Since Sherlock Holmes first appeared in 1887, he has become a global phenomenon. Yet the man Arthur Conan Doyle credited as Sherlock’s prototype has slipped into the shadows. Renowned for his extraordinary talent for detection and diagnosis, 19th-century doctor Joseph Bell amazed onlookers at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh with his ability to read a patient’s ailments, occupation, and personal habits at a single glance. Though such deductive powers were all quite “elementary” to Bell, they had a profound influence on Conan Doyle, a medical student and budding writer. Bell’s methods helped spark the creation of the celebrated detective: By scrutinizing a scratch on a desk, a trace of cigar ash, or the slightest peculiarity of a man’s gait, Bell could turn the smallest clues into revelations.
Author Lindsey Fitzharris brings Bell center stage, recounting how his work took him from ward to witness box as a medical detective probing murder and misdeeds. He worked closely and covertly with police surgeon Henry Duncan Littlejohn and a pioneering ballistics expert named Dr. Watson and even collaborated with Conan Doyle to overturn a homicide conviction. Bell’s forensic investigations took him from gaslit alleyways to Gilded Age drawing rooms, put him on the trail of poisoners and child killers, and even drew him into the hunt for Jack the Ripper.
Fitzharris’s new book, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is available for purchase.
Book Sale Information
General Information
