Activity pubs.acs.org/jchemeduc
The Chemical Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Brief Case of the Vile Humour Ken Shaw* The Waterford School, Sandy, Utah, 84103, United States ABSTRACT: This story is a chemical mystery with an emphasis on qualitative analysis. It is, as well, part of a body of work that presents a scientific problem in mystery format in the context of the popular and beloved characters of 221B Baker Street. A break within the story allows readers to ponder and solve the mystery. Holmes and Watson provide the solution in the final paragraphs. KEYWORDS: Elementary/Middle School Science, General Public, High School/Introductory Chemistry
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THE STORY Sherlock Holmes, my friend and mentor, possessed an appetite for crime solving that demanded constant feeding. Were he to go even a few days without a curious case to exercise his skills of ratiocination, a pervasive melancholy would settle in throughout the house at 221B Baker Street. He would become brooding and morose, keeping late hours alone in his room or buried in an obscure text. On some of these occasions of professional drought, he would disappear without notice for several days, only to return home with his clothes torn and his face scratched and bruised. These strange events were eventually attributed to clandestine research into the London underworld, but details failed to ever materialise. Even in the wake of the detective’s most successful case of the Second Stain, Holmes sulked with dissatisfaction. He did this despite his recent achievement by which he employed both deduction and a remarkable feminine instinct to allow England to avoid one war,1,2 even as another two were brewing on the continent. Holmes held a particularly pessimistic view of impending war as unlike anything seen before; a very modern and scientific conflagration in which, he imagined, a chemist on each side would approach the frontier with only a bottle. With speculation in the press over the possible existence of such chemical weapons, some containing poison gases such as phosphorous and still a newer class Holmes referred to as halogens, these were dark and uncertain days for England, and Holmes appeared to me to be a cipher for the suspicions and anxieties of an entire people. It was during this period of restless inactivity that a small case of chemical interest fell into our hands. We received it in the home of an elderly neighbor, as we had been summoned to attend him in the throes of some unknown agony. It proved to be just the medicine Holmes required to lift his spirits. The patient gesticulated at our arrival. “I swear to you, Doctor Watson, I am not losing my mind! I am a retired scholar, I am in complete control of my faculties, and I am telling you that a hideous green jelly apparitioned in the drinking glass on my bed stand last night. My nurse can confirm it. She saw it as well.” The aging man, about 60 years or more, was not my patient, as I was strictly reminded by his disapproving nurse, so I should © 2012 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
not provide a diagnosis without proper examination. Nevertheless, there seemed nothing seriously wrong with him. He was decrepit to only a minor degree, with some bed lesions and varicosis, and he appeared perhaps slightly jaundiced, but he was by no means weak. On the contrary, his temperament was voluble and highly charged. He grabbed at his sheets and wiped sweat from his gaunt face, very full of energy. If the man suffered from any affliction, I suspected it was a consuming fear of dying, resulting in a kind of narcissistic hysteria and related hypochondria, by which every finger of fate was pointing in the same direction. I had treated men with these symptoms before, some from the Afghan frontier, their bodies and minds injured after fierce battles, but often among older men as well, as they grew nearer their maker. I had surmised this state of mortal panic would be most common among atheists, but the man before me firmly believed in God. He believed in a number of them, in fact, invoking references to Jupiter and Poseidon and Yahweh and Moloch, as well as a number of saints. Whatever his beliefs, however, fear was driving him to madness. “Oh it is a sign!” he cried. He gestured sharply with his head, and long, matted locks of silver hair flew across his face. The nurse stood quaking at the door, appearing dehydrated and frail. She was perhaps even older than her patient, her thinning hair concealed beneath a white habit, but her eyes were focused and clear. She spoke with a strong, stern voice, in an accent of Scotland, perhaps Glasgow. “That would be true, doctor, I saw it too. The color was more to blue than green, though. It was not from any living body, I say. It was viscous and greasy, and it was very dark. Very unnatural, not at all vital.” “Yes, exactly, a green jelly!” the old man cried and nodded, with wide desperate eyes. “A phantom, it was!” “And where is it now, this colorful-jellied mass that mortified you so?” asked Holmes, unaffected by the man’s emotional display. We had been called to this neighbor’s home by Mrs. Hudson, our landlady, who had taken a fondness for a young maid from 110 Baker Street whom she met at market. The poor flustered girl arrived suddenly at 221B Baker Street that morning, requesting immediate help with the master of her house who had been stricken down with death terrors. Mrs. Published: February 23, 2012 640
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medicine with the hot drink. Holmes, mixing his own tea with an apothecary’s precision, laughed loudly when he heard this, but he did not elaborate. The man lifted the medicine dropper with shaking hands and slowly dripped the pale liquid into his tea. His eyes suddenly grew wide with horror. “Caesar’s ghost!” he shouted. “It has turned from amber to black before my very eyes! Black as tar macadam! My tea has become death, destroyer of worlds!” He waved his arms in a wild fit, throwing hot tea and china everywhere. The nurse and I rushed to the bed. “Colonial ink, I believe the Americans called it,” said Holmes, laconically. “Tea, steeped in iron. They actually wrote with it quite well. The inky substance is ferrous tannate, a dark precipitate formed in the reaction with tannic acid, common in English teas. I should think this confirms that your medicinal solution is indeed very rich in iron. The question now becomes what may have been in your night-time glass of water, which reacted with the very same dissolved iron to conjure a hideous, heterogeneous, green phantom!”
Hudson pleaded with Holmes to assist, but I agreed instead. Holmes followed, without enthusiasm. “I discarded the thing at once,” replied the nurse, tartly. “It was perhaps a foul contagion or a sinister humour.” “A sinister humour?” Holmes charged, incredulously, as he retrieved his magnifying glass to examine the drain. “Nurse, from whom did you receive your medical training, the village barber?” I shook my head, as I recorded notes. Like Holmes, I often braced against the persistence of antiquated notions such as chemical transmutation, magic tonics, mystical alchemy, vitalism, and even foul humours. Such superstition was most vexing in this so-called modern age. It was an affront to all who stood for science and enlightened reason. This poor nurse, however, who must have been at least 70, undoubtedly possessed a vast life experience of caretaking with folk remedies, affected by suffering but untouched by recent advances in medicine; which informed her that foul was never fair but always foul, and must be destroyed at once. I looked up from my note pad to see her frost-lidded blue eyes fixed on Holmes, with hesitant anger. Neither spoke for a long moment. The sleuth sniffed at his fingers. “So am I to take it,” I asked, helpfully, “you poured the material down the drain?” “Aye, doctor, I did that,” she said, adding, “with plenty of water. The vile thing is gone, thanks be to God.” The old man groaned and rolled in his bed. “I am sentenced to death, I know it. The humour is an omen!” Clear drool poured from his curled lips as the pale man wept like a frightened child. “Now see here,” I said, with some authority, “I have heard no death warrant. What you describe could be gastric juice or bile or blood, and, if so, there are well-tested treatments for the causative ailments. However there is no indication that this strange substance even came from your body, or any other. As you say, it simply appeared in your glass of drinking water in the middle of the night. Did you do nothing to precipitate this unusual reaction?” The poor man wiped tears from his eyes and snorted loudly, attempting to regain some composure. “It was late,” he said. “I had awoken from a terrible dream and remembered to take my iron medicine. My blood is very poor, you see. I added a dose to my water, just a few drops from the medicine dropper on my nightstand. See, there.” With a thin, quivering finger, he pointed to a small glass vial, which contained faint orange liquid. Holmes immediately lifted the bottle, removed the dropper, and sniffed at the contents. “A solution of iron, you say?” He stared closely at the bottle. “It looks to be a mixture of ferric chloride and ferrous sulphate, as a few crystals have precipitated on the glass.” Ignoring what was, for him, mere gibberish, the man groaned once more, “Oh, I am dying.” I recommended, as firmly as my position would allow, that the patient be removed from his own bed and taken to a hospital, if only to unburden the increasingly agitated nurse. Then, tea arriveda jarring non sequitur, but which seemed a surprise only to mecarried by the concerned young maid. I had little doubt that she would soon scurry away to inform her friend, our Mrs. Hudson, of progress in our investigation, to which I could thus far report none. The man insisted on a hot cup of tea with honey, despite my warning that black tea was known to exacerbate stomach conditions such as peritonitis or ulcer. The nurse at least stipulated that he take his iron
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QUESTIONS What household chemical is in the drinking glass besides water? “Did you do nothing to precipitate this unusual reaction?” Dr. Watson had asked. How might this statement be interpreted as foreshadowing?
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THE SOLUTION The nurse was mopping up the spilled tea with whatever towels were available, while I removed shards of teacup from the bed. “Heavens,” she said, annoyed, “this mess will surely stain the sheets.” She hurried to the window just outside the bedroom to retrieve from the sill a clear jar that very much resembled the man’s drinking glass. “Just a wee bit of this cleaning fluid should remove the offence.” She placed a corner of her white medical apron into the clear liquid in the glass and began dabbing it against the stain. Holmes leaned his long frame delicately over the jar and inhaled deeply through his aquiline nose. “Do you presume this cleaning fluid to contain ammonia?” “I do,” she replied, now scrubbing furiously. “The liquid is cleansing, and the vapors restore the spirits.” “Madam, there is no ammonia in your glass.” “There most certainly is. I prepared it myself.” She abruptly stopped her scrubbing. Holmes continued, “Despite my years of exposure to a wide variety of concentrated fumes, my sense of smell remains remarkably acute. There is no ammonia in your glass, none.” The old man had stopped reeling in his bed and now pursed his lips pensively. “I remember smelling ammonia last night, in fact. It was the first thing I recalled from my dream. In it I was choking.” “Ha! Of course you were!” fired Holmes, smiling widely for the first time. “My heavens, no,” said the nurse, her jaw slowly descending. She raised her eyes with the terrible realisation that she had, in fact, confused the two glasses of clear liquid, placing an ammonia solution next to her patient’s bed and his drinking glass on the windowsill outside his room. She remembered that she had prepared both glasses at the same time, just before retiring to bed. With her cleaning solution in place, she intended to wake before dawn to clean the window outside his room, allowing the healing south rays of the sun to provide 641
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therapy. Meanwhile, her patient was placed in a position to retch, should he ever imbibe his drinking water during the night. Holmes dripped the iron solution into some ammonia procured by the nurse, and a dark, green−blue mass formed, with tentacles of protoplasm radiating outward in a growing spectacle. “The precipitation is fantastic,” the sleuth said, admiringly, as he gazed through his magnifying glass. “I would say it is ferrous hydroxide, an alkaline compound formed from the base, aqueous ammonia, and the iron. The consistency is gelatinous indeed.” Holmes made a few notes (see Figure 1),
Figure 1. An excerpt from Holmes’s handwritten journal.
and looked over towards the amazed patient. “By Jove,” bellowed the sleuth, “it is a sign! No, two signspositive and negative!” Some months later, I chanced to see the old pair outside their house, he complaining of the chill and coughing into a handkerchief, she making a fuss of his collars and buttons. The man looked no closer to death, but a bit happier for the attentive company. The End.
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AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected].
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I remember learning about colonial ink and green ammonia blobs from a book by Vicki Cobb,3 given to me when I first started teaching in the 1980s. I thank the author for inspiring this tale, and I still follow her sage advice that amateur chemists should befriend their local pharmacist. I also wish to thank Isabelle Rosett for her excellent editorial suggestions, all of which were followed to the letter.
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REFERENCES
(1) Doyle, A. C. The Adventure of the Second Stain. In The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; George Newnes, Ltd: London, 1892. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/108/108-h/108-h.htm#H2H_4_ 0013 (accessed Jan 2012). (2) The Chemical Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. J. Chem. Educ. 2011; Virtual Issue 1. http://pubs.acs.org/page/jceda8/vi/1 (accessed Jan 2012). (3) Cobb, V. Chemically Active! Experiments You Can Do at Home; Harper and Row, Publishers: New York, 1985.
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