Long message alert!
This is off a website, can't remember the name but if you
Google search for Sherlock Holmes and cocaine it'll pop up.
There is more, and a lot of other articles that will interest
any Holmesians. I think you are right though in that it is
latter day adaptations of Holmes that have made such an issue
of his drug use/abuse. This article goes on to say that the
most surprising thing about it at the time was Watson's
vehement opposition to it - well ahead of the rest of the
medical community. Just to get this back on group matters I
don't think Holmes is hardboiled either. However, asskicking
carpenter's son, on the run from authority, mesmerising
speaker, on the mean streets of judea but not mean himself,
HB or what? Colin, flippantly
Conan Doyle was a prolific and rapid writer who contributed
more than thirty full-length books, over one hundred and
fifty short stories, as well as numerous poems, plays, essays
and pamphlets but is best known for the four novels and
fifty-six short stories that comprise the Holmesian canon.
The first story A Study in Scarlet, was published initially
in November 1887 and the final study Shoscombe Old Place was
published in The Strand in April 1927. Holmes's much
publicised drug habit is directly observed in only two
stories: The Sign of Four (1890) and A Scandal in Bohemia
(1891) with vague or historical references in seven other
tales. Why did Doyle inflict his character with this
behavioural flaw? The view promoted by some Holmesian
scholars (5) that this was for "no other reason than to add
to his idiosyncrasies" is unsatisfactory. Doyle had watched
his own father's addiction to alcohol result in his eventual
commitment to mental institutions. His medical knowled!
ge of drugs also added to his appreciation of cocaine's
potency (6). Another biographer suggested that because Doyle
began writing A Study in Scarlet on 8 March 1886, the same
day that an article on cocaine appeared in one of Doyle's
favorite periodicals, Chambers Journal, that this supplied
him with the idea for Holmes's addiction (7). This is a
flawed deduction for no reference was made to cocaine in the
story, although Watson states that he "might have suspected
him of being addicted to the use of some narcotic had not the
temperance and cleanliness of his whole life forbidden such a
notion". Doyle had no intention of serialising this fiction
and was only enticed to do so by Joseph Stoddart several
years later. Thus it is implausible that Doyle would lay down
this suspicion to be proven true in later adventures.
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