The British physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a prolific writer, best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who is perhaps the most famous fictional detective. Both were avid ...researchers and loved working in solitude. ...Conan Doyle investigated real crimes and Scotland Yard occasionally requested his advice on solving cases (panel 1). Like for Sherlock Holmes, such grueling work and lack of sleep took their toll on Conan Doyle's health, and he would have to go to quiet places like Seaford and Cromer at the British coast to rest and recover.
Between 1887 and 1927, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote sixty Sherlock Holmes stories, and his great Canon has become the most praised, most studied, and best-known chapter in the history of detective ...fiction. Over twenty thousand publications pertaining to the Sherlock Holmes phenomenon are known to have been published, most of them historical and critical studies. In addition, however, almost since the first stories appeared, such was their uniqueness and extraordinary attraction that other authors began writing stories based on or derived from them. A new genre had appeared: pastiches; parodies; burlesques; and stories that attempted to copy or rival the great detective himself. As the field widened, there was hardly a year in the twentieth century in which new short stories or novels did not appear. Many hundreds are now known to have been published, some of them written by authors well-known for their work in other literary fields. The non-canonical Sherlock Holmes literature not only constitutes a literary field of considerable historical interest, but includes many stories that are both enjoyable and fascinating in their own right. Although a large bibliography on these stories exists, and a few limited anthologies have been published, no attempt has previously been made to collect them all and discuss them comprehensively. The Alternative Sherlock Holmes does so: it provides a new and valuable approach to the Sherlock Holmes literature, as well as making available many works that have for years remained forgotten. Presented as an entertaining narrative, of interest to both the aficionado and the scholar, it provides full bibliographic data on virtually all the known stories in the field.
Contents: Introduction; The vaults of Cox & Co: Watson's unchronicled cases and their pastiches; Baker Street revisited: period pastiches; However improbable: non-period pastiches; Friends, relations, and one enemy; The sincerest form of flattery: parodies and impostors; Complimentary (complementary?), my dear Holmes: copies and rivals; Bibliography; Indexes.
Despite the work of innovative historians such as the late Roy Porter to anchor the discipline more firmly from the perspective of patients and consumers of health care, medical history within the ...curriculum often seems iatrocentric, positivist, and lacking in a sense of identification with the complex and messy realities of medical practice. The conflict between prudent science and the allure of national and institutional prestige, media attention, commercial success, and popular acclaim, illustrated by the ultimate failure of Koch's tuberculin trials, still has relevance in the ongoing controversies over the influence of pharmaceutical companies over researchers and scientific journals. From a scientific perspective, the series also shows the challenge of scientific innovation through the widespread resistance to the concept of bacteria as agents of disease, from the dignified but traditionalist pathologist Rudolf Virchow to the doctrinaire nursing matrons.
The 2013 graphic novel Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black rewrites Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet (1887) as the story of two young Black men solving crimes in modern-day New York City. The ...adaptation challenges traditional Victorian national borders by highlighting the interimperial, white supremacist connections Doyle's works promote between Britain and the United States. Furthermore, it crosses Victorian temporal boundaries by evoking Doyle's racialized theorization of a mind-body hierarchy and the impact of this broader Victorian dogma on contemporary experiences of lived blackness. The formal complexity of comics facilitates Study in Black's restaging and rejection of blackness as abject materiality in the Sherlock Holmes stories and their original illustrations. This self-conscious and densely allusive redrawing of Doyle's novel presses upon readers the burden and insights of Black double consciousness, theorized at the ostensible end of the Victorian period.
Diagnosis murder Wise, Sarah
The Lancet,
12/2014, Volume:
384, Issue:
9959
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Holmes and Dr Watson inhabit an optimistic world in which fingerprinting, craniometry, eye-colour charts, footprint analysis, telephones, telegrams, and speeded-up transport links are likely to make ...the mysterious mass of human beings huddling together in the city more easily knowable and traceable. Holmes's world was a man's world, and the Museum packs its display cases with items that telegraph to us the masculinity and homosociality of the fin de siècle: tweed, pipes, hats, walking canes, cigarette cases, and the scientific and pseudo-scientific implements of criminal identification and detection.
"Viral resurrection" describes the embodied illness apparent in the resurfaced corpses, zombies, and disfigured bodies of literature and culture in this period, which highlight the pandemic's lasting ...effects on survivors who often experienced a feeling of living death. The constant sight of coffins and funerals, along with the sounds of tolling bells, which rang in memory of those who fell victim to the flu, are details inscribed in the minds of those who experienced it firsthand—but they are also, as Outka notes, quintessential images of modernist literature. Viral Modernism's approach could indeed be criticized for reducing modernist experimentation down to reflections or responses to the disorienting effects of widespread disease and the loss of life. ...she insists, "knowing the outbreak's sensory and affective history changes our sense of the wellspring from which interwar literature arose" (244). ...while US writers like Cather, Porter, Maxwell, and Wolfe write in a realist style that details "the sights and psychological impact and tensions of the moment" (97), the more well-known modernist writers based in the UK and Ireland analyzed in part two—Woolf, Eliot and Yeats—write in a more fragmentary and less linear style, registering the more immediate trauma of the pandemic and the "emotional pieces that have yet to be formed into a coherent story" (99).
PDF
