The Adventure of the Manufactured Miracle (The Midwinter Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes Book 1) (16 page)

[42]
Of all of the various forms of leukemia, a rare subtype known as acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) is particularly sensitive to arsenic, which is still employed today as part of its cure.

[43]
The Bradford sweets case was the accidental arsenic poisoning of more than 200 people in Bradford, England, in 1858; an estimated 20 people died when sweets accidentally made with arsenic were sold from a market stall. The event contributed to the passage of the Pharmacy Act 1868 in the United Kingdom and legislation regulating the adulteration of foodstuffs.

[44]
One of the first things that Watson recognized about Mr. Sherlock Holmes was that he had a “good practical knowledge of British law” (Chapter II,
A Study in Scarlet
).

[45]
Waterloo Bridge was referred to with sad irony as London’s ‘Bridge of Sighs’ for the numerous suicidal leaps that took place from its railings. There was even an 1844 poem by Thomas Hood commemorating this sad tradition. John Openshaw was murdered on this bridge by the K.K.K. (
The Five Orange Pips
).

[46]
Holmes would go on to condone justifiable private revenge again, most famously in the assassination of the king of all the blackmailers (
The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton
).

[47]
Watson’s famous list of Holmes’ limits suggests that his knowledge of astronomy was ‘nil’ (Chapter II,
A Study in Scarlet
).

[48]
When he refers to the Napoleon of crime, Holmes is of course speaking about Professor Moriarty (Chapter I,
The Valley of Fear
).

[49]
It has been argued that the famous quote of Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) to Napoleon Bonaparte is apocryphal, though there is little doubt that Laplace was either a deist (as were most of the great scientists and philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment, including many of the founding fathers of the United States, as well as Victorians like Alfred Lord Tennyson) or an agnostic, and thus, the quote is certainly plausible. Deism is the belief that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient to determine the existence of a Higher Power, accompanied with the rejection of revelation and authority as a source of religious knowledge, with a disbelief in supernatural events such as miracles.

[50]
There is very little evidence in the Canon that Holmes possessed any particular religious inclinations. We know that he made a special study on the Buddhism of Ceylon (Chapter X,
The Sign of Four
), and visited with the head (or Dalai) Llama of Lhasa, while living in Buddhist Tibet for two years (
The Empty House
). Watson even once described Holmes as sitting “upon the floor like some strange Buddha” (
The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger
). Holmes admitted that his “Biblical knowledge is a bit rusty” (
The Crooked Man
) and he also did not appear disturbed by the magnum opus of Professor Coram in which his analysis of the documents found in the Coptic monasteries of Syria and Egypt cut deep at the very foundations of the revealed Abrahamic religions (
The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez
). Holmes was also a passionate devotee of William Winwood Reade’s book,
The Martyrdom of Man
, which was a secular history of the Western world, with rather outspoken attacks upon Christian dogma (Chapters II & X,
The Sign of Four
). There are few instances of Holmes having any sense of a higher power. One such is when he referred to flowers as evidence of the “the goodness of Providence” (
The Adventure of the Naval Treaty
). However, a close reading of the case suggests that at the time of that comment Holmes was being purposely distracting, so any such reference must be viewed with suspicion. Holmes also comments on the terrible mystery of the universe at the conclusion of the grim case of
The Cardboard Box
. The most likely conclusion is that Holmes was either a Buddhist or a deist, or some combination of the two, and while those particular religious leanings perhaps situated upon him a skeptical viewpoint of some of the trappings of the Christian version of the midwinter solstice, they would not have limited him from enjoying the season as a whole, nor prevented him from developing his own interpretation of its deeper meaning.