22 - Medicine

Summary

I was interested to read what you told me in your last letter as I myself started to study medicine three times, in Dublin, Paris and again in Dublin. I would have been even more disastrous to society at large than I am in my present state had I continued.

(L I 137)

In 1890 the German bacteriologist Robert Koch (1843–1910) unexpectedly announced the discovery of a cure for tuberculosis, one of the most devastating contagious diseases of the time. This announcement was greeted with excitement and Koch's revolutionary finding swiftly promised to become a landmark in medical research. Arthur Conan Doyle, himself a doctor, visited Koch's laboratory in the same year and conveyed some of the excitement surrounding the event in an article in the Review of Reviews:

The stranger must content himself by looking up at the long grey walls of the Hygiene Museum in Kloster Strasse, and knowing that somewhere within them the great master mind is working, which is rapidly bringing under subjection those unruly tribes of deadly micro-organisms which are the last creatures in the organic world to submit to the sway of man.

Sadly, after thorough trials, Koch's famous cure turned out to be ineffective. But Conan Doyle's account, unabashedly comparing the medical practitioner to an unflinching imperialist on his civilising mission, nonetheless illustrates the unrelenting faith invested in medicine and medical research at the turn-of-the-century. And modern medicine's achievements were indeed considerable.