Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [56]
Every biographer summing up Ehrlich’s life mentions his passion for detective fiction. Martha Marquardt, for instance, revealed that Saturdays at the lab were made sacred by the arrival of the latest issue of the doctor’s favorite crime magazine, with, as she described with an implied tsk-tsk, “its cover showing the most lurid pictures of murder.” This weekly serial magazine was probably akin to the American “pulps” that became popular in the early 1900s, such gritty treats as Detective Story Magazine, Black Mask, and The Shadow. Though they were called pulps because of the cheap, wood-specked paper they were printed on, the stories were sensational and soaked in intrigue. Paul would devour the new issue that same night, Marquardt reported, and it never failed to distract the doctor from his true-life problems.
Ehrlich was also a huge admirer of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a signed portrait of whom held pride of place on the wall of his study. He owned copies of many of his books, several of which had been personally inscribed by the Scottish physician-turned-author. As to the when and wherefore of the first “meeting” between Ehrlich and Sir Arthur’s most esteemed creation, the inimitable Sherlock Holmes, my sources do not say. But if one considers that the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887), was published just a few months before Ehrlich began his convalescence, it’s not too great a stretch to imagine he brought along a copy of the new whodunit.
“Voilà, hemoglobin.”
While A Study in Scarlet is most memorable for presenting the first meeting between Holmes and Dr. John Watson, I take particular notice of what immediately follows this historic handshake. Holmes, in his own estimation, has just made an utterly brilliant discovery about bloodstains. He seizes Watson by the coat sleeve and tugs him into the spacious laboratory to demonstrate said brilliance. Given that arrests were often made long after the commission of a violent act, the detective explains, it had theretofore been difficult for the London police to prove that incriminating stains found on a suspect’s clothing were blood rather than, say, fruit or rust stains. But no longer, as Holmes shows. He pricks his own finger with a needle, draws some blood into a pipette, and stirs a drop into a liter of water. Of course, all evidence of scarlet disappears. But wait. Holmes, re-creating an actual forensics innovation of the time, crushes a few white crystals into the water, followed by several drops of a transparent fluid. In an instant, the liquid takes on a dull mahogany color, and a brownish precipitate collects at the bottom. Voilà, hemoglobin. Holmes is so delighted with himself he’d be patting himself on the back were his hands not occupied with the experiment.
When Dr. Ehrlich did read A Study in Scarlet, I can’t help but wonder if he noted the characteristics he and Sherlock Holmes shared: how both men’s hands, to borrow Watson’s words, were “invariably blotted with ink and stained with chemicals”; how, although they both brought a broad background in the sciences to whatever subject was at hand, each possessed an enthusiastic “knowledge of sensational literature”; and how both men incessantly smoked strong tobacco (no, not even TB could make Ehrlich give up cigars). There may have even been aspects of this character’s life that Ehrlich dreamed of having for himself—the unquestioned autonomy, for instance; the instant respect; and, perhaps above all, that gloriously spacious laboratory.
Brushing aside all speculation now, the fact is, when the Ehrlichs