The Remedy

by Thomas Goetz

  Throughout his life, Conan Doyle would be a fighter, a fierce defender of causes he felt just. In countering the attacks on medicine during the 1880s, and particularly those against the cause of infectious disease, he was convinced that science could bring certainty, that there was precision and definition and utility in medicine. Scientific medicine didn’t just offer a new way to look at disease—it offered doctors a weapon to combat it. Science made it possible to discern facts out of ambiguity, to give people answers to their questions.

  For a medical doctor, this must have been not only exciting, but also something of a relief, considering how often patients knocked on Conan Doyle’s door with the hope of a cure but never the expectation of one. Years later, in a speech to medical students, Conan Doyle would recollect the tentative benefits of medical practice. “Someone described our condition as that of a blind man with a club, who swung it at random. Sometimes he hit the disease and sometimes the patient.”

  In 1885, resolved to improve his career in medicine, Conan Doyle submitted his thesis for his MD. At the time, it was possible to practice medicine with only a bachelor’s degree, which Conan Doyle had earned in 1881. Yet the MD was a further mark of respectability, and thus he hoped “those magic letters behind my name” would make him more marketable in Southsea. His chosen topic was the “Vasomotor Changes in Tabes Dorsalis,” a degeneration of the nervous system. The disease is now known to be the result of syphilis, but in 1885 the connection between the two was conjectural. Though syphilis was perceived to be an infectious disease, it had not been proven to be one. It was commonly referred to through its contagious origins. Depend-ing on who the perceived agents were, it was called the French disease, the Italian disease, the Polish disease, the British disease, and so on. It would be decades before the true cause, the bacterium Treponema pallidum, was identified, and not until penicillin was developed in the 1940s did a treatment become available.

  Conan Doyle’s thesis would be assessed on its scientific insights, not its literary merits, but he couldn’t help but fill the essay with literary flourish. The descriptions of a chronic syphilitic, for instance, showed the close eye of a detective: “His wife calls his attention to the fact that he has developed a squint, or he finds a dimness come over his sight and the lines of his morning paper become blurred & blotted. Very commonly one of his eyelids drop and he finds he cannot raise it. . . . [V]arious little symptoms show him however that the demon which has seized him has not relaxed his grip.” With this paper he ably passed and was granted the MD.

  However much “that small square of parchment,” as he described it to his mother, affected him in 1886, Conan Doyle soon took up his pen and began writing a new tale. And this time, rather than craft another adventure story, he imagined “something fresher and crisper and more workmanlike,” something perhaps not so removed from the world of medicine he toiled in daily.

  This time, he began to write a story closer to home.

  CHAPTER 6

  1887 • The Detective

  The cover of Beeton’s Christmas Annual, December 1887

  Every November, beginning in 1860, Samuel Beeton, a London publisher, put out a Christmas Annual, a collection of stories aimed at the growing English middle class, something families could read together during the holidays. Beeton had made his name, and his fortune, publishing the British edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, obtaining the rights from Harriet Beecher Stowe before the novel had become an international sensation. His true genius, though, was marrying Isabella Mary Mayson, who, as Mrs. Beeton, would become the phenomenal author of Beeton’s Book of Household Management, the first reliable cookbook and housekeeping manual. The book launched an empire of self-help guides under Mrs. Beeton’s moniker, and Isabella Beeton became one of the first authors to address and exploit the concerns and needs of the domestic British family.

  Even though Mrs. Beeton died in 1865, and Samuel Beeton in 1877, the Beeton name endured, under the publishers Ward, Lock and Company, as a proxy for entertaining stories and good, respectable reading material. And in November 1887, the twenty-seventh edition of Beeton’s Christmas Annual appeared on newsstands in London, at the price of one shilling. The front cover blared out the main story in this year’s release: “A Study in Scarlet, by A. Conan Doyle.”

  Conan Doyle had written the story the previous year, in the spring of 1886, in just six weeks. Several times, he bundled the manuscript up in an envelope and posted it to a publisher, hoping to hook the editors on the unusual tale. But time and again, the manuscript would return to Southsea, sometimes unread, sometimes with a polite note explaining that it just wasn’t the sort of thing for their sort of journal. “My poor ‘Study,’” Conan Doyle wrote to his mother, “has never even been read by anyone except Payn,” referring to the prominent London publisher who had encouraged the young author but who had “found it both too short and too long.” Conan Doyle was crestfallen. “Verily literature is a difficult oyster to open. All will come well in time, however.”

  Among the submissions was one to Ward, Lock and Co., where G. T. Bettany, the chief editor, picked up the manuscript and brought it home. Mrs. Bettany read the story first, and she was smitten. “This is, I feel sure, by a doctor—there is internal evidence,” she wrote in a note to her husband. “The writer is a born novelist.” In October 1886, Ward, Lock and Co. made an offer: “We have read your story A Study in Scarlet and are pleased with it. We could not publish it this year, as the market is flooded at present with cheap fiction, but if you do not object to its being held over until next year we will give you £25 for the copyright.” The fee was meager, the remark about “cheap fiction” was a backhanded compliment, and the request for copyright was an outright insult. Conan Doyle made a counterproposal for royalties, but Ward, Lock refused. Conan Doyle acquiesced. So be it, he thought. Better to have something out under his name in a year than another story stuck in a drawer at 1 Bush Villas.

  The offer from Ward, Lock—twenty-five pounds would have been worth about five thousand dollars in today’s currency—would help him make a more comfortable home with his new wife, Louise, whom he’d married the previous October. Touie, as Conan Doyle called her, was a quiet, gentle woman of twenty-seven, a year or two older than her new husband. They met under sad circumstances: Louise’s brother Jack had come to Dr. Conan Doyle for treatment of his cerebral meningitis, a dangerous brain fever. Conan Doyle took him in as a resident patient, but he soon died. While coping with her own grief, Louise showed Conan Doyle a good amount of sympathy “for the shock I had suffered, and the disturbance of my household. . . . Before I had spoken to her or knew her name, I felt an inexplicable sympathy for and interest in her.” Soon they were married, and she joined Conan Doyle at Bush Villas, offering some sorely needed domestic comforts.

  Though it offended him at first, the offer from Ward, Lock was the best he’d had in a good while. Even as his medical practice in Southsea moved along steadily enough, he had begun to worry that his progress in writing was slowing down. “After ten years of such work,” he recalled a few years later, “I was as unknown as if I had never dipped a pen in an ink-bottle.” His first novel, The Narrative of John Smith, had been lost in the mail as it made its way among publishers, and a second, The Firm of Girdlestone, was scarcely luckier—not lost, but not published, either. These novels, “written in the intervals of a busy though ill-paying practice,” he recalled later, were his effort to rise above the grind of magazine work and affix his name to the spine of a book. Magazine work was frustrating and too anonymous, he believed, the work too quickly lost in the tide of next month’s issues. He was beginning to realize that, as he wrote a few years later, “a man may put the very best that is in him into magazine work for years and years, and reap no benefit from it.”

  He was right to be frustrated. If there was ever a moment for an aspiring writer to taste some success, it was in England in the 1880s. The publishing indus
try was flourishing, with a staggering amount of reading material streaming off the presses each week. More than 125,000 different periodicals and newspapers were issued in nineteenth-century England, appealing to readers of all stripes. There were bourgeois monthly journals such as The Pall Mall Gazette, Punch, The Cornhill Magazine; down-market penny weeklies such as Tit-Bits (which had recently rejected Conan Doyle’s submission of a Christ-mas story); and middlebrow sixpenny monthlies such as Good Words (where he had published his “Life and Death in the Blood” essay). There were periodicals for suffragists, workmen, boys, and girls. There were so many titles that a new category, the “review,” emerged, whose editors would filter the rest of the press to publish a summary of noteworthy articles appearing elsewhere. Some of these, such as The Edinburgh Review, The Saturday Review, and The Fortnightly Review, became celebrated journals in their own right. Inevitably, there appeared The Review of Reviews, offering a further layer of filtering. Meanwhile, there was a cascade of fiction published as cheap books, the novels known as “penny dreadfuls” or “shilling shockers.” The Victorian audience consumed them all voraciously.

  The explosion of periodicals in the late nineteenth century was fueled by several complementary trends. Costs for producing a newspaper or magazine were dropping as paper production improved, growing train networks enabled cheaper and faster distribution, and printing evolved from a highly manual process to stereotyping. Typesetting, which at the century’s beginning required hand-setting, was revolutionized in the 1880s with the linotype machine, which could run entire lines of text at once.

  At the same time, literacy rates among the British public were soaring, especially after the 1870 Elementary Education Act provided elementary education for all children, and after compulsory attendance at the board schools (public elementary schools) began to be enforced in the 1880s. These many thousands of periodicals were hungry for words to fill their pages: essays, reporting from across the empire, and the “cheap fiction” produced by those who thought they could spin a tale. Conan Doyle, like many of his contemporaries, saw an opportunity here to be something more. In 1871, some 2,500 Britons identified themselves as writers in the census, five times as many as at the beginning of the century.

  In the decade he’d been writing, Conan Doyle had sold a handful of stories, here and there, but A Study in Scarlet was his longest piece yet accepted for publication. So he took the Ward, Lock deal. With any luck, if the story was well received, he might return to the character central to A Study in Scarlet: an eccentric detective with a surname borrowed from Conan Doyle’s favorite physician-philosopher, Oliver Wendell Holmes. He first called him Sherrinford but ultimately settled on something less haughty: Sherlock Holmes. There was something promising about the fellow, Conan Doyle thought. If the public liked Holmes, he might give him another go.

  • • •

  IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE THE WORLD TODAY WITHOUT SHERLOCK Holmes. Holmes has transcended literature to become perhaps the most popular character in Anglo-American culture. In films and television, he remains omnipresent on the scene of contemporary culture, as conspicuous a character as Luke Skywalker or Mickey Mouse. So if we’re to appreciate the full breadth of what Conan Doyle created, we must try to push out of our minds everything we think of when we think of Sherlock Holmes and instead consider the vast vacuum of that empty sheet of paper when Conan Doyle sat down at his desk in Southsea and began to sketch out a tale. Originally titled “A Tangled Skein,” the story focused on an unlikely duo: this eccentric man with a knack for investigating crime and his newfound acquaintance, a hobbled physician needing a place to live.

  It’s tempting to slot Conan Doyle into the myth of the lone genius here, just as it was to consider Koch as such. But just as Koch’s work owed much, in fact, to Henle, Pasteur, and others, so Conan Doyle’s creation can be traced quite clearly to specific influences that broached even distant Southsea. This first Sherlock Holmes novel resourcefully cobbled together a range of influences and sources. In terms of the detective himself, the most obvious predecessor is Edgar Allan Poe’s detective, C. Auguste Dupin. Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” published in 1841, is considered the first modern detective story. Conan Doyle devoured the tale as a child and admired it as an adult. Like Holmes, Dupin relies on logic and intellect more than happenstance. And like Holmes, Dupin doesn’t have an official position as a detective (a word that hadn’t, in any event, been invented in 1841). He is simply motivated by an urge to put his wits to work, to wield his powers of reasoning and analysis to do something useful.

  Though Conan Doyle clearly drew on Poe, he was also tapping into a popular enthusiasm for tales of crime and intrigue. By the time Sherlock Holmes came around, mysteries had been a staple of English fiction for more than a century. The cascade of periodicals created a new demand for adventure stories tinged with a bit of criminality. The novels of Wilkie Collins—first serialized in Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round in the 1850s and ’60s—invented many of the classic touchstones of the genre, such as a local police investigator in over his head, a handful of false suspects, and the surprise twist.

  But Conan Doyle turned out something that, even in the first appearance in A Study in Scarlet, went far beyond his influences. (For instance, though today many consider his London a definitive portrait of the city, in fact, Conan Doyle had little firsthand experience in London and, as he later confessed, had leaned heavily on a post office map to describe the city in his early Holmes stories.) Sherlock Holmes wasn’t a stock character but had a singular personality and appeal and a wholly modern approach to his task of criminal detection. “I had been reading some detective stories, and it struck me what nonsense they were, to put it mildly, because for getting the solution to the mystery the authors always depended on some coincidence,” Conan Doyle explained a few years later in the Westminster Gazette. “This struck me as not a fair way of playing the game, because the detective ought really to depend for his successes on something in his own mind and not on merely adventitious circumstances which do not, by any means, always occur in real life.” Instead of coincidence, Holmes made his way through keen observation and an idiosyncratic cabinet of knowledge. He was, as first described in A Study in Scarlet, “a little queer in his ideas—an enthusiast in some branches of science. . . . His studies are very desultory and eccentric, but he has amassed a lot of out-of-the-way knowledge which would astonish his professors.”

  Indeed, to read the first Holmes story today is to note how different the detective is, on first appearance, from the omnipotent genius we think of today. In fact, his expertise is erratic and spotty, not broad and deep. His new roommate, Dr. John Watson, is struck by this and describes it at length.

  His zeal for certain studies was remarkable, and within eccentric limits his knowledge was so extraordinarily ample and minute that his observations have fairly astounded me. . . . His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge.

  Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the naivest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.

  Holmes does not, quite profoundly, know everything. Rather, he knows how to gather and assess evidence, to treat a crime scene like an experiment in progress. He knows how to diagnose a crime scene. It is his method that makes him singular. It is his process, his thoroughness—and most of all, his ability to connect small observations with a larger body of knowledge, a process that Holmes calls, famously, “the science of deduction.”

  To contemporary audiences, this flair for discovery was Holmes’s most impressive attribute, and it remai
ns his signature trait—and it comes right out of Conan Doyle’s experience at Edinburgh. When Conan Doyle served as assistant to Joseph Bell, he witnessed how nimble were Dr. Bell’s powers of observation and diagnosis. Conan Doyle would later remember one episode when a new patient arrived, and Bell quickly identified him, apparently without any prior knowledge, as a noncommissioned officer discharged from his High-land regiment stationed in Barbados. Conan Doyle was astonished, but it was entirely obvious, Bell explained: “The man was a respectful man, but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.”

  It’s an episode that neatly parallels one in A Study in Scarlet, when Sherlock Holmes identifies a man walking by on Baker Street as a retired sergeant of the Royal Marines. Watson is sure Holmes is guessing, but when the man rings the doorbell to deliver a package, Watson asks him about his background and is left incredulous when Holmes is proven right. “How in the world did you deduce that?” Watson asks, and Holmes proceeds to tick off the catalog of clues.

  For Conan Doyle, Bell’s talent for connecting seemingly random clues with a storehouse of knowledge, the way he applied scientific analysis to routine matters, was just the sort of ingenious skill that might turn a stock detective into something more compelling. As he noted later, “I thought I would try my hand at writing a story where the hero would treat crime as Dr. Bell treated disease.” In an essay published with a reissue of Scarlet a few years later, Bell himself praised how his former student had put his medical training to use. “Dr. Conan Doyle’s education as a student of medicine taught him how to observe, and his practice, both as a general practitioner and a specialist, has been a splendid training for a man such as he is, gifted with eyes, memory, and imagination.”