Detecting the Diagnosis: Parasitology, Crime Fiction, and the British Medical Gaze

Abstract

In this chapter, Taylor-Pirie traces the cultural encounters between the parasitologist and the scientific detective in the medico-popular imagination, revealing how such meetings helped to embed the figure of the doctor-detective in public understandings of science. Parasitologists like Ronald Ross and David Bruce were routinely reported in newspapers using detective fiction’s most famous archetype: Sherlock Holmes, a frame of reference that blurred the boundaries between romance and reality. Recognising the continued cultural currency of Holmesian detection in clinical and diagnostic medicine, she re-immerses the ‘great detective’ and his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, in the literary-historical contexts of the fin de siècle, demonstrating how material and rhetorical entanglements between criminality, tropical medicine, and empire constructed the microscopic world as new kind of colonial encounter.

Seeing germs, selling germs: translating Anglo-American bacteriology

“…The first was selling the cultural idea that Novy and a small handful of other Americans, or Crookshank and some British doctors, who had visited Koch and Pasteur's laboratories were the American versions of heroic bacteriology (Otis 2000). And this performative and rhetorical grandstanding to Europe ran deep in American medical culture, similar to ways that it did in Britain, although perhaps for different reasons (Taylor-Pirie 2022). The first issue of The Bacteriological World , for example, featured Koch and Pasteur's photographs as the frontispiece, and donned them with lavish descriptions as ‘celebrities,’ ‘geniuses,’ and the ‘greatest benefactors that ever blessed the world’ (Turner 1891, 6).…”

“…To Doyle, the potentiality of the germ theory and its bacteriological protagonists was clear: why should not all diseases … be also done away with … it is probable that in the days of our children's children, or even earlier, consumption, typhus, typhoid, cholera, malaria, scarlatina, diphtheria, measles, and a host of other diseases will have ceased to exist. (Doyle 1883, 182)The recent work of literary scholars like Servitje (2019) and Taylor-Pirie (2022) has shown the ways that both clinicians and writers used metaphors of warfare, of fictional journeys into a microbial world, in order to make sense of laboratory findings of germs. Biomedical scientists today might think through the ways—both beneficial and prejudicial—that popular non-fiction journalistic accounts of scientific discovery, such as Walter Isaacson's The Code Breaker , or the classic 1997 film Gattica , on genetic manipulation, play key roles in making sense of and popularizing scientific discovery.…”

“…2 For more on late nineteenth and early twentieth century ideas around vision in science, medicine, and literature, see Martin Willis 2011; Kennedy 2010; Emilie Taylor-Pirie 2022.…”

Authority and medical expertise: Arthur Conan Doyle inThe Idler

“…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. Emilie Taylor-Pirie (2022) identifies the event as a catalyst for Conan Doyle’s ‘passion for the narrative romance of medicine’ (144) and finds he positions ‘scientific brilliance’ opposing ‘microscopic threat’ (148). These readings recognise an admiration for the heroic Koch in this battle with bacteria.…”