Former Wired executive editor Goetz (The Decision Tree) offers an intriguing medical and literary history based on “accidental partners in a profound social shift toward science and away from superstition.”
Robert Koch, a meticulous and ambitious German country doctor-turned-scientist, isolated the bacteria causing TB and, Goetz writes, in doing so “offered a template” not only for medical science but for “all scientific investigation.”
Physician and Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle also viewed “science as a tool,” and Koch’s work in microbiology “provided the template” for Doyle’s fictional detective’s fascination “with minuscule detail.”