Like Newton and his predecessors, Orfila would spend hours in the dim back rooms with vials, eerie substances, and fire. Unlike them, he wasn’t looking for the elixir of life; he sought the means of death. Having studied in Valencia and Barcelona, the good doctor spent three years testing poisons on thousands of animals.5 Most of them died horribly, but the result of his exploration was the first complete toxicology of its kind: General System of Toxicology, or a Treatise on Poisons. It appeared in 1813, not long before Shelley’s Frankenstein. In its way, the treatise was its own kind of “modern Prometheus”—not a God stealing fire for humans, but a man revealing for the first time exactly what a poison could do, and how to recognize signs of its deadly work. The old means relied upon testing stomach contents, but in substances like arsenic, which resulted in horrible retching, nothing would remain to test. Instead, men like Marsh and Orfila turned to the organs themselves, the once-pink lobes tarnished with metallic elements acted like the pointing finger of justice—a truly “tell-tale” heart, or kidney, or pancreas. In 1818, Orfila wrote a book on detecting and treating poison (accidental and otherwise), and suddenly his work had more than just forensic application. His fame assured, Orfila became physician to Louis XVIII, the last French monarch to die while ruling. Two successors later, and Napoleon III would declare his rule and Verne would write his dystopia. Orfila would live just long enough to see that empire’s dawn, but his ambitions were not political so much as practical, and his fame carried the day not with courtiers, but in courtrooms. In 1840, France’s elite gathered to hear a celebrity case, as famous for its histrionics as for its dastardly plot: the murder trial of the heiress Marie-Fortuneé Lafarge. Orfila had his chance at public proof before an audience that included all of Europe.
The delicate beauty, Marie grew up a wealthy and prominent aristocrat. In Forensics, Val McDermid describes the twenty-three-year-old as young, possessing 100,000 francs in dowry, and eager to make a match.6 It should have been an easy task. But there were as many adventurers in the marriage game as in the engineering sciences, and Marie’s first taker, Charles Lafarge, was an inventor on the rocks. The technological advances across Europe needed more than coal; they needed steel. Pig iron could be produced by heating iron, coke, and limestone, but the resulting metal contains 3.8% carbon, while the more useful steel had only 0.4%.7 The only way to reduce the carbon content was to use stove-packing and intense heat in a process that might take six weeks, and it wouldn’t be solved until mid-century by Henry Bessemer and Bessemer steel. But that didn’t keep others from trying—even in failure. Lafarge inherited an estate in decline, a crumbling manor, dingy rooms, and tangled financial affairs. He’d also inherited a desire to invent and very little common sense, it seems; he set up a forge on the estate, intent on developing new techniques for pouring steel. In the end, only his money flowed, and in only one direction: out. The forge failed, and on the edge of financial collapse, he spied the advertisement of a marriage broker: lovely young lady with the fortune. In due course, Lafarge wrote a vastly incorrect assessment of his worth and made his offer of holy matrimony. Within four days of the original meeting, the two were married and on their way to their new home.8 What could go wrong? A lot, as it happened.
The house, lined in discolored furnishings, crawled with rats. Here were no lovely promenades, no admiring neighbors, nothing but people and places Marie considered “shabby and ridiculously old-fashioned.”9 Marie locked herself in her bedroom and demanded to be released from the wedding vows. Charles Lafarge must either let her leave the marriage alive, or carry her body away dead. “I will take arsenic,” she wrote “for I have it on me.”10 The ominous words would haunt the both of them, in the end. While away on a business trip, Charles received a letter of seeming kindness from his new and newly aggrieved wife. She was mending fences, and with the note came a piece of Christmas cake. Soon after, he found himself too ill to continue his travels, and fearing he’d contracted cholera (known for its symptoms of heavy vomiting, diarrhea, and dehydration), he came home again. Maria nursed him ever so carefully, bringing him all his meals in bed while his condition strangely worsened. Doctors came and went, and all the while, Marie lavished affection on the failing man. He died on January 30, but in the end, he wasn’t quite as duped as he seemed. Charles had made a second will. Meanwhile, his maid had noticed something odd being added to the food by her new mistress, and she kept a sample of Christmas eggnog in a cupboard jar just in case.11 Two days later, the composed widow found herself under arrest. The prosecutor requested the Marsh test, but it proved inconclusive; they could not find traces of the element. Maria threw herself upon the mercy of jury, a poor injured widow, whose love for her husband none could seriously deny, a woman who had been at his side throughout. She cried, and she fainted, and her lovely figure, languid with grief, appeared in illustrated newspapers as a picture of tragedy. Readers pored over pages as though scenes from a novel, and public opinion divided. Had the law wrongfully accused this flower of womanhood of a devilish crime? The prosecution had other ideas—and a copy of Mathieu Orfila’s book. He told the judge that the body must be exhumed. The rotting corpse raised, men brought the vile organ meat in for testing, causing spectators to faint from the “fetid exhalations.”12 But as before, the test failed them. In a last desperate effort to find justice for Charles Lafarge, the prosecution sought the only weapon they had left: Mathieu Orfila himself.
Val McDermid describes the scene as worthy of any television drama at season climax: Orfila arrived by the express train and set to work “macerating” organs into a rancid sludge of liver and brain. He set up the test as before—along with a test for the soil to ensure no compounds from the earth could be blamed for a false positive. Then, before the courtroom attendees, he performed the complexities of the Marsh test. This time, however, the results were positive. The difference wasn’t in process but in method; as with the surgeons practicing antiseptic medicine, where the carbolic acid sprayer did no good if the tools, hands, and wounds weren’t also thoroughly cleaned, James Marsh’s test could only be as accurate as the practitioner. How was the evidence collected? From where? When? How much? In what ways did you heat or measure? The calculations could be tricky and easy to tamper with (they still are). But Orfila was not a bumbling surgeon, or a guessing detective. His steady hands and unperturbed temper, steeled by years of testing in the face of rot and horror, made no mistakes. The devilish “inheritor’s powder” struck again; Madame murdered her husband to regain her dowry and whatever was left of the fortune. Thanks to Orfila’s patience, Marie Lafarge spent the next decade and more in prison for her crime, where she died of tuberculosis. “Orfila’s performance,” writes McDermid, “would come to be seen as a watershed moment in the fight against murder by poison—a vindication of forensic toxicology.”13 But it was also the beginning of a new type of detective, one that understood chemistry, toxins, and the body itself almost as well as a medical man. It should be no great surprise, then, that Arthur Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes, who, by his own admission, “dabbled with poisons a good deal,” on a peculiarly gifted surgeon, Dr. Joseph Bell. And of course, Mr. Doyle was, himself, a doctor. The Adventures of Bell and Doyle* doesn’t have quite the same ring, but because of them, and through them, we have the greatest detective who never lived.
A Study in Sherlock
We first meet Mr. Holmes in A Study in Scarlet. The curious story, only half of which takes place in nineteenth-century London, the rest being a flashback through storytelling once the supposed poisoner is caught, hinges upon two curious clues. First, the word Rache, and second, two capsules found next to the last body. “Rache” means revenge, but Holmes addresses his inquiry at the capsules, discovering one (and only one) contains poison. We learn that the murderer has acted in revenge against two devious men from Salt Lake Valley, USA—but the poison pill would turn up as often as poison pens in detective fictions to come. Sherlock’s knowledge of vicious substances appears in written
tales, like “The Illustrious Client” and “The Dying Detective,” but also in unwritten ones, the stories so often referenced by the duo in tantalizing one-liners. Why so much focus on chemical concoction? For the same reason doctors played the largest role in medical jurisprudence: Sherlock was a chemist.
Watson takes pains to describe a young Sherlock upon their first meeting: a “student,” bent over test tubes and finding in that methodical work a fascination akin to treasure-hunting. “He is a little queer in his ideas—an enthusiast in some branches of science,” remarks the man who introduces them in A Study in Scarlet; “a first-class chemist” but with “desultory and eccentric” habits.14 Holmes is no medical student, however. Despite his long hours in the dissecting lab, he lays out his interest to Watson immediately upon meeting him. “Why, man, it is the most practical medico-legal discovery for years. Don’t you see that it gives us an infallible test for blood stains. Come over here now!”15 He drags the reluctant Watson to his station and proceeds to repeat the demonstration with the excited flair we might expect of a showman rather than a chemist. (Orfila did much the same thing in the Lafarge courtroom drama.) Though in fact no test for hemoglobin existed at the time, Doyle invents one, and Holmes takes obvious pleasure in being its namesake: “Now we have the Sherlock Holmes’s test, and there will no longer be any difficulty.” Murderers might be easily brought to justice, he reasons, because forensic analysis will pin a telltale rust spot to the perpetrator or victim with ease. As Wagner explains, Sherlock acts for himself partly out of convenience; there “being no forensic medical specialist at the scene,” Holmes “simply fills the role himself.”16 And yet, in the foregoing series that follows, Holmes isn’t remembered for his chemistry or his medical jurisprudence. He’s remembered for an ability that would be a hallmark not only of the newborn detective novel, but of steampunk, and of the madcap history of science and power as well: he reasons in reverse. “In solving a problem,” Holmes explains at the end of Doyle’s very first tale, “the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards.” Because time seems always to go forward, hardly anyone has a reason to think the other direction—it’s the very problem Elting Morison references in his look at men, machines, and his great uncle’s engineering prophecies. A memory that works both ways lets us see cause and consequence in a vastly different light. Elting calls it “recalling the future,” an act of imaginative remembering that gives a picture not only of where we’ve been, but also where we are going.17 In that way, A Study in Scarlet owes at least a small debt to the Red Queen. “Let me see if I can make it clearer,” Holmes says encouragingly. “Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result.”18 In his extraordinary way, Sherlock Holmes is a time traveler; he pieces together scene and analysis, fact and impression, working from the dead body to the motive and murderer days, weeks, months before the event. And while this all seems like the magic of an author’s pen, the toxicologist and forensic specialist is a time traveler, too. In mid-Victorian England, amid the many future-hunting engineers in pursuit of lofty dreams (and their often deadly consequences), we find four very different heroes. Each of them, in their separate way, turns from the grand designs of the New Epoch and instead focuses on the minutiae: Joseph Bell, Hans Gross, Edmond Locard, and Bernard Spilsbury. The first two would inspire Sherlock Holmes—and the others, ironically enough, would be inspired by him. Art, imitating life, to imitate art.
The Doctor Tells a Tale
Into the medical theater entered a bluff and husky workman, skin chafed from the cold of a November morning in 1878. He stands before the fresh faces of medical students and an angular sharp-eyed doctor. The newcomer shifts uncomfortably as those gray eyes take him in, fingers, toes, head to the careworn boots. “Your back—it’s your back,” the doctor tut-tuts. “But carrying a heavy hod of bricks won’t improve it.”19 The man stumbled as if struck; all medical diagnosis aside, how could the doctor know he was a bricklayer? Did he see him with those eagle eyes as he struggled to carry the bricks, or follow him home where he could find no comfort in rest or sleep? Dr. Joseph Bell awed his students and his patients by diagnosing on sight, by revealing what a man or woman did for a living, or even what they had for breakfast, all merely by observing detail. But observation comes from more than mere looking.
“In teaching the treatment of disease and accident,” Dr. Bell explained in his work, “all careful teachers have first to show the student how to recognize accurately the case.” The recognition depended not on sudden swoops of intellect, but “in great measure on the accurate and rapid appreciation of small points.” The student must be taught to “observe” and to “interest himself” is the context that surrounded the patient, but history to nationality to occupation. Sherlock Holmes famous assertion that Watson “sees” but does not “observe” rings through every letter. When Dr. Bell presented a patient to eager students, he gave them an entire narrative. But though Bell served as expert witness and collaborator on several criminal cases, he nearly always suppressed any notice of his involvement. As a physician and a “gentleman,” he feared such dealings in police matters might sully his reputation. Bell would remain firmly fixed to the medical profession, unwilling to be tied to the more plebian police detectives. But the reputation of those very detectives was about to change, due principally to an eager student in Bell’s medical theater: the young Arthur Conan Doyle.
In The Sign of Four, Doyle brings Bell’s words to life through his now famous creation. Sherlock Holmes explains that the specialist was not to begin in the lab but end there. Instead, he ought to rely upon experience of his surroundings: “Let him, on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs [. . .] it sharpens the faculties of observation, and teaches one where to look and what to look for. 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.”20 It’s what awed Doyle about Bell: forensics couldn’t be just the inside of a body. Neither could it be only the scene or environment of the crime. Detection relied on both at once—detail within and without, the knowledge of a medical chemist, the eyes of an eagle, the nose of bloodhound. Details, the minutiae of everyday life, fuel the art of forensics like coal to an engine. Crime scenes speak to the investigator just as a body speaks to the physician, and in this steampunk drama of masterminds, medical tech, and malicious intent, the detective reigns supreme.
From Doctor to Detective
Forensics of one type or another may be as old as crime itself, but crime scene investigation (CSI) remains astonishingly young—one of the youngest, in fact, of our “box-fresh” sciences. Ian Burney and Neil Pemberton’s history of CSI in Britain consider it just over a century old, meaning it took root about the same time Sherlock Holmes did, sometime in the late Victorian age. Crime scenes “had always been there,” they remind us, but they didn’t have importance—they were not “substantive” in themselves.21 How, their study asks, did the crime scene come to be thought of as a distinct space, a place of hidden clues? It doesn’t start with DNA; if anything, it ends there. Burney and Pemberton suggest that our reliance on supposedly irrefutable DNA evidence actually narrows the legitimacy of forensics to a laboratory and a single set of tools—the pathology and microscopes “squeezing” everything else out of the picture.22 Not only is this sort of modern view of forensics wrongheaded (DNA evidence is a fraught and delicate world just as prone to misinterpretation and accident as anything else), it misses the point. Crime scenes, like crimes themselves, are layered, nuanced, dynamic, and regularly “es
cape [. . .] the constraints of the lab.”23 For Burney and Pemberton, the very complexity of how we, in the modern era, have come to regard forensics “serves as a reminder that the past is a messy place.” That was George Shattuck Morison’s point—possibly even Newton’s point—the “back then, back there” always has a helter-skelter appearance, full of rotten beams and uncertain paths. The problem arises from the fact that the present is also a messy place, and the future is likely to be just as messy; as a result, easy, uncluttered solutions are almost always going to be wrong. The investigator needed a model. Better yet, he needed a handbook.
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