The Doctor and the Detective: A Cultural History of Diagnosis

Under contract, Johns Hopkins University Press

Sherlock Holmes wasn't born in a vacuum. As a young doctor in training, I noticed that most physicians agreed upon one thing: that diagnosis is a type of investigation, like detection. Arthur Conan Doyle was a physician who understood this fundamental connection. But this alliance has a long history.

For over 150 years, diagnosis and detection have co-evolved across medicine, culture, and literature. From Edgar Allan Poe's fascination with René Laennec's stethoscope to contemporary physicians using mysteries to teach clinical reasoning, these twin arts have shaped how we understand bodies, illness, and scientific processes themselves.

The Doctor and the Detective: A Cultural History of Diagnosis uncovers their shared intellectual genealogy. Through comparative analysis of medical and literary sources—from case reports to detective fiction, hospital wards to crime scenes—it reveals how popular fictional genres drew inspiration from scientific medicine, while medicine gained cultural authority from the metaphor of detection. Over time, writers, social analysts, and physicians themselves have wielded detective tropes as a critique of medicine, and fiction developed into an intellectual testing ground for examining diagnosis and its role in the world. This book argues that this history is essential for understanding and reimagining diagnostic practice in an era of tectonic technological shifts.