Doctor and Detective: Thomas Duffy on Sherlock Holmes (June 12, 2008)

Thursday night I attended the 27th Annual Sherlock Holmes Lecture at Yale's Davies Auditorium.  I think the last time I was in Davies was for an astronomy class my freshman year.  The series was sponsored by the Yale Summer Session and the Yale Sherlock Holmes Society.  The organizer proudly announced, shades of WSFS, that the group did not actually exist, but that all attendees were now members.  The title of the evening's speech, interesting enough to have lured me into absconding with a poster so I'd remember to attend, was "What Did Sherlock Holmes' Syringe Contain?"

The lecture was given by Professor Thomas Duffy, an able speaker who is the director of the Humanities in Medicine program at the Yale School of Medicine and has a particular interest in cross-disciplinary studies.  I expected more from his lecture than the obvious answer (cocaine) and was not disappointed.  There was not actually much in the lecture about the syringe, and Duffy took his own sweet time getting to what there was.  While I suspect that much of what he said was familiar information to serious Sherlock Holmes fans, I'm not that passionate a fan, and it's been nearly two decades since I read the canonical stories in their entirety (in one wild weekend's marathon read when I was a teenager) though I've since occasionally reread individual stories.  So I learned a lot and now will have to find time to revisit the Holmes canon with this new information in hand.

Duffy, himself a doctor, predictably sees Sherlock Holmes "as refracted through the prism of the physician."  Both are engaged in similar species of detective work: to identify the causes of illness or death via intense observation, a process which is not "elementary" to non-specialists.  What surprised and pleased me to learn was that Arthur Conan Doyle himself shared this view of Holmes, and had in fact modeled him on a physician with whom he was familiar from his own medical training in Edinburgh.  Holmes attracts me as a character because I feel a similar kinship in his constant "craving for mental exaltation" and enjoyment of collecting and analyzing data; this is what I do in my own research.  Unlike Holmes, I find enough to keep me frantically busy and don't need to resort to cocaine as a substitute.

Duffy reviewed Holmes' three traits that make a successful detective: the power of observation, the ability to reason by deduction, and wide knowledge.  He also noted that Holmes himself possessed only very specialized knowledge - that his ignorance of many fields (contemporary literature, history, politics) was just as remarkable.  At this point he put up a slide.  I have a good visual memory, and I thought to myself "Hmm, that looks like Matteo Ricci, the memory palace guy."  (Yale Professor Jonathan Spence's The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci is another book I haven't reread for well over a decade and ought to.)  Bingo!  Moments later, Duffy made the connection: the brain's capacity for knowledge, like Ricci's memory palace, had a limited capacity, and Holmes chose to keep in his brain only knowledge pertinent to his profession.

Still nothing about the syringe, but the next section of the lecture was the most personally fascinating to me, as Duffy took us on a short tour of a couple of the late 19th-century "fathers of medicine".  Sir William Osler, familiar to me mainly as the namesake of the Osler Institute review courses, was the source of advice to doctors to "use the patient as their text" and diagnose by careful, Holmes-style observation.  Even more interesting was Dr. Joseph Bell, a professor at Edinburgh who chose Conan Doyle as a clerk in his surgery (a medical clerkship is a clinical apprenticeship, not a clerical position.)  Bell was not only an expert surgeon but also an expert diagnostician, and not only of disease, but of other aspects of his patients' lives.  Duffy told an anecdote in which Bell correctly identified a patient as having recently been an Army noncom in a Highland regiment stationed in Barbados from no more than a brief conversation, very much in the Holmes style of deduction.  (Briefly, the clues were that he  was very respectful but did not remove his hat, had a Scottish accent and an air of authority, and presented with a Caribbean disease.)  Bell recommended that his students "not just look at a patient, but feel him, probe him, listen to him, smell him."  The similarities to Holmes are obvious, and Conan Doyle acknowledged that Bell was in fact his model for Sherlock Holmes.  Both Holmes and Bell "embodied the diagnostic life at which Arthur Conan Doyle failed."

Moving on to another aspect of Conan Doyle's life, as the son of an artist and a regular museumgoer, Duffy drew a further parallel with the work of Giovanni Morelli, originator of a technique for dating old master paintings and distinguishing originals from copies.  Morelli's theory was that major visual elements are easily imitated, but that differences invariably show up in the minor details least significant to the overall work: methods of depicting (for example) fingernails, earlobes, folds in curtains, and the shape of fingers and toes.  Duffy displayed slides of Morelli's observation sketches of different artists' depictions of such things - the "Botticelli ear" and more.  He also made an explicit connection to a Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box," in which Holmes' client received a box of severed ears and Holmes makes the same sort of observations about them.  As in detection, so in art analysis and in medicine: the secret is in the attention to details, the logical analysis, and the intuitive leap solidly based in knowledge.

Duffy still hadn't gotten to the syringe, and I was wondering if this was one of those presentations in which the speaker had to submit the title a year in advance and then discovered he didn't have enough material to back it up and gone on to add lots of random padding.  If so, the padding was interesting enough that I didn't mind in the slightest.

Next came a brief diversion into psychology, with Duffy positing that just as there was a spectrum of language-processing ability ranging from dyslexia to hyperlexia, there was also a spectrum of social/emotional intelligence ranging from autism to what he referred to as "supermindfulness," predicated on the ability (or failure) to interpret signs and read emotions.  He speculated that just as with autism, this supermindfulness could actually be a drawback in interacting with people and participating in normal human relationships.  Holmes' hypothesized supermindfulness, which led him to be rather obnoxious to Watson at times in showing off his observational abilities, could likewise be the cause of his lifelong bachelorhood, the elimination of mystery, surprise, and wonder not being very conducive to successful romance.

And at last we came to the infamous syringe, Holmes' seven-percent solution of cocaine, his substitute high when lacking the rush of a challenging case.  Duffy cited the case of the contemporary Dr. William S. Halsted, the "father of American surgery", who was highly successful professionally despite an addiction to cocaine, which was legal during the late nineteenth century.  Duffy also speculated that with legal access to morphine, Holmes might have balanced its use with cocaine to keep from becoming addicted to either.

That Holmes' syringe contained cocaine was hardly news to me (or anyone else in the audience, I assume).  Duffy went on to speculate, accompanied by attractive botanical slides, about other substances Holmes - and Conan Doyle - might have experimented with.  In 1879, Conan Doyle wrote in a letter to his mother about his experiments with gelsemium, yellow jasmine, considered at the time to have stimulant and analgesic effects (though there is no clinical data to back this up and the plant is actually poisonous in sufficient quantity.)  Duffy also suggests that as India features prominently in some Holmes stories, Holmes might have experiment with herbal bromine, derived from the delphinium plant and supposed at the time to have the ability to improve alertness, or Asiatic pennywort, said to have similar properties. 

Fully aware of the value of props, Duffy concluded his lecture by producing an actual plant from behind the lectern as a live model for anyone in the audience who felt moved to purchase some pennywort of their own before enthusiastically commending to us the post-lecture movie, the 1939 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, with Basil Rathbone, and in particular its final line, "Oh, Watson, the needle!"

Comments

[Serge]

Regarding Joseph Bell... In 2000 and 2001, PBS's Mystery aired a few movies about his character, with Ian Richardson as Bell. Below is a link to the first of them. You don't watch much TV, but you might want to take a look if ever you come across it on DVD.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212903/

[Paul A.]

Thanks for posting that, Susan. There's some interesting stuff there, and although I already knew some of it, much of it was new to me.

Once, in the early days of Sherklockmania, an enterprising publisher invited Dr Bell to write a foreword to a new edition of one of the Sherlock Holmes books. Bell wrote, as I recall, that it was good to see a work promoting the importance of proper observation, and incidentally that he didn't have any truck with the popular rumour that he was the model for Sherlock Holmes, since any fool could see that apart from the observation thing they were nothing alike.

(Certainly there is no record of Bell ever taking up crimefighting, despite what the series Serge mentions would have you believe; although Doyle tried his hand at it occasionally, with some notable successes.)

[Susan de Guardiola]

Paul:
I am reminded of the Tony Stark line in Iron Man, when he was asked if he was the da Vinci of our time: "That's absolutely ridiculous; I don't paint."

All of this was new to me, but as I said, I'm not actually a serious Holmes fan. I found the lecture fascinating, though, and am glad someone else found it of interest!

I should perhaps give the whole story-cycle (series doesn't seem like quite the right word) a reread as an adult. I'd probably have a deeper appreciation for Holmes now with more life experience behind me.

[Serge]

Paul A... Oops. I didn't mean to imply that those movies about Bell had any factual basis, apart from the observation thing.

[Paul A.]

Serge, I didn't think you did, but better safe than sorry.

[Serge]

Paul A... It is indeed better, especially when my original comment might have led one to the wrong conclusion.

About Doyle, it is interesting that, while his most famous creation was a man who valued Reason and skepticism above all, he himself was a great believer in the Occult. Houdini and he were friends, but the true skeptic was magician Houdini, who wanted to believe, but was never given proof.

[Paul A.]

Yes. Houdini had the advantage over Doyle, in that he knew what to be alert for, since his day job meant he was familiar with many of the ways people can be misled or can mislead themselves in that area. (The Amazing Randi, in some respects a modern version of Houdini, once remarked that the really irritating thing about Uri Geller was not just that his claim to psychic power was based on a trick any amateur conjurer could do, but that he wasn't even very good at it.)

Speaking of Doyle and the Occult and Reason, one of the stories in Kim Newman's The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - which I think I've already recommended to you, Serge, elsewhere - involves Doyle getting tangled up in a genuine occult occurrence: apparently some kind of faerie vistation, involving strange lights in the sky and small unearthly beings with large bald heads and no noses...

[Susan de Guardiola]

I bought that Diogenes Club book last fall. I was hoping for stories set in the world of Newman's Anno Dracula, which I loved. Instead it's sort of an alternate universe to his own alternate universe. Interesting, and the stories were fine, but not what I'd hoped.

[Serge]

The magazine Skeptical Inquirer has had articles about Houdini & Doyle. Doyle apparently was such a fervent believer in the supernatural that there were instances where Houdini would demonstrate a trick to him, and he'd see that as proof of the supernatural and assumed that Houdini himself didn't know he was performing true magic.

By the way, has anyone here ever seen the movie Fairy Tale: A True Story? It assumed that those little girls told the truth when they said that they'd really photographed stories. Overall, the movie was disappointing, but it had Doyle played by Peter O'Toole, and Houdini by Harvey Keitel.

About Newman's Diogenes Club... Yes, Paul, you had indeed recommended that book set in the early days of the Club, along with The Man from the Diogenes Club, which is set during the Swinging Seventies. I haven't read the books yet, but I will. A glimpse told me the hero apparently also has had to deal with Daleks.

[Marilee J. Layman]

Photographed fairies, Serge?

(It's hailing! It was 86F today!)

[Paul A.]

Serge, I'm afraid your glimpse misled you; the mention of dealing with Daleks is a hypothetical one, arising out of a conversation about television viewing where our hero says that the only fictional television he watches is Doctor Who, and that only due to "professional interest".

"Richard believes commercial television was invented by Satan," Vanessa explained to Price.

Actually, Richard didn't believe that—he knew it for a fact.

[Paul A.]

Susan, there was talk at one point of a collection of stories set in the Anno Dracula timeline, following on from the novels, but it got held up while Newman struggled with the concluding story and now it appears to have stalled indefinitely. Some of the individual stories are available to read online, though.

[Serge]

Paul A... A curse on glimpses!

[Susan de Guardiola]

Paul:
Thanks for the tip - I went off to Newman's website to poke around, and there are quite a few stories I will want to track down!

[Paul A.]

Susan, Wikipedia's entry on Kim Newman has a list of where you can find his stories on the web.

One Anno-Dracula-timeline story that's not on the list because the site that hosted it has disappeared, but which is still accessible through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, is Andy Warhol's Dracula. (Which is a direct sequel to Coppola's Dracula, so you should read that first.)

[Susan de Guardiola]

Thanks, Paul! I'm finally getting a day off on Friday and after I finish my Hugo reading (last-minute as usual) I'm going to take some time to track down Newman stories.