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ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE'S The Sign of Four (1890) opens with Sherlock Holmes removing his hypodermic syringe from its trim leather case on the mantelpiece, methodically scanning his arm, and injecting himself with his famous 7% solution of cocaine. Cocaine had only come to public attention six years previously, late in 1884, when its properties as a local anaesthetic had been discovered. At first the drug was hailed all but unequivocally as a triumph of modern medical science, but within a few years escalating reports of cocaine poisonings and addiction prompted a reassessment of this early optimism. By the late 1880s and early 1890s, cocaine was already being grouped with more established addictive substances (opium, alcohol, and morphine), and while many still extolled its virtues, a steady stream of articles appeared warning against cocaine intoxication, toxicity, and addiction. Thus it seems peculiar that Conan Doyle-a medical doctor himself- should portray cocaine in the way he does in The Sign of Four, situating Holmes's use of the drug firmly outside contemporary medical discourses and anxieties about addiction. But in fact Conan Doyle's depiction of cocaine in the Holmes stories is predicated upon the use of the drug as a symbol for Holmes's character and his work as a private detective.
The conventional interpretation of Holmes's cocaine habit is that it demonstrates his "counter-cultural"1 status and his "eccentric, languid Bohemian[ism]."2 In relation to The Sign of Four, often the contention is that the detective's blithe cocainism represents a foreign (even colonial) contamination of his body, just as the Agra treasure and the Anglo-Indian returnee Johnathan Small represent a colonial corruption of the British homeland. The predominant view, according to Benjamin D. O'Dell, is that the 7% solution effectively dissolves colonial boundaries, that "Holmes's injection collapses the distinction between foreign and domestic, dismantling Victorian gentility to illustrate a savage core."3 However, cocaine is actually a powerful synecdoche for the focused ideality of Holmes's professional life. Cocaine symbolises the detective's dedication to his profession, his absolute ascendancy within that profession, and also the acute modernity of his professional existence. To that end, Conan Doyle capitalises on the confused, ambiguous discourse still encircling cocaine in the years preceding the composition and publication of The Sign of Four. He makes use of...