Empire Under the Microscope

Taylor-Pirie, Emilie

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-84717-3

Cited by 2 publications

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“…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.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Authority and medical expertise: Arthur Conan Doyle inThe Idler

Chapman

2023

Med Humanities

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Arthur Conan Doyle’s medical and writing careers intertwined and his work has a history of being read in the light of his medical expertise. He wrote at a time when the professionalisation and specialisation of medicine had resulted in an increasing distance between the profession and the public, yet general practitioners relied financially on maintaining good relationships with their patients and popular medical journalism proliferated. A variety of contrasting voices often disseminated narratives of medical science. These conflicting developments raised questions of authority and expertise in relation to the construction of medicine in the popular imagination: how is knowledge constructed? Who should disseminate it? How and by whom is authority conferred? How can the general population judge experts in medical science? These are questions explored more widely in Conan Doyle’s writing as he examines the relationship between expertise and authority. In the early 1890s, Conan Doyle wrote for the popular, mass-market periodicalThe Idler: An Illustrated Magazine. His contributions to it address these questions of authority and expertise for a lay audience. First establishing the medical context of doctor/patient relationships in which these questions arose, this article undertakes a close reading of these mostly rarely studied single-issue stories and articles as a means of ascertaining how Conan Doyle and his illustrators identified the relationship between competing narratives, expertise and authority. It argues that rather than maintaining a distance between public and professional, Conan Doyle’s illustrated work demonstrates to his readers that there are ways to successfully navigate the appearance of authority and recognise expertise as they confront entangled representations of advances in medical science.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Authority and medical expertise: Arthur Conan Doyle inThe Idler

Chapman

2023

Med Humanities

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Seeing germs, selling germs: translating Anglo-American bacteriology

Steere‐Williams

2023

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

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The germ theory of infectious disease, which developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is often considered a pivotal breakthrough in modern science, medicine, biology, and public health. The germ theory provided a new way to study disease in laboratory, clinical, and community settings, and a new rationale for public health intervention. This article explores two important facets of the germ theory; how the physical techniques and methods of studying germs in laboratories were taught to the first generation of doctors, and how the germ theory was communicated to diverse publics in clinical and community settings. Drawing on the concept of transnational science, I argue that late nineteenth and early twentieth debates around the laboratory practices of bacteriology and the public reception of the germ theory help us to understand the deeper ways that biomedical scientific knowledge is created, constrained, and communicated.

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Empire Under the Microscope

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Authority and medical expertise: Arthur Conan Doyle inThe Idler

Authority and medical expertise: Arthur Conan Doyle inThe Idler

Seeing germs, selling germs: translating Anglo-American bacteriology

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