Arthur Conan Doyle and the Consumption Cure

Abstract

Arthur Conan Doyle and the Consumption Cure' A large number of the important themes of Arthur Conan Doyle's life, his intellectual character, and the emergence of his vocation, cluster in the story of a trip he made to Berlin in 1890, with the purpose of attending a scientific lecture. He tells the story in a chapter of Memories and Adventures (1924) entitled 'Pulling Up the Anchor' in token of his own reading of late 1890 as a turning point in his career and life. 1 The Berlin episode constituted a decisive turn in his relation to the professions and discourses of writing and medicine, to science and art, and to the provincial, metropolitan and continental scene. It dramatized the issue of the professional's responsibility to society. It foregrounded questions of nationality and ethnicity. It provided him with a model of the heroic investigator combating dangerous antagonists, to be developed in the serial figures of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger. The Berlin adventure was in many ways a critical point in Conan Doyle's evolution as man of letters, and it merits a thicker description. In mid-November 1890, Conan Doyle, a 31-year-old provincial doctor in general practice with the beginnings of a reputation as a writer of fiction, decided on the spur of the moment to travel to Berlin, to attend a demonstration of a cure for tuberculosis announced by Professor Robert Koch, the celebrated German bacteriologist. '[A]t a few hours' notice,' he recalled years later, 'I packed up a bag and started off alone upon this curious adventure' (M&A, 88). He went up to London from Portsmouth, collected some 1 Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures 1924 (Oxford,1989) pp. 82-93. Further references to this book, abbreviated M&A, will be parenthetical. letters of introduction, and hurried on to the continent that same night, meeting on the train a smart London doctor, Malcolm Morris, who was also going to learn more about the consumption cure. In Berlin, Conan Doyle could not get in to the packed hall to attend the demonstration given by Koch's colleague Ernst von Bergmann, but the next day he was given access to the German doctors' wards where Koch's procedure was being tested on tubercular patients. Without delay he sent a letter to the Daily Telegraph in which he recorded his doubts about the so-called cure; later he wrote a longer piece for the Review of Reviews also casting doubt on the curative properties of Koch's procedure, while heaping praise on Koch himself as a Carlylean hero of science. Returning from Berlin via London to his home on the south coast, the following day Conan Doyle gave an interview to a local newspaper about his Berlin trip, in which he announced that he was giving up his Southsea practice. He had decided to go to Vienna to further his studies in ophthalmology before setting up in London as a specialist. The last part of the story is a familiar episode of the Conan Doyle myth, and is cheerfully recounted in his autobiographical Memories and Adventures, written in 1924. Setting up in practic...

Authority and medical expertise: Arthur Conan Doyle inThe Idler

“…Researchers have examined the significance of the Koch episode for Conan Doyle and his contribution to popular understandings of medical science. Douglas Kerr argues that this was a key event in Conan Doyle’s writing career; he was ‘a writer in pursuit of a story’ who achieved a ‘journalistic scoop’ that would be his first piece for a national newspaper ( Kerr 2010 , 47, 46). In also reporting this story in the Review of Reviews , he contributed to the development of the martial metaphor as a way of comprehending the threats of the microscopic world, as Servitje (2021, 169–72 ) details.…”

“…His hagiographical presentation of Koch shifted over time ( Kerr 2010 , 47). By 1924 he wrote more critically of the scientist and with more empathy for the public who had pinned such hopes on his cure.…”

“…Kerr views this shift as influenced, in part at least, by Conan Doyle’s postwar opinion of Germany. But Conan Doyle’s contempt for ‘scientific arrogance’ ( Kerr 2010 , 47) and sympathy for a public who learnt of medical advancements through popular media can be found much earlier than 1924: between 1892 and 1894 Conan Doyle published seven short pieces in The Idler: an illustrated magazine , a periodical which actively positioned its readers in close relationship with its contributors. Proximity between the public and experts had significance in medicine during this period: it was a contradictory time in the practice of medicine when professionalisation and specialisation had resulted in an increasing distance between the profession and the public, yet general practitioners’ financial success depended on maintaining good relationships with their patients and popular medical journalism proliferated.…”