e to diagnose and treat the contagion of criminality as easily as his medical sidekick, Watson, can treat the physical body. It is worth recalling that Conan Doyle, a physician himself, based Holmes upon his own teacher, Joseph Bell (1837-1911) of the University of Edinburgh. Bell practiced a kind of science of deduction of his own. He was renowned for his ability to make correct medical diagnoses based on the mere observation of superficial external signs. In an interview in the Bookman in May 1892, Conan Doyle recalled how Bell would "sit in the patients’ waiting-room with a face like a Red Indian and diagnose the people as they came in, before even they had opened their mouths. He would tell them their symptoms, he would give them details
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If Watson is the cliché version of the Victorian doctor, bumbling but reliable, predictable, and unambiguously heterosexual, then Holmes is a genius of deductive science and criminological diagnosis. There is a sense in which this genius is psychologically abnormal in the stories; Holmes is first encountered in a medical environment, the chemical laboratory at Bart’s, a setting which is more immediately suggestive of the mad scientist than the detective. His medical knowledge is described as “desultory and eccentric” (16). He, Sherlock, beats the cadavers in the mortuary with a walking stick “to verify how far bruises might be produced after death” and enthusiastically extracts his own blood for use in chemical experiments (17). His body bears the brunt of his rampant experimentalism, which echoes the faintly masochistic morbidity of his cocaine habit: “He held out his hand as he spoke, and I noticed that it was all mottled over with pieces of plaster, and discolored with strong acids” (18). More problematic still is the detective’s famous cocaine habit, which is hinted at in A Study in Scarlet, and made explicit in The Sign of Four; the latter novel opens with a detailed description of the detective as he shoots up …show more content…
in “The Final Problem” he declares: “There is no one who knows the higher criminal world of London as I do” (471). His ability to identify with the dark underside of the metropolis requires him to be acquainted not only with the criminals who populate it but also with the physical topography of the city. "Alexandra Warwick has suggested that Conan Doyle’s stories are part of a distinct urban Gothic tradition, which constructs the environment of the city as a site of alienation, degeneration, and decay" (Spooner & McEvoy, 2007). His famously fetishized representation of London; a maelstrom of opium dens, slums, gaslight, hansom cabs, and alleyways provides a setting in which barbarian criminality finds its form, the urban jungle through which the likes of Mr. Hyde, from Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and, indeed, Sherlock Holmes, can move unobstructed. Christopher Redmond observes that the modern-day pilgrimages taken by Holmes fans in London encompass not only the iconic reconstruction of the sitting rooms at 221B Baker Street, but frequently extend to the streets and locations where various events take place in the stories (Stashower). From Lauriston Gardens, where the first murder occurs in A
If Watson is the cliché version of the Victorian doctor, bumbling but reliable, predictable, and unambiguously heterosexual, then Holmes is a genius of deductive science and criminological diagnosis. There is a sense in which this genius is psychologically abnormal in the stories; Holmes is first encountered in a medical environment, the chemical laboratory at Bart’s, a setting which is more immediately suggestive of the mad scientist than the detective. His medical knowledge is described as “desultory and eccentric” (16). He, Sherlock, beats the cadavers in the mortuary with a walking stick “to verify how far bruises might be produced after death” and enthusiastically extracts his own blood for use in chemical experiments (17). His body bears the brunt of his rampant experimentalism, which echoes the faintly masochistic morbidity of his cocaine habit: “He held out his hand as he spoke, and I noticed that it was all mottled over with pieces of plaster, and discolored with strong acids” (18). More problematic still is the detective’s famous cocaine habit, which is hinted at in A Study in Scarlet, and made explicit in The Sign of Four; the latter novel opens with a detailed description of the detective as he shoots up …show more content…
in “The Final Problem” he declares: “There is no one who knows the higher criminal world of London as I do” (471). His ability to identify with the dark underside of the metropolis requires him to be acquainted not only with the criminals who populate it but also with the physical topography of the city. "Alexandra Warwick has suggested that Conan Doyle’s stories are part of a distinct urban Gothic tradition, which constructs the environment of the city as a site of alienation, degeneration, and decay" (Spooner & McEvoy, 2007). His famously fetishized representation of London; a maelstrom of opium dens, slums, gaslight, hansom cabs, and alleyways provides a setting in which barbarian criminality finds its form, the urban jungle through which the likes of Mr. Hyde, from Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and, indeed, Sherlock Holmes, can move unobstructed. Christopher Redmond observes that the modern-day pilgrimages taken by Holmes fans in London encompass not only the iconic reconstruction of the sitting rooms at 221B Baker Street, but frequently extend to the streets and locations where various events take place in the stories (Stashower). From Lauriston Gardens, where the first murder occurs in A