Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the most popular fictional detectives of all time, Sherlock Holmes, and spawned countless novels, films, television series, etc. featuring the detective. Far fewer people know of Holmes’ real inspiration: a renowned surgeon at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh named Joseph Bell, who taught Conan Doyle when the author was a young medical student. Bell is the subject of a new, eminently readable biography. Sleuth Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmesby medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris.
Fitzharris, a noted science communicator with a penchant for the medically macabre, published a biography of Scottish surgical pioneer Joseph Lister. The art of butcheryin 2017 – a great, if sometimes grisly, read. It followed in 2022 The Facemaker: A visionary surgeon’s fight to heal the disfigured soldiers of World War Iabout a World War I surgeon named Harold Gillies who restored the faces of injured soldiers.
In 2020, Fitzharris hosted a documentary for the Smithsonian Channel. The strange life and death of…Exploring famous deaths, from drug lord Pablo Escobar to wizard Harry Houdini. Fitzharris conducted virtual autopsies, experimented with blood samples, interviewed witnesses and conducted real-time demonstrations in the hopes of gaining new insights. And last year she and her husband, cartoonist Adrian Teal, worked on an illustrated children’s book: Dead ends! Flukes, flops and failures that caused a medical miracle.
With Detective dogFitzharris returns to Edinburgh The art of butcheryof the discovery of the ether by body snatchers and surgeons, which was also the Edinburgh of Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Bell. Bell was notorious for his peculiar method of diagnosis: he was able to deduce a patient’s occupation and personal habits, as well as any complaints, just by looking at them. For example, Bell once discovered which route a patient had taken to walk to the infirmary by identifying the type of clay on the patient’s boots – an incident used by Conan Doyle The sign of four. Bell was also something of a medical detective, working with a local police surgeon on some of the most famous murder cases of his time.
Ars caught up with Fitzharris to find out more.
Ars Technica: What motivated you to write an entire book about Joseph Bell?
Lindsey Fitzharris: I knew about Bell because I’m a medical historian and knew he was an inspiration for this character, but no one had written a major commercial book about him. In 1982 there was a book by a man named Ely Liebow. So people in the Sherlock world know a little bit about Bell through him, but I really wanted to bring a medical history perspective.
