepting superstition as science. We can see this clearly when in “The Final Problem” he describes Moriarty’s moral deficiencies as being the result of biological inheritance: “[T]he man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers.” Holmes’s evaluation of Moriarty was wholly in keeping with nineteenthcentury theories of criminology, which in turn were influenced by the faulty research techniques of previous times.

  The Italian physician Cesare Lombroso published a small book titled L’uomo delinguente in 1876 and later expanded it to explain his views of some criminals as atavistic creatures who bore distinctive physical signs of their shortcomings. His opinions acquired international notoriety, and although he later modified them somewhat, his original writings won many adherents. In 1906, he presented a paper at the Sixth Congress of Criminal Anthropology at Turin, Italy, which affords us a striking picture of his methods:

  In 1870 I was carrying out research in the prisons and asylums of Pavia upon the cadavers and living persons in order to determine the substantial differences between the insane and criminals without succeeding very well. At last I found in the skull of a brigand a very long series of atavistic anomalies, above all an enormous middle occipital fossa [depression] and a hypertrophy of the vermis [the median part of the cerebellum] analogous to those found in inferior vertebrates.

  At the sight of these strange anomalies the problem of the nature and of the origin of the criminal seemed to me resolved; the characteristics of primitive men and of inferior animals must be reproduced in our times. Many facts seemed to confirm this hypothesis.

  Above all the psychology of the criminal; the frequency of tattooing and of professional slang, the passions as fleeting as they are violent, the lack of foresight which resembles courage and courage which alternates with cowardice, and idleness which alternates with the passion for play and activity.

  It is evident that Lombroso’s research did not encompass what we today consider the proper scientific method of stating a problem, forming a hypothesis, predicting the results of future observations, and having independent researchers duplicate the results. Lombroso was basing his views on a very small sample, and he most likely confused cause and effect by tossing cultural artifacts such as tattooing and the use of slang into the anthropological hopper.

  Lombroso also argued that crime is incited by the press, saying:

  Morbid stimulation is increased a hundred-fold by the prodigious increase of really criminal newspapers, which spread abroad the virus of the most loathsome social plagues simply for sordid gain … and excite the morbid appetite and still more morbid curiosity of the lower social classes… . In New York in 1851 a woman murdered her husband, a few days afterward three other women did the same thing.

  While it may be true that a venal and salacious media is an unpleasant addition to society, it is quite a leap to assume that the report of a single murder in New York was the direct cause of those that followed. After all, spouses had managed to murder each other with efficient energy for centuries before the advent of newspapers.

  Lombroso was quick to accept new ideas and was the first to make use of an early form of lie detector. He was also an enthusiastic admirer of the work of Richard L. Dugdale, the “gentleman sociologist” from Ulster County, New York, who in 1877 published The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity, which described several generations of what was purported to be a family group of criminals and mental defectives. Lombroso wrote in Crime: Its Causes and Remedies, “The most striking proof of the heredity of crime and its relation to prostitution and mental diseases is furnished by the fine study which Dugdale has made of the Juke family.” To be fair to Dugdale, he included the concept that a poor environment was a major cause of the Jukes’s criminality, but proponents of eugenics who wished to “improve” the human race by controlled breeding grasped Dugdale’s work and Lombroso’s admiration for it as weapons for their cause. In the United States, this led to the forced sterilization of a number of people who were adjudged imbeciles or idiots.

  In recent years, historical research has led to the discovery of old records that have made it clear that the Jukes were not all related to each other but were a composite of several families, and that they were not universally either criminals or mentally defective. What they seem to have been was poor. In the late nineteenth century, however, the belief that heredity was a major cause of criminality was dominant. We see it reflected in “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” when Turner explains his violent rejection of a suitor for his daughter’s hand by saying that the suitor’s father was amoral, and he says to Holmes, “I would not have his cursed stock mixed with mine; not that I had any dislike to the lad, but his [the suitor’s father’s] blood was in him, and that was enough.”

  The skewed logic that pretended to be science at the end of the nineteenth century was not limited to criminology. Just as in the days of Kenelme Digby, understanding of the root causes of disease, diagnosis, and treatment was often mired in myth. “Brain fever” was a catchall convenient diagnosis for physicians and a useful narrative device for writers of fiction. It is mentioned repeatedly in the tales of Sherlock Holmes, including “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” “The Musgrave Ritual,” “The Crooked Man,” “The Naval Treaty,” and “The Adventure of the Cardboard Box.” The phrase with which Holmes refers to the condition in “The Crooked Man” is typical: “No information could be got from the lady herself, who was temporarily insane from an acute attack of brain fever.”

  The disease most likely to cause “temporary insanity” is encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain or the meninges (the membranes that envelop the spinal cord and brain). Symptoms include headache, fever, vomiting, weakness, and irritability. Common treatments included leeches, hot footbaths, and the ever-popular strong laxatives. Since encephalitis does not occur in fact as often as it does in fiction (where it appears to be as frequent as the common cold) or as often as it is discussed in old medical books, it is fair to suspect that any illness that produced feverish delirium was diagnosed and treated as brain fever.

  The great difficulty in arriving at an accurate diagnosis and avoiding a disease that had no known cause led to a kind of medical terrorism in which any practitioner could make wild statements as to the cause of an illness, imply that the patient’s habits triggered it, and prescribe unpleasant treatments to alleviate it.

  The nineteenthcentury obsessive concern with masturbation is a prime example. The 1891 edition of Warren’s Household Physician included the following on what he called “Self Pollution, or Onanism”:

  There is probably no vice to which so many boys and young men, and even girls and young women, are addicted, and from which so many constitutions break down, as self-pollution… .

  Symptoms … are very numerous… . The principal ones are headache, wakefulness, restless nights, indolence, indisposit
ion to study, melancholy, despondency, forgetfulness, weakness in the back and private organs, a lack of confidence in one’s own abilities, cowardice, inability to look another full in the face.

  Treatments proffered included tonics and frequent washing of the genitals with icy water. Warren’s Household Physician also advised avoiding solitude and soberly suggested that one “Sleep with some friend” instead.

  The great fear was that, along with the myriad symptoms Dr. Warren described, masturbation might be a forerunner of something even more threatening: nocturnal emissions, or “spermatorrhea.” This dire condition, delineated in the 1889 edition of The People’s Common Sense Medical Advisor by R. V. Pierce, M.D., results, we are told, in impotence, premature decay, consumption, St. Vitus’s Dance, epilepsy, paralysis, softening of the brain, complete dementia, and insanity. “This form of insanity,” Dr. Pierce continues, “is rarely curable, and often results in suicide.” To prevent this dread occurrence, it was important to wear only loose clothing and helpful to receive “daily injections of cold water into the bowels.” (Dr. Pierce, it is interesting to note, was a U.S. congressman; he resigned that office in 1880 to “serve the sick.” Obviously possessed of an eclectic mind, he was also the inventor and purveyor of “Dr. Pierce’s Pleasant Purgative Pellets.”)

  Imaginatively awful treatments abounded during the Victorian era. In the interests of sedating a patient and relaxing a spasm of the lower intestine, nicotine in the form of tobacco smoke introduced into the rectum was considered useful. Dr. George B. Wood, in A Treatise on Therapeutics and Pharmacology or Materia Medica published in 1860, explained how to deliver the appropriate dose. The practitioner was advised to light a pipe or cigar, and, by means of a funnel, to direct the smoke into one of the many clever instruments created for the purpose of introducing the smoke into the patient—one of the simplest being a pair of bellows, its muzzle covered with leather to avoid injury to the bowel.

  Other parts of the body benefited from tobacco smoke as well. Dr. Wood goes on to describe the case of a woman who was suffering the intense pain of a dislocated jaw. Her doctor felt it was imperative to relax her tense facial muscles, but the lady’s general state of health made her a poor candidate for bleeding, which was the usual method of inducing a relaxed state. She was therefore provided with a pint of gin, which she imbibed. The doctor waited hopefully, but she remained tense. Growing desperate, the physician handed her a cigar. She took several puffs, promptly growing sufficiently relaxed to fall off her chair. The alert doctor seized the happy moment to spring upon her and realign the problem mandible.

  As useful as the nicotine-laden smoke may have been in desperate situations, it was still very dangerous. Nicotine is a potent poison, as Sherlock Holmes was well aware (“I think, Watson, that I shall resume that course of tobacco-poisoning which you have so often and so justly condemned,” he says in “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”). It was difficult to measure out a proper therapeutic dose, and once the smoke was inserted, there was no way to retrieve it should the subject react badly. Patients were known to have died from an excess of it.

  Jürgen Thorwald, in The Century of the Surgeon, informs us that some clever practitioners avoided the problem by eschewing the smoke and simply inserted a strong cigar into the sufferer’s rectum, the advantage being that the cigar could be quickly withdrawn if need be. Just how efficacious this treatment was, Thorwald doesn’t say, but no doubt the patient found it diverting.

  Sherlock Holmes may have toyed with phrenology, but when it came to most other myths, he asserted his scientific bias. In “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” Holmes is depicted as the epitome of logical skepticism. When he receives the famous letter that begins:

  Re Vampires. SIR,—

  Our client, Mr. Robert Ferguson, of Ferguson and Muirhead, tea brokers, of Mincing Lane, has made some inquiry from us … concerning vampires. As our firm specializes entirely upon the assessment of machinery the matter hardly comes within our purview, and we have therefore recommended Mr. Ferguson to call upon you and lay the matter before you.

  Holmes reacts with irritation, famously demanding:

  “But what do we know about vampires? …

  Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It’s pure lunacy.” “But surely, [Watson says,] the vampire was not necessarily a dead man? A living person might have the habit. I have read, for example, of the old sucking the blood of the young in order to retain their youth.”

  Watson and Holmes are referring not only to folklore but also to nineteenthcentury literary concepts of vampirism, such as that fabricated by Bram Stoker in his 1897 novel Dracula.

  In real life, exhumations of reputed vampires provided helpful information to medical science. In the eighteenth century, during a vampire panic in central Europe, a number of graves were opened by physicians of the occupying Austrian army. Their reports give a detailed picture of the unexpected effects that burial can have on cadavers—effects that in less educated minds gave credence to the vampire legends. Bodies of males, for instance, were sometimes discovered showing “wild signs,” or penile erections, no doubt caused by bloating from gases. The same gases caused corpses to split open, often with sufficient noise to be heard aboveground. Some burials were in earth so rich in tannin that the bodies were extraordinarily preserved, even after centuries underground. All of this served to immortalize the belief in the “undead.”

  Dr. R. V. Pierce might have believed that “consumption” or tuberculosis was caused by solitary sex, but in many nineteenthcentury country villages the disease was instead associated with vampirism. The latency period before the signs of illness grew obvious meant that the infected descendants of deceased victims often showed the first signs of illness after their progenitors were buried. It was not recognized that the disease was the result of contagion within the household. The symptoms of weakness and anemia caused by poor lung function and bloody coughs suggested to the credulous that the dead had returned to feed on their young.

  Opening the graves of the suspected vampires sometimes disclosed that the corpses had changed position, a result of effects of decomposition and ensuing gas formation. Insect activity affected the visage of the dead, contraction of the skin made it appear that the hair and nails continued to grow, and what was thought to be fresh liquid blood could be found in the mouth or chest cavities. It was not generally realized that blood, which coagulates after death, can subsequently return to a liquid state, so when a stake was driven into the chest of an exhumed corpse and a plume of blood erupted, it satisfied the observers that a vampire had been quelled.

  (Some believed that it was more efficacious to remove the head of the corpse. In eighteenth-and nineteenthcentury New England, this was the method of choice during outbreaks of tuberculosis. Recently exhumed graves in Rhode Island, Vermont, and Connecticut disclosed skulls buried at the feet of the dead.)

  Sherlock Holmes had no patience with these superstitions: “But are we to give serious attention to such things? This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain,” he declares in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire,” and he proceeds to get to the heart of the matter, determining that the culprit who inflicts injury on a small child is no vampire but his morbidly jealous half-brother.

  Holmes, Watson often reminds us, is a passionate collector of books and articles relating to old crimes, and perhaps he solves the vampire problem so handily because he recalls another infamous crime that had taken place in England sixty-four years before the publication of “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.” In June 1860, Francis Savile Kent, the four-year-old son of Samuel Savile Kent, was found missing from the nursery of the three-story lavish family home in Wiltshire when the household awakened. There was no sign of an intruder. The household included Samuel Kent’s second wife, who was pregnant, her three small children, Kent’s three children over age f
ifteen by his first deceased wife, and several servants. A frantic search by the family, local police, and villagers went unrewarded until someone thought to look in a long disused servant’s outhouse that was half hidden by overgrown garden shrubbery.

  Blood covered the outhouse floor. Wedged in the outhouse vault (receptacle) was the corpse of the missing child, dressed in his nightgown and wrapped in a blanket. There was a wound in his chest, and his throat had been cut so deeply that he was almost decapitated.

  The local police responded by arresting the nursemaid, who had no conceivable motive. There was also no evidence against her, and she was eventually released. A bloody handprint was found on a windowpane and wiped off so as “not to upset the family.” The closets were not searched so as not to “invade the family’s privacy.” Mr. Kent was highly unpopular, having an overbearing manner, and a local rumor had it that he had murdered his little son for unspecified reasons. An agitated press demanded results.

  The local police were clearly floundering. Scotland Yard responded by sending Detective Inspector Jonathan Whicher, one of their most talented investigators, to assume control of the case. Aware that the present Mrs. Kent, the mother of the dead boy, had first entered the household as the older children’s governess during the final illness of their mother, he paid close attention to sixteenyear-old Constance, the child of the first Mrs. Kent. The girl had been known to use the old outhouse as a hiding place. Her mother had a history of mental derangement. Was it possible that this was an inherited tendency? And, as Francis had been the obvious favorite of his mother, might jealousy and revenge be a motive? Could it be “something in the blood?” as the distraught father, Ferguson, wonders in “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire.”