Detecting the Disease: The Sherlock Holmes Paradigm
Scientists, epidemiologists and medical researchers in their studies on Coronavirus, focused on the detection of its origin and on the interest to trace back the trail of contagion, have often compared their activity to Sherlock Holmes’s investigations. In particular, the references to Sherlock Holmes abound in Chinese medical reports on Coronavirus, which referred to this well-known Western literary and cultural icon to remark the international impact of the pandemic. Moreover, “The Adventures of the Dying Detective” (1913) by Conan Doyle, where Holmes is (seemingly) infected by a deadly tropical disease, may be seen as a possible declination of “The Sherlock Holmes Paradigm” – which identifies with the investigator’s fight against contamination, disease and infection coming from “outside” – and, at the same time, as a narrative anticipating contemporary perceptions and fears of the virus as a metaphorical and biological threat menacing, and altering, our Western lifestyle. In the literary and artistic field, the “Sherlock Holmes Paradigm” has been adopted and updated in a series of neo-Victorian texts directly or indirectly borrowing from Holmes’s adventures: from David Stuart Davies’s Sherlock Holmes. The Shadow of the Rat (2010) to Tom Holland’s Supping with Panthers (1996) and The Affinity Bridge (2008) by George Mann. Here Sherlock Holmes and Holmesian investigators have to face diseases contaminating London, proving that the scientific methods adopted by Doyle’s detective are an extremely useful and widely-applied approach in both medical and literary discourse.
Saverio Tomaiuolo is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at Cassino University, Italy. His areas of research are translation and adaptation studies, Victorian Literature, and neo-Victorianism. He has published In Lady Audley’s Shadow. Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and Victorian Unfinished Novels. The Imperfect Page (Palgrave, 2012). More recently, he has written an entry on “neo-Victorianism” in the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature (eds. Dino Franco Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert and Linda K. Hughes, 2015). His latest book is entitled Deviance in neo-Victorian Culture: Transgression, Canon, Innovation (Palgrave, 2018). Forthcoming is a new project on the Italian /screen adaptations of Victorian novels.
