and curing the public. It was the time when doctors and non-doctors alike witnessed exciting breakthroughs in medical technology and a series of great discoveries of human pathogens and vectors of human diseases. The golden age of bacteriology, referring to the years 1880–1900 when so many advances in medical science were made,boosted doctors’confidenceand ambition forgreaterachievements.Thesetwo golden decades happened to coincide with a crucial moment for Doyle himself, when he turned away from a struggling medical career and became a successful writer.
From 1876 to 1882, he received formal training at the medical school of the
University of Edinburgh. During the next two years, in which he struggled to start his
11 Doyle attended Edinburgh University in 1876 and obtained his M.D. in 1881, after which he set up a clinic in Portsmouth. His practice was not successful and he started to write and publish short stories in his spare time. His stories began to be published in 1879, between the start of his practice and before obtaining his M.D. (Barsham 40–9).
own practice in Portsmouth, he remained active in responding to current discussion of medical issues. He was passionate and devoted enough to travel from Portsmouth to London to attend committee meetings of physicians as the chairman. He was even enthusiastic enough to travel to Edinburgh in order to pass his exam in Moral Philosophy as a preliminary to the M.D. degree (Lellenberg et al 235–40). He also worked for his M.D. degree during this period.12
As a doctor himself, Doyle was as interested and active in medical and public health issues as any other doctor in his time. His letters to some major newspapers, written sometime between 1879 and 1890, were also valuable records that showed his struggle to become a good and profitable doctor. His submission to major medical journals and newspapers such as The Lancet (on a rare disease) showed his great ambition not just to impress his readers but also to make a substantial contribution to medical research:
The patient, a well-built man, twenty-nine years of age, came to my friend Mr. Hoare complaining of a large tumor, which extended across his abdomen from the right costal border to the left anterior superior spine of the ilium. This proved upon examination to be an enormously hypertrophied spleen, the ilium being represented by a deep notch a little above the level of the umbilicus. The account of the patient was that some years before he had had a sharp attack of ague at Aspinwall, on the American coast, and that he had never entirely shaken off its effects. The swelling, however, had
12 Physicians at the time of Doyle could start their own practice with either a bachelor‘sdegree in medicine or a master’sdegree in surgery. Doyle possessed both. However, his ambition for medicine motivated him to study for an M.D. that would further advance his career. In letters written to his mother, Doyle mentioned that he was working fervently on his M.D. while trying his luck as a writer by sending some of his early works to publishers. He finished his M.D. in 1885 and, as he wished, he finally had “the magicalletters[M.D.]behind [his]name”(Lellenberg etal. 238). His submissions of his literary creations were turned down several times at first. He then spent six weeks of March and April of 1886 to work on his first Sherlock Holmes adventure story, A Study in Scarlet. It was therefore plausible to assume that Doyle possessed both a love for medicine and passion for literature (Lellenberg et al 235–48).
appeared recently, and attained its large proportions in the course of a few weeks. (Doyle, Letters 14)
His submission to The Lancet revealed a writing style that largely relied on the details of objective observation and evaluation, a style all readers of Holmes would be familiar with. By comparison, a passage of typical description of Holmes’client bore striking similarity to Doyle’sown writing in depicting the physical features and style in description. But for the medical terms, the following passage would read alike:
Our visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy gray
shepherd’s check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top-hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was nothing remarkable about the man save his blazing red head, and the expression of extreme chagrin and discontent upon his features. (Doyle, “Red-headed”207)
In these two passages quoted here, extended descriptions were given to instruct his readers about each case. In the letter to the editors, it is not Doyle’sstrong interest in health issues that surprises us but the similarity of the wording and the style of objective description of the case. The sense of detachment and objectivity that largely entertained readers of Sherlock Holmes was presented here in a neutral tone found in most scientific research. Similarly, the same detachment and emotional neutrality were both present in the description of a client coming for Holmes’consultation.
Subjective likes and dislikes were repressed and a great amount of physical characteristics visible to the observer were enhanced to intensify the objective and transcend the observer. As a doctor-writer, Doyle remained the same objective and
detached observer giving his attention to the most frivolous details of his gaze.
Holmes showed great persistence in retaining his principle of objectivity. His training as a doctor and the mission of curing and caring for people endowed upon doctors pushed him to take further actions in safeguarding public health. Sherlock Holmes made his best attempt to protect city dwellers from attacks and restore social order. For Arthur Conan Doyle, he remained consistent in his principle as a doctor and loyal to his Hippocratic oath. The commonwealth of the general public was also a social responsibility for Doyle’sdoctor identity,
Even in his letters to local newspapers, Doyle displayed the same level of intensity. Following his submission to The Medical Times in June 1883, Doyle remained active and fervent about public health issues. He argued that concerns for human rights violations over the Contagious Diseases Acts should be discarded as long as the society was subject to contagious diseases invading the country (Doyle,
Letters 15–
6). His submission to local newspapers, such as The Evening Mail and TheHampshire County Times, largely disputed the notion that vaccination of human
bodies violated individual rights (Doyle, Letters 27–32). Doyle defended his medical specialty and urged a complete and compulsory vaccination against smallpox via a tribute to Pasteur and some other forerunners:The tendency of the scientific world, if we may judge from the work not only of Pasteur and Koch, but also of Burdon-Sanderson, Toussaint, and others, lies more and more in the direction of preventive methods of inoculation to check zymotic disease. (Doyle, Letters 31)
In response to the claim by anti-vaccination campaigns that vaccination was a form of poison, Doyle defended the use of vaccination as a calculated result of reason and caution. According to Doyle, the whole science of vaccination was that a mild poison was used to counteract a deadly one. His ultimate guidance for his persistence, to put
it briefly, was his determination to take care of national, not just personal, health. As a doctor, he remained faithful to his belief; as a writer, he created the persona, Sherlock Holmes, to enact his aspirations for public safety and order.
Richard Barnett notes that one of the overarching themes in Victorian literature is thatthecity ofLondon wasusually presented asasick body:“sicknesshasalways been partofeveryday lifeforitscitizens”(xiii).In thissense,asthecrowd represents the heart of the city, it also stands for many sicknesses at its heart. By the end of the Victorian era, major cities in England were known for their population growth with immigrants from the countryside and overseas colonization. The responsibility for protecting the health of the urban population lay in the hands of doctors. Therefore, physicians,especially urban physicians,“took on an increasingly politicised position as gatekeepers, monitoring and managing immigrant populations through quarantine, specialist hospitals and the apparatus of statepublichealth”(Barnett161).In the adventurestoriesofSherlock Holmes,theresponsibility ofthe“gatekeeper”for public health lay in the hands of the detective hero.
The image of Holmes has been closely associated with medicine. The prototype of this detective hero was a doctor: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle publicly admitted that he created the fictional character of Sherlock Holmes based on his recollection of his teacher at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph Bell. Doyle claimed that Dr. Bell’s famous exhortations to the students to use inductive and deductive methods before making a diagnosis were an important factor in Doyle’s inspiration (Accardo 23–39, Jaffe 31, Liebow 127–42). Bell’s skill in observation and diagnosis became the basis for Holmes’ways of seeing.
But the most obvious metaphor of Holmes as a medical detective remained the fact that his job duty was to keep his clients from fear of threat or invasion. In this sense, Holmes could be interpreted as a metaphor for vaccination. If vaccination
meant inoculation with infectious material into the body, with the purpose of enabling the body to resist or rid the disease, then Holmes was the antibody, which would conferimmunity againstthedisease’ssubsequentattacks.Forcity dwellers, Holmes enabled the city to keep track of and purge all possible invaders or corrupted members.
Hispowerfulmemory to recallcriminalrecordsand thecity’shistory borea strong resemblance to the function of immunity, which can be seen as a series of chain reactions. The immune system identifies a substance as foreign when it is first encountered; Holmes did the same by searching from his mental database, which contained past cases, criminal history, and all possible information he had gathered from the newspapers. Foreign substances provoke an immune response, as did criminals in their disturbances and crimes. As specific immune responses work with the defense mechanism by eliminating antigens and killing invading micro-organisms, so did Holmes in his investigation and solutions to crimes.
Conclusion
Foucault argues that the modern body serves as an important site for political contestation. His notion of biopolitics emphasizes the role of the modern state in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in regulating and disciplining the individual and social body. By analyzing the discourse of medicine, science, jurisdiction, and sexuality as dominant powers shaping the modern body, Foucault investigates the body as the matrix in which the rights a society allots to people of various genders, races, and classes was inscribed. Foucault further notes that the regulation and control of individual bodies were formulated in accordance with the concepts of population, as the individuals were considered a whole that can be managed, controlled, and anticipated.From thiscomeshisnotion of“governmentality.”By governmentality
Foucault means,
the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific, albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatus of security as its essential technical instrument. (Security 108)
For readers of the adventure stories of Sherlock Holmes, such notions of
regulation and governance remain valid. Holmes embodies both a new way of seeing (in Foucault’swords,theensembleof“institutions,procedures,analysesand reflections,calculations,and tactics”)and anew way ofexercising protection (the powerinvested in the“apparatusofsecurity asitsessentialtechnicalinstrument”). Holmes was not just a detective hero who provides easily affordable entertainment to his Victorian readers; he was the aspiration of literary production collaborating with medicine in fostering the expectation of order, security, and safety of a society.
Chapter Five
East End Prostitution and Fear of Contagions:
On Narratives of the Ripper Case around 1888
One day men will look back and say that I gave birth to the twentieth century.
—Jack the Ripper1
During thepastcentury,alegacy of“Ripperology,”the study of the Ripper murders, has been embraced by academics and amateurs alike both in and outside Great Britain. As a result of these collective efforts, the study has produced a huge reservoir for research and most significantly, entertainment. Characterizations of Jack the Ripper and East End London have appeared in not only serious studies but also in the intensity and proliferation in popular entertainment including comics, novels, drama, musicals, and most importantly, films.2
Either as a source of entertainment or inspiration for academic research, the century-long fascination with the Ripper shows no signs of exhaustion. Regarding the everlasting popularity of the Ripper murders, it would be interesting to note that Jack the Ripper is not the first serial killer, nor the most brutal in human history.
Nonetheless, this has not diminished his legacy. As time passes, Ripper fascination has been infused with various additional elements.
1 This famous quote of Jack the Ripper arguably came from any letters from the Ripper. There is a high possibility that this widely adopted quote came from the 1979 Ripper film, Time After Time. The influential graphic book From Hell and its film adaption are actually what make this quote well-known and widely accepted as an original quote from the Ripper. See discussion on the Casebook website at http://www.casebook.org/forum/messages/4923/7670.html.
2 In Denis Meikle’sstudy Jack the Ripper: The Murders and the Movies, 63 movies from 1915 to 2001 are included for his research. In the year of 2001 alone, when the movie From Hell was produced, three other movies on the Ripper, Bad Karma, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, and Ripper:
Letter From Hell, were also released. Even after so many years, the popularity of the Ripper has not slowed down in the movie industry. (Meikle, “Appendix”212–35). See also Chen, “The Ripper Fascination”for the medical fascination with the Ripper murders.
The ultimate source of Ripper fascination comes from his mutilation of East End prostitutes in Victorian London; this perhaps would never have manifested had the Ripper killed at a different time or a different place. This is what Paul Begg, a
well-known and productive Ripperologist, regards as the source of Ripper fascination:
“had Jack theRipperkilled anywhereelseorkilled atany othertimehewould today beafootnotein criminalhistory”(
The Definitive History 4). The late Victorian East
End provided the best setting for the collective dark fantasies, with prostitutes as the best prey. Jack the Ripper not only killed; he killed at the right time, in the right place, and targeting the right victims. In the absence of one of these elements, Ripperinterest would probably fade.
However, Begg does not further elaborate on his notion of the simultaneity of time, setting, and target. His reading of the Ripper cases only emphasizes the geographical element, failing to fully illustrate the multiple layers of Ripper
fascination. To continue with Begg’sinquiry of the Ripper case, and to fully illustrate the simultaneity of geographical and biological elements in the fascination, this chapter deals with the construction of the Ripper narratives in late Victorian East End London. I discuss how the narratives of the Ripper, such as media coverage, street literature, and official autopsy examination records, were constructed, disseminated, and then fabricated. I analyze how the Ripper narratives were composed of
geographical and biological elements and how each element involved with the Ripper fascination contributed to the formation of fear of contagions.
Regarding geographical fascination, I argue that East End London is diversely authenticated, or reconstructed, either to prompt or to petrify the collective
fascinations of the slums. It is with these variations in geographical representations, all inspired by the gruesome images of the Ripper, that the mutilated victims and the dark, sullen imagination of the East End reveal the association between personal and
collective memory.
On the level of biological fascination, I argue that Ripper narratives vividly illustrate features of sexuality, sewage, and discipline, each serving to enhance his infamy. I examine the process through which bodily fascinations with the East End are established, frequently challenged, and further elaborated in the collective imagination of the urban body. Using discussions of the Contagious Disease Acts enacted in mid-Victorian Britain, I argue that in many ways, Jack the Ripper is synonymous with the East End, which in turn is closely related to unclean sex with cheap prostitution. In this way, the East End parallels the lower part of the body and is therefore further associated with practical functions of lust, wantonness, and
excrement. Since all Ripper victims were prostitutes, there is a strong moral aspect to the murders, and thus the Ripper case can be read as an urban allegory of bodily morality: that which is unclean, excessive, and immoral, such as the filthy and highly contagious bodies of prostitutes, should be purged through violence. The Ripper is an arbiter of moral judgment.
I decide to use the term narrative for the Ripper case, instead of discourse or text, for several reasons. Narrative fits my purpose for research because it satisfies both the need for close textual reading and demand for analysis of influences from multiple layers of history. The narrative aspect, either in the oral or written form, involves “the recounting of an event or events”(Hawthorn 129); it fully illustrates the point that narratives of the Ripper case are “recountings”of the real historical event intertwined with fictitious elements. In addition, narrativesareseen as“constructions of the raw material of a sequence of events”that “help create rather than report on reality”
(Brooker 172); the term thus highlights the notion of discursive formation.
This chapter also attributes much of its methodological framework and
theoretical approach to Michel Foucault, especially his notion of discursive formation.
According to Foucault, the discursive formation of a certain episteme is closely affiliated with its dominant paradigm. In Foucault’s earlier works. Foucault uses the terms “discursive formation”or “discursive practices”to analyze the kinds of statements affiliated with certain institutions and their ways of establishing the truth of a certain episteme. By episteme, Foucault refers to “the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possible formalized systems”(Archaeology 191).
The truth that is acknowledged and approved in “thetotality ofrelations”isone that“manifeststhesovereign unity ofasubject,aspirit,oraperiod”underthereign
The truth that is acknowledged and approved in “thetotality ofrelations”isone that“manifeststhesovereign unity ofasubject,aspirit,oraperiod”underthereign