“Confession and Profession”: Vouching for the Truth in Hamlet and Sherlock Holmes

Abstract

It is 1887. A doctor recently returned to London from Afghanistan is looking for modest lodgings. He is introduced, via a mutual friend, to a rather singular stranger. Within moments, that stranger – not himself a medical man – begins musing aloud about the properties of haemoglobin, and proceeds, rather alarmingly, one might say almost histrionically, to take blood from himself by inserting a slender dagger, of the sort known as a bodkin, into his finger. He draws off a few drops into a pipette and subsequently dissolves them in water. But the experiment does not end there:

As he spoke, he threw into the vessel a few white crystals, and then added some drops of a
transparent fluid. In an instant the contents assumed a dull mahogany colour, and a brownish dust was precipitated to the bottom of the glass jar.
(A Study in Scarlet 13)

Shakespeare in Southern Africa Vol. 16 2004: pp. 1-14