#subcutaneously my dear watson

[muchtohope]

Now that it’s like two weeks after I said I might do it, FINALLY sitting down to talk about Subcutaneously, My Dear Watson by Jack Tracy and I’m just gonna head it off with a read more because I ALREADY KNOW it’s gonna be excessively long ✌ KIND OF half review half summary, all infodump, u know how it is.

content warnings, of course, for drug use and needle mentions

So if you’re unfamiliar, Subcutaneously is a nonfiction writeup on Sherlock Holmes’s cocaine usage in the context of the time period. It takes into consideration everything that was known and/or believed about coke in the 70s (because this was published in 1978) and applies it to Holmes’s behavior throughout the stories to try and understand exactly how affected he might have been by his addiction.

Along with prefacing this by noting the year it was published, it’s ALSO worth pointing out that Jack Tracy is part of the Baker Street Irregulars, so there are points in this book where he refers to Sherlock Holmes and Doyle as if they were BOTH actual people who might have met in person at one point or another, also bearing in mind that the BSIs have some notoriously hot garbage takes.

Coke in Victorian London

So first, the stuff that’s already pretty commonly understood: drugs in 19th century England were not terribly regulated, dangerous addictive substances like opium and morphine and cocaine were legal and readily available. Cocaine first entered the general public’s sphere of awareness around 1884, popularized by our favorite deeply fucked up psychology dad Sigmund Freud. Medical professionals pretty immediately recognized it as a toxic substance and warned against it, but he insisted it was Totally Fine and Not Addictive At All until 1887, when he Stopped That for reasons Tracy does not specify but One Can Guess. Still, same as cigarettes and junk food, just because the doctor says it’s bad for you doesn’t mean you’re not gonna do it, so cocaine wasn’t terribly frowned upon by the average person.

It was only in 1916 that cocaine was restricted to prescriptions. This was, in part, a reaction to events in the US; in 1914, we put up the Harrison Narcotics Act which effectively criminalized addiction (that’s like, another post, I won’t get into it here) and over time, that had a pretty significant impact on the public’s perception of drug users. In the early 1920s, the UK passed the Dangerous Drugs Act which was a similar idea, allowing the government greater control over illicit substances and attempting to advise doctors when not to prescribe them, although overall that act wasn’t quite as invasive as Harrison. Up to THAT point though, cocaine was commonly prescribed to wean addicts off their other vices -- opium and morphine namely, but also cigarettes and alcohol. GENERALLY SPEAKING, doctors really didn’t know much more about these substances than their patients.

Cocaine itself was available in multiple formats: snuff, edibles, cigarettes, ointments, Coca-Cola as we know, and of course, injectable solutions, as was our boy’s preference. Since Victorians didn’t really have much in the way of germ theory, hypodermic needles were treated NOT QUITE as cautiously as they should have been, and a lot of morphine users ended up with really bad bacterial infections at the puncture sites -- Tracy suggests Holmes avoided this SORT OF through dumb luck, as it was likely his cocaine solution was some part boracic acid, added to slow the cocaine’s deterioration in the water and which acted as an antibacterial agent. 

Watson describes Holmes’s coke intake at one point as somewhere around three times daily for months, which Tracy points out is pretty moderate. He does some interesting math based on Holmes’s supposed height and weight, along with the solution cap at 7%, to determine he was probably using 20mg with each dose in order to achieve any sort of satisfying high. Like, it’s Not Great, but Tracy writes that a severe addiction would probably not have that sort of cap on either solution percentage, dosage amount or frequency of dosage. This also makes it believable that Holmes would be able to put the needle down long enough to work a case without getting high. Another fun fact: Holmes’s annual cocaine budget was PROBABLY roughly what you might spend on a year’s Netflix subscription today.

SO. That’s the gist of the factual shit, the rest of it revolves mostly around the chronological timeline of the canon stories and Holmes’s changing relationship with the drug over time. Tracy uses the Baring-Gould timeline as a base, which afaik is the most widely accepted chronology. 

This is where things become LARGELY subjective, and we’re reminded that the author is chronically heterosexual. I HAVE TO preface this by saying that while a lot of his suggestions are interesting to me purely for the sake of Angst, a lot of them are also A LITTLE upsetting to consider. So like, take it all with an entire rock of salt -- this guy does not know that the series ends with them retired together keeping bees in Sussex, he can’t help it.

The Coke Chronology

The first point Tracy makes that immediately threw me was the suggestion that when Watson and Holmes first meet, Holmes has not ever used cocaine before, but rather he picks it up somewhere around the time of Sign of Four. From 1878 (the year Musgrave Ritual takes place) to 1886 (two years before Sign of Four), Holmes is clean, if SUPER depressed. There are a few points here he uses to support this -- first, in Study in Scarlet, Watson describes Holmes as a pleasant roommate. He’s orderly, quiet, mostly keeps to himself despite laying out on the sofa for days at a time. This is in pretty stark contrast to the Holmes popular culture is familiar with, the manic disaster detective he came to be recognized as, and Tracy attributes the change to Holmes taking up coke. 

Another is that Holmes’s opinion of himself and his career was SORT OF lower than dirt when he met Watson. He was convinced he’d already peaked and would never achieve more success than the SPARINGLY little amount he’d already tasted. Watson’s publications undeniably boosted his career, but Tracy looks at the frankly insane amount of stories published which take place between 1887 and 1891 as a result of the energy Holmes got from using coke. The idea, I think, is that rather than spending his down time relegated to a days-long depressive episode on the couch, cocaine offered him the energy and motivation to look for more work. This time period, according to Baring-Gould, encompasses TWENTY-SIX cases (out of the like 60 stories that exist!!) and ends with Final Problem. Watson either directly mentions or alludes to Holmes’s coke usage in six of these stories, most blatantly maybe in Sign of Four, where Watson leaves for married life and ends with Holmes’s alarmingly cavalier comment that I’m good, you got a wife and I got this here cocaine 👌

Tracy’s next take is that Holmes was absolutely clean during his entire post-Reichenbach hiatus. He feels like Holmes’s travels paired with his mission to eliminate Moriarty’s empire was sufficient distraction, and when he returns to London in 1894, he stays clean until the end of 1895. That’s 8 cases he works clean, and his sobriety could easily have played a part in convincing Watson to move in with him again in Empty House. Tracy frames those 8 cases as exemplary work, at least in comparison with some of the cases later on in the timeline, because he works them totally sober. This is kind of a hilarious way to @ Doyle that his later work wasn’t as good, but okay, we’ll work with it.

From late ‘95 to late ‘96, Holmes does not work a single case, at least not any which Watson deemed worth publishing. Tracy refers to this hiatus as Holmes’s first relapse, and suggests that Watson spends this entire year caring for Holmes and helping him recover. Tracy calls back to Watson’s comment in the Missing Three-Quarter that Holmes’s drug use “threatened to check his remarkable career”, which up to that point had not really been true, assuming his usage was as moderate as it sounded pre-Reichenbach. So that KIND OF implies it must have gotten worse at some point, probably here during this relapse.

From this point to spring of ‘97, Holmes works at least 5 cases (including Missing Three-Quarter). This stretch of time ends with Devil’s Foot and goes immediately into another year-long hiatus -- another relapse, maybe, but given that Devil’s Foot has Watson bringing Holmes to Cornwall for some Convalescence™, he had probably already relapsed and the rest of this empty time is spent in Cornwall, away from the stressors of the city, helping him recover again. The implication here is that, despite what Watson says about having already weaned him off the drug, Holmes is still dealing with his addiction and Watson is trying to get a handle on it in the face of changing public attitudes toward addicts. Basically, there’s nothing to see here, he’s all better, please just let us work through this privately.

The last bit here is honestly, in my opinion, the hardest to think about. Tracy writes about the stretch of 9 cases from mid-1898 to mid-1902 as some of Holmes’s worst work, and there’s two parts to why I really hate this.

First, like, it is of course painful to think of Holmes suffering any irreversible consequences of drug abuse. It’s harder, maybe, to think of it as affecting his cognitive abilities, but that’s exactly what Tracy says is happening: Holmes displays symptoms of “cocaine psychosis” (I’m not sure that’s still a relevant medical term, but that’s what he uses here). He specifically points out the too-close-for-comfort resolution in Lady Carfax and calls it a totally avoidable error, had Holmes been as mentally present as he should have been. He also points to the later case, Mazarin Stone, as evidence of Holmes’s love of practical jokes morphing into something “tasteless” and, as Lord Cantlemere says, “perverted”, and attributes all of it to said psychosis.

So that’s rough, and I high key hate it, but the second part is really the knife in my heart, and it has more to do with the relationship between Holmes and Watson at the end of Holmes’s career. Those 9 cases up to 1902, Tracy describes as alternating between near failures, showcases of Holmes erring sometimes GRIEVOUSLY, and impressive examples of what he was still capable of. This, he says, speaks a lot to Watson’s opinion of him during that time, that throwing in those unflattering cases was done A LITTLE BIT out of spite, suggesting that they weren’t really on great terms anymore.

There is a small reprieve in the otherwise totally depressing notion that Holmes and Watson became estranged in part due to Holmes’s addiction, and that is that Tracy believes in that summer of 1902, Holmes quit cocaine for the final time, and the very next case is Three Garridebs. Yes, the great heart beyond that cold mask was 100% sober and that shared moment of deep affection was just that and nothing else.

Around this time though, according to Baring-Gould, Watson has left Holmes, also for the final time, to remarry. Finding himself alone, with no support should he relapse again, Holmes retires at the ripe old age of 49 so as to remove himself again from the stressors and triggers of London and detective work. This doesn’t account for the work he does post-retirement, but it’s assumed he remains sober for the rest of his life.

SO ANYWAY

OVERALL, this is an interesting read, but the further in you get, the bleaker the picture becomes, and I kind of fundamentally disagree with this guy’s view of the relationship Holmes and Watson have. I’ve sort of intentionally skirted a romantic take on it because in the end I’m not sure that would necessarily impact how Watson felt about the entire thing -- romantically involved or not, I completely believe Watson would give years of his life to helping Holmes through his addiction. It’s a cold, sort of utilitarian perspective, but if nothing else, even if he otherwise totally resented Holmes, I still believe he would do what he could to keep him in working order, if only as an act of public service. Like I KNOW. I know. But that’s kind of my point: they were absolutely more to each other than that.

I have a really hard time reading Watson as intentionally publishing stories to tarnish Holmes’s reputation; not that he’s never spiteful, like, we know our boy is fully capable of being a bitch when he wants to, but I just can’t see him being that kind of malicious about what he HAS to recognize (because it was recognized then, and even today in the UK WAY MORE than in the US) as a disease. Like there’s a huge difference between expressing disappointment or disapproval and publicly dragging him. That is Not My John Watson.

I don’t like the idea that some of the most recognizable aspects of Holmes’s personality are because of his coke usage, not just because it sucks to think about but also because a lot of those same attributes are ones I’d more likely chalk up to neurodivergency. There’s too much overlap in the traits Tracy believes are a product of drugs and the traits I recognize as ADHD, manic depression, autism, any number of ND flavors that are a lot more meaningful in a character like Holmes than ascribing all of it to a coke addiction.

And there is of course the otherwise canon disappointment of the notion that Holmes and Watson become estranged after Holmes’s retirement, which for my own sanity I wholly reject, and I reject even harder when it’s paired with the implication that it had anything to do with Watson just trying to close that chapter of his life.

tl;dr, Subcutaneously, My Dear Watson -- interesting, depressing, terminally hetero, as probably expected, you can find copies relatively cheap on Amazon, not sure if it’s available digitally though. It is at the very least something to chew on, especially if you’re out there writing ACD Holmes fics.

Anyway if you made it this far I’m VERY SORRY but I’d love to hear your takes anyway, reactions, questions, whatever SORRY AGAIN HOPE YOU’RE HAVING A GREAT EVENING 💖

[muchtohope]

I got my hands on a copy of Subcutaneously, My Dear Watson and these Harsh Criticisms™ of sherlock holmes as a character are absolutely sending me, this is my boy and I love him -- one guy like “people get put in jail by a coke fiend; how can you trust this bum?” and another guy calling him “a drug addict without a single amiable trait”

[muchtohope]

thinking about writing something up on subcutaneously, my dear watson -- it’s a quick read, I just finished it and there’s a lot of useful stuff about public attitude and beliefs at the time about cocaine, a lot of medical stuff that doesn’t quite hold true anymore, and a LOT of headcanons about what qualifies as proof of holmes’s addiction throughout the books and how it’s evidenced to have affected his relationship with watson, not all of which I agree with 🤔

[thedoctorgoinghome-blog]

There is no direct evidence that [Doyle] and Holmes actually met, his forty-one year association with Watson notwithstanding--in later years Doyle denied ever having set foot in Baker Street--and his role, if any, in Holmes's introduction to drugs will probably never be known.

Subcutaneously, My Dear Watson: Sherlock Holmes and the Cocaine Habit, by Jack Tracy with Jim Berkey

That moment when you realize that a book is Playing The Game.

[thedoctorgoinghome-blog]

In those opening paragraphs of The Sign of the Four, published in 1890, the world was introduced to Sherlock Holmes, cocaine addict—perhaps the best known drug user of all time.

Subcutaneously, My Dear Watson: Sherlock Holmes and the Cocaine Habit, by Jack Tracy with Jim Berkey