The brilliant Sherlock Holmes is certainly the most famous detective, for that matter character, in all of literature. The Guinness Book of World Records lists him as the “most portrayed movie character” of all time. Over 70 different actors have portrayed him in over 200 films. We are of course dazed by his wealth of knowledge and unequalled sleuthing skills, but we are mesmerized by his personality and presence—his self-absorption, his addiction, his passion and his egotism. “Excellent! I cried. Elementary, said he” is Watson’s correct account of that famous conversation with his friend, the one that lives on in movies in its misquoted form, “Elementary, my dear Watson”.
The real Dr. Holmes was the Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at the Harvard Medical School in 1847 when one month after Halloween the school was closed by a coroner’s jury. They spent the next week gathering evidence in the form of Dr. Parkman’s dismembered body. They found his jaw with its teeth and an identifying gold filling in the furnace of Dr. John Webster’s lab. Dr. Webster, a chemistry professor, was heavily in debt to the wealthy Parkman. In those days a professor was paid from the receipts of tickets bought by students to attend his lectures. Apparently, neither Dr. Webster nor his subject was too popular. His murder trial and the precedent it created in case law, however, were sensational. When Charles Dickens came to America he asked to tour the crime scene. The conviction on the basis of circumstantial evidence is part of American legal history.
Unlike the unfortunate Dr. Webster, Dr. Holmes was a masterful lecturer. His craft took root in his days as a Harvard undergrad where at 5’2” his sport was lively conversation. He joined the Hasty Pudding Club where he wrote and performed comedic poems and skits. His wit followed him into the lecture hall. He added spice to Anatomy and Physiology with puns and poetry in the form of mnemonic devices, at times of a ribald nature. When the four month term was over he would take his act on the road. Every city and most small towns had a lyceum. In the Age before movies and Comedy Theater, speakers like Holmes would tour the country and provide entertainment for the locals. His favorite topics were poetry, especially Byron, and homeopathy, a practice he railed against. “The causes of disease,” he said, “have been less earnestly studied in the eagerness of the search for remedies.”
Doctors in the 1800s still used bleeding and cure-all elixirs for any and all ailments. Holmes was schooled in Paris in the French methode expectante, a sort of therapeutic nihilism that instructed the physician not to do harm and to keep the patient going long enough to allow the body to heal itself. He was taught to observe. This training led him to collect hundreds of cases of postpartum infection into an historic paper, "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever". His claim that doctors and midwives spread infection to mothers giving birth was not accepted by mainstream medicine for another twelve years. His recommendations that practitioners involved in infection cases stay away from future deliveries saved many lives. His scientific method was a model, that when applied to other ailments, saved many more.
Holmes was an educator and an entertainer. He did not pretend to be a genius or scholar. “Nothing is so commonplace as to wish to be remarkable,” he said. He did not invent the use of ether in surgery but he came up with a name for it, anesthesia. He was no Keats, but his simple rhyme, “Old Ironsides” inspired mainstream America and helped save the USS Constitution from the scrapheap. His unwillingness to show proper reverence to religion or to take sides with “moral bullies” like the Abolitionists in the pre-Civil War years got him in trouble in the press. “I don’t want to be bullied into heaven by the pulpit—neither do I wish to be called hard names to make me better or more humane.” For a public figure, he was certainly naïve. He just preferred to see the good in people, humor in difficult situations and be a conciliator. Not surprisingly, University politics did not suit his temperament. Next week, his transition to 19th Century blogger.
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