The Science of Sherlock Holmes: From Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective's Greatest Cases Read online

  Sherlock Holmes

  From Baskerville Hall

  to the Valley of Fear,

  the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective’s

  Greatest Cases

  e. j. wagner

  Sherlock Holmes

  From Baskerville Hall

  to the Valley of Fear,

  the Real Forensics Behind the Great Detective’s

  Greatest Cases

  e. j. wagner

  Copyright © 2006 by E. J. Wagner. All rights reserved. Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada

  Illustration credits: Pages 111–114 from Engravings Explaining the Anatomy of the Bones, Muscles, and Joints by John Bell (London, 1794); page 115 from Report of the Case of John W. Webster: Indicted for the Murder of George Parkman by George Bemis (Boston, 1850); page 116 from How to Read Character: A New Illustrated Hand-Book of Phrenology for Students and Examiners with a Descriptive Chart by Samuel R. Wells (New York, 1873); page 117 (top) from The Identification Facilities of the FBI by John Edgar Hoover (Washington, D.C., 1941); page 117 (bottom) by Ira Bradley and Company for Warren’s Household Physician: For Physicians, Families, Mariners, Miners; Being a Brief Description, in Plain Language of Diseases of Men, Women, and Children by Ira Warren and A. E. Small (Boston, 1891); page 118 from the Catalog of Medical and Surgical Works appended to A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology by Henry C. Chapman (Philadelphia, 1893).

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  Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Wagner, E. J.

  The science of Sherlock Holmes : from Baskerville Hall to the Valley of Fear, the real forensics

  behind the great detective’s greatest cases / E. J. Wagner.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-471-64879-6 (cloth)

  ISBN-10: 0-471-64879-5 (cloth)

  1. Forensic sciences—History. 2. Criminal investigation—History. 3. Holmes, Sherlock

  (Fictitious character) I. Title.

  HV8073.W34 2006

  363.25—dc22 2005022236

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Bill, my beloved husband and tech support

  Contents

  Preface vii Acknowledgments xi

  1 Dialogue with the Dead 1

  2 Beastly Tales and Black Dogs 17

  3 A Fly in the Ointment 31

  4 Proving Poison 41

  5 Disguise and the Detective 61

  6 The Crime Scene by Gaslight 76

  7 A Picture of Guilt 91

  8 Shots in the Dark 119

  9 Bad Impressions 133

  10 The Real Dirt 146

  11 Notes from the Devil 157

  12 A Voice in the Blood 169

  13 Myth, Medicine, and Murder 191

  Glossary 215

  Bibliography 218

  Index 235

  Illustrations follow page 110

  v

  Preface

  I first met Sherlock Holmes on Mosholu Parkway in the Bronx during the 1950s. At the time I was suffering through the torments of junior high school, my misery relieved only by the combined English and social studies class taught by a singularly humane teacher named Benjamin Weinstein.

  It was Mr. Weinstein’s engaging habit to invite his students to bring lunch to the park when the weather permitted. We would perch on logs and on the grass while he entertained us by reading aloud from work with which he felt we should be familiar. I always went.

  He read with a fine but gentle authority. He did no funny voices. He did not perform strained pantomimes. He just provided a conduit that allowed the author to speak to us.

  He read tales from Mark Twain and tales from Damon Runyon. Toward the end of autumn, when it was growing cold and most of the leaves had fallen, he opened an unfamiliar book that had a dark blue cover and read:

  On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to

  vii viii preface

  associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic.

  It was the opening of “The Adventure of the Speckled Band.” The next day I was at the library to obtain the collected works.

  There’s been a great deal written about the intense appeal of the Sherlock Holmes tales. I suspect it lies largely in the contrast between the emotional excitement of wild adventure and the reassuring intellectual control represented by Holmes. As I write this in 2005, when superstition threatens to seduce the civilized world with its dangerous embrace and science is dismissed in some quarters as merely an amoral discipline that humanity is free to abandon, a literary hero who possesses both intellect and a sense of ethics is particularly compelling.

  Sherlock Holmes may have been fictional, but what we learn from him is very real. He tells us that science provides not simplistic answers but a rigorous method of formulating questions that may lead to answers. The figure of Holmes stands for human reason, tempered with a gift for friendship. (He may claim to be merely a brain, but he betrays an intense emotional core when he says to the villain in “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs,” “If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive.”) Holmes has an incisive min
d, a warm heart, and an artistic dimension—he skillfully plays the violin. No wonder I and so may others are entranced.

  Over the years I acquired rather more copies of the Canon than was sensible, and from time to time I would indulge myself, read a bit, and wonder if there was a way of incorporating my weakness for Holmes with my job of lecturing on the history of crime and forensic science. I did present a program called “The Science of Sherlock Holmes: True Cases Solved by Conan Doyle,” but that was about the author rather than the Great Detective. I kept toying with ideas, but basic sloth made it difficult to decide how to combine Holmes with criminal history.

  And then one cold February afternoon while I was waiting for

  preface ix

  a loaf of bread to rise, I received an e-mail asking if I would be interested in writing a book that would use the Great Detective’s adventures as a jumping-off point to discuss forensic science during the Victorian age. There could be chapters on anatomy, toxicology, blood chemistry, and a variety of other very complicated things. I could see at once that this endeavor would involve a prodigious amount of work.

  It would mean contacting old friends who were specialists on fingerprinting, trace evidence, poisoning, and a number of other esoteric subjects and begging them for information. It would require detailed reading of old autopsy reports, crumbling newspapers, and lecture notes. It would mean convincing my husband that he would be delighted to spend weeks scanning fragile old pictures, formatting my messy typing, and compiling a bibliography that promised to be sizable. (My secretarial skills are sadly lacking.)

  It would mean spending many hours poring over ancient medical tomes, dusty trial transcripts, and yellowing letters and papers, tracking down the details of crimes centuries old, isolated in my workroom with only hundreds of antiquarian books and Dr. Watson, our black Labrador Retriever, for company.

  So of course I said yes.

  Acknowledgments

  Profound thanks to Mark Beneke, Ph.D., for details on insects; Robert A. Forde, for background on both the British legal system and the pronunciation of British names; Ernest D. Hamm, who can trace anything; Lee Jackson, for insight into Victorian life; Professor Erwin T. Jakab, for translations from the French; Professor Gernot Kocher, for information about Hans Gross; Sigmund Menchel, M.D., former chief medical examiner of Suffolk County, for much-needed help in analysis of the drowning at Tisza-Eszlar, as well as many other cases; James J. Maune, Esq., and William Nix, for information on the law; Andre A. Moenssens, Douglas Stripp Professor of Law Emeritus, University of Missouri at Kansas City, for background on legal photography; Stephen S. Power, my editor at John Wiley & Sons, for his patience and sensitivity and a really good idea; Marcia Samuels, for amazingly precise and considerate copyediting, and William R. Wagner, for both emotional and technical support. Without them this book would not exist. Any mistakes are mine.

  I am deeply grateful to the members of the forensic world who over the years have, with great generosity, in different ways, helped me to learn. They include Jack Ballantyne, Ph.D.; Robert Baumann; Vincent Crispino, retired director of the Suffolk County Crime Laboratory; Leo Dal Cortivo, Ph.D., retired director of laboratories of the Suffolk County Office of the Medical Examiner; Joseph Davis, M.D., chief emeritus, Miami–Dade

  xi xii acknowledgments

  County Medical Examiner Department; Robert Golden; Charles Hirsch, M.D., former chief medical examiner of Suffolk County, currently chief medical examiner of New York City; Jeffrey Luber; and the late Sidney B. Weinberg, M.D., former chief medical examiner of Suffolk County, all of whom I met through the Suffolk County Office of the Medical Examiner, an organization that has been a continuing source of support and information. Other forensic scientists who helped me learn include Michael Baden, M.D., chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police; the late Theodore Ehrenreich, M.D., consultant in clinical pathology to the New York Office of the Medical Examiner; Zeno Geradts, forensic scientist at the Netherlands Forensic Institute; the late Milton Helpern, M.D., chief medical examiner of New York City; and Peter D. Martin, retired deputy director of the Metropolitan Police Forensic Science Laboratory, United Kingdom (Scotland Yard).

  I am also grateful to the Museum of Long Island Natural Sciences at Stony Brook University, which as sponsor of the annual Forensic Forum has aided and abetted my efforts.

  CHAPTER 1

  Dialogue with the Dead

  “You can take him to the mortuary now.” —Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet

  London in 1887. Cobblestones and narrow, twisting streets. Hansom cabs driven on urgent errands, rumbling past public houses bursting with noise and smoke. Bearded men wearing capes, carrying walking sticks with silver heads. Vast museums holding jumbled curiosities, visited by veiled ladies draped in furs and discreetly scented with lavender—ladies whose rigid carriage somehow implies they expect to be embraced rarely and reverently by their husbands but firmly and constantly by their corsets.

  Street women florid with gin. Homeless and diseased, laden with every garment they own, agitated by lice, they move heavily, heading to the public house, the doss-house, the workhouse, the river …

  And the river is the slow-moving Thames. It penetrates the city, its water brown in response to the strong current stirring the bottom mud, its flow the only power carrying flatboats that

  1

  convey the desperately needed black coal. The banks of the river swarm with mudlarks, young boys who scavenge for anything salvageable—wood, coal, coins—their reward often cholera from the raw sewage that churns through the great river.

  The city teems with street vendors, drivers, horses, pickpockets, chimney sweeps, and nursemaids, the exalted and the wretched. It is home to the elegant parks and to the noisome slaughterhouses, to the tenements and to the majestic houses, all of them wrapped in swaths of thick fog and illuminated by gaslight.

  It is home as well to the great hospitals, St. Mary’s, Guy’s, St. Bart’s, and their lecture halls and laboratories, where sometimes macabre research is undertaken, hidden from public view by drawn blinds. In the first Sherlock Holmes story, the novel A Study in Scarlet, we are taken behind those blinds and watch as Stamford, an old acquaintance of Watson, leads him toward the laboratory where the most famous friendship in detective fiction will soon be forged:

  [W]e turned down a narrow lane and passed through a small side-door, which opened into a wing of the great hospital. It was familiar ground to me, and I needed no guiding as we ascended the bleak stone staircase and made our way down the long corridor with its vista of whitewashed wall and dun-colored doors. Near the farther end a low arched passage branched away from it and led to the chemical laboratory.

  This was a lofty chamber, lined and littered with countless bottles. Broad, low tables were scattered about, which bristled with retorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps, with their blue flickering flames. There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work.

  Stamford has already warned Watson of his future roommate’s many eccentricities, which include Holmes’s beating of dissecting room cadavers with sticks in order to study postmortem bruising and his frequent dabbling in poison:

  “Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes [Stamford tells Watson]—it approaches to cold-bloodedness. I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects.”

  And Holmes, when they finally meet, doesn’t disappoint in this respect:

  “Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,” said Stamford, introducing us.

  “How are you?” he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”

  “How on earth did you know that?” I asked in astonishment.

  “Never mind,” said he, chuckling to himse
lf. “The question now is about hæmoglobin.”

  Watson is a medical man, comfortable with dissecting rooms and their pungent odors. He is also well traveled and well read, and he is probably familiar with the enormous advances that were being made in the new world of forensic medicine, many the result of experiments done on corpses, so he finds Holmes’s interests congenial. They are thus well matched to share a series of adventures in a Victorian world that becomes their laboratory for applying science to criminal investigation.

  In 1887, forensic science was largely a function of the medical profession and was most frequently referred to as “Medical Jurisprudence” or “Legal Medicine.” An accurate understanding of fingerprint and trace evidence was still in the future, but a few adventurous physicians versed in anatomy, pharmacy, and microscopy were beginning to use their skills in the study of unexplained sudden death.

  At first, this new field grew most vigorously on the European continent. Across the channel from England, there had been an old, if not entirely respectable, tradition of anatomical exploration, and in past centuries innovative artist-anatomists such as Andreas Vesalius and Leonardo had been known to liberate bodies from the dead houses and the gallows to study and draw them. Vesalius had to answer to the Inquisition, and Leonardo could not publish his anatomical studies within his lifetime. But gradually, the established Church withdrew its opposition to dissection, and more students were drawn to the subject.

  At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the great Italian physician Giovanni Battista Morgagni began to change the focus of anatomical dissection, not only searching for an understanding of the structure of the human body, but also trying to match the changes in the cadaver to the clinical symptoms of disease reported before death. From there it was a short step to the idea of dissecting bodies to look for changes caused by criminal acts.

  By 1794, the famous Scottish anatomist and surgeon John Bell was insisting on the primacy of dissection in the study of medicine and anatomy, writing in his Engravings Explaining the Anatomy of the Bones, Muscles, and Joints, “Anatomy is to be learnt only by dissection. Dissection is the first and last business of the student.” Bell’s engravings of dissection are extraordinary, both detailed and instructive, but they gave no guidance on obtaining subjects.