As many fans of Sherlock Holmes know, Arthur Conan Doyle had a real-life inspiration when he created the world’s most famous fictional detective. His muse was Joseph Bell, the surgeon who taught Conan Doyle when the future author was a medical student in Edinburgh.
In Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, author Lindsey Fitzharris offers a biography of Bell and his enterprising methods. Though the connection between Bell and Holmes has long been documented, Fitzharris draws on Bell’s private diary to paint her subject’s portrait with greater detail.
A vivid writer, Fitzharris throws a subtle nod toward Conan Doyle’s performative literary style in her own evocation of Victorian life. “Gas lamps hissed and guttered, throwing quivering shadows over the masonry,” she writes of 19th-century Edinburgh. Her previous books, which include a study of medical pioneer Joseph Lister, place her on familiar ground in exploring period Scotland.
Fitzharris also hosts an unexpectedly charming web series about medical history, and Bell, readers are reminded, had a gift for theater, too. His zeal for deductive reasoning when examining patients has obvious parallels to Holmes, who enthralled readers by extrapolating tiny shards of evidence into a larger whole. “A pinprick-speckled forefinger betrayed a tailor,” Fitzharris writes of Bell’s powers of observation. “A worn area on the inside of the knee of a man’s trousers indicated he was a cobbler.”
There was a reason, Fitzharris argues, why physicians like Bell might have used such guesswork instead of simply asking patients for basic case histories. Medicine was widely mistrusted back then, so patients might not be forthcoming.
“No surgical procedure or pathogen is named after him, no instrument or anatomical discovery stands as his legacy,” Fitzharris writes. But in shaping Sherlock Holmes, as readers of this colorful biography learn, Bell earned immortality, which is perhaps the best medical trick of all.
