An Appetite for Injection: Addiction, Gender, and Race in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four (1890)

Abstract: This essay explores representations of injection in nineteenth-century medical and literary culture. Through an analysis of medical texts, I show how injection came to be understood through descriptions of racial and gender difference borrowed, in part, from literary culture. By unpacking how moments of injection, perforation, and interpretive crisis in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four rely on tropes of race, gender, and sexuality that nineteenth-century physicians used to understand addiction, this essay underscores the importance of the hypodermic needle for the invention of addiction as a concept ineluctably shaped by the social and political hierarchies of British imperial culture.