Elementary, Dr Bell

Abstract

“It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes, and although in the stories I have the advantage of being able to place him in all sorts of dramatic positions, I do not think that this analytical work is in the least an exaggeration of some of the effects which I have seen you produce in the out-patient ward”, wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to his former clinical surgery teacher Joseph Bell on May 4, 1892. Before he became a famous writer, Conan Doyle studied medicine at a time when students were taught the importance of detailed personal observation of patients. Bell, renowned for his skill in diagnosing patients' illnesses and deducing details of their personal lives by meticulous observation of their physical appearances, made Conan Doyle his outpatient clerk at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in 1878, enabling him to observe Bell's deductive “method”. Holmes and Dr John H Watson first appeared in 1887, in A Study in Scarlet. By 1892, when The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was published, they were fast becoming the world's most popular pair of literary characters. A Royal Society of Medicine exhibition, based on an earlier show at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, shows how Conan Doyle based some of Holmes's fictional explanatory monologues, delivered to the less observant Watson, on Bell's observations of real patients. The exhibition also reveals how other Edinburgh medical men informed the Holmes novels, including Sir Robert Christison, who taught materia medicine and was an expert in studying poisons; and Sir Henry Littlejohn, who taught medical jurisprudence and was an expert witness for many notorious Scottish murder cases. Conan Doyle also drew on his own family members to add narrative flesh to Holmes's fictional bones. The detective's addiction to cocaine, first mentioned in The Sign of Four (1890), reflects Conan Doyle's father's battle with alcohol addiction. His father's conversational style also inspired Holmes's wit and observation. A self-effacing letter from Bell was published in The Strand Magazine in 1892. “Dr. Conan Doyle by his imaginative genius has made a great deal out of very little and his warm remembrance of one of his old teachers has coloured the picture…Dr. Doyle's genius and vivid imagination has on this slender basis made his detective stories a distinctively new departure but he owes much less than he thinks to yours truly Joseph Bell.” But the exhibition in Wimpole Street, London, just 10 minutes' walk from Holmes's fictional Baker Street home, establishes that Bell was Conan Doyle's primary inspiration and source for the detective's character. Photographs of Bell, wearing a deerstalker hat and tweed coat, indicate that he also influenced the detective's distinctive sartorial style.