Lucinda Bennett, the Medical Librarian at Ascension St Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, MD, publishes a regular series on Art in Medicine and The Health Humanities.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
It is, perhaps, common knowledge that the world’s most famous detective is in fact quite fictional. For over a century the long shadow of Sherlock Holmes has covered the mystery genre in an all encompassing hold. While the first acknowledged detective story is properly attributed to Edgar Allan Poe, the methodology of Sherlock Holmes and his friend John Watson set the standard for modern criminal investigation stories. What might not be so commonly known is how the author of such novels approached and created said narratives. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is known as a writer but that was not always his intended career - he was actually a physician first.
“After graduating from Edinburgh University with the degree of Bachelor of Medicine in 1881 (the MD was then an advanced degree which he would earn by writing a thesis four years later), Conan Doyle took a faltering stab at general medical practice, followed by a disastrous attempt to establish himself, in London, as a specialist in eye surgery. Of the latter effort, fashionable London took no notice. His waiting room on Harley Street was poshly appointed, in a neighborhood home to some of the most famous physicians in the world, but Conan Doyle quickly discovered that he was the only person waiting in it.
Now facing an abyss of poverty and professional isolation (the familiar story goes), and lacking social connections or private income, Conan Doyle seized on an untested resource. He turned to writing, brokering a nascent talent into a brilliant and lucrative career, never neglecting to incorporate elements of medicine into his fictional work. And yet, in the canonical account of his life, the literary lion remained at heart a medical man. Who was Sherlock Holmes, after all, but a doctor with surpassing powers of deduction who chose to specialize in the diagnosis of crime?” (Hektoen International)
Sherlock Holmes Portrait
Artist: Sidney Paget, Drawing 1904, Wiki Commons
As is the case with all authors, Doyle pulled from the world he knew and the experiences of his life. While his tenure as a doctor was far shorter than his career as an author, the training he had in the medical field carried through in his writings. According to the timelines established by the Conan Doyle Estate, the young Arthur was a C student in medical school with a near insatiable wanderlust. He took a position as a ship’s doctor in the arctic, various short lived internships across the United Kingdom, and even traveled as far as Vienna to study German and hear lectures of the top physicians on the continent. During that time he observed the people and places he encountered, some of which made a great impact upon the formation of the titular character that would make him famous. “His model for Sherlock Holmes was Joseph Bell, MD, FRCSE, a renowned surgeon who worked at the royal infirmary and attended to Queen Victoria during her visits to Scotland. Dr. Doyle considered Dr. Bell the most important person whom he encountered during his own medical training. Dr. Bell was known for his inductive reasoning skills, observations, and clinical judgment—not to mention his timeless sense of style. Even today, more than a century later, one witnesses the classic deerstalker hat and tweed coat available as a Halloween costume for Art in Medicine September 2025 all ages. Dr. Bell recognized potential in Dr. Doyle during his medical training and selected him for an outpatient clerkship. It is here that the character study of Dr. Bell began…not only a master diagnostician, but also was known to make extraordinary observations about patients. He could discern where a sailor had traveled based on his tattoos, was able to determine patients’ specific regional origins by their accent, and could detect their profession by looking at their hands. He was reported to have noted that a man was a cobbler by the particular way the inside of the knee of the trousers was worn. He could also tell, by observing behavior and mannerisms, if someone had lied to him.” (American College of Surgeons)
What also concerned Doyle was the swiftly changing world of medicine and the relationship between physicians and patients. As information spread faster than ever with inventions such as telegraphs and newspapers wrote stories about scientific discoveries, the public became privy to the once closed world of medicine. As such, the genre of medical journalism exploded in popularity, as did medical fiction.
“...between 1892 and 1894 Conan Doyle published seven short pieces in The Idler: an illustrated magazine, a periodical which actively positioned its readers in close relationship with its contributors. Proximity between the public and experts had significance in medicine during this period: it was a contradictory time in the practice of medicine when professionalisation and specialisation had resulted in an increasing distance between the profession and the public, yet general practitioners’ financial success depended on maintaining good relationships with their patients and popular medical journalism proliferated.” (Authority and Medical Expertise) Yet for all his publishing in the field of medical fiction and attempts to make a private practice successful, it was not to be. From his background in medicine, of which he was very proud and vocal, came the novels which changed the mystery genre forever. Methods of investigating disease became the foundation of a genius detective. “His first Sherlock Holmes tale, the novel A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887, and the second, The Sign of Four, in 1890. They did not create much stir, but in 1891 and ’92 the first Sherlock Holmes short stories appeared in the then-new Strand Magazine and became an enormous transatlantic sensation. This soon made him one of the best-known and highest-paid writers in the world. In the end, over a forty-year period, he wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.” (The Official Conan Doyle Estate)
References:
The Official Conan Doyle Estate
Authority and medical expertise: Arthur Conan Doyle in The Idler
Reprinted with the generous permission of Ms. Bennett.