A distinguished physician and professor of medicine at Edinburgh University, and a forensic expert for the British Crown, Joseph Bell was well known for his remarkable powers of observation and deduction. In what would become true Sherlockian fashion, he had the ability to deduce facts about his patients from otherwise unremarkable details. In one instance recounted by Arthur Conan Doyle himself—and similar to Sherlock Holmes's own observations in "The Greek Interpreter"—Bell took little time to determine that one of his patients had recently served in the army, a non-commissioned officer discharged from his Highland regiment stationed in Barbados:
“The man was a respectful man, but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantitis, which is West Indian and not British.”
Based on extensive research into the life of Bell and including tantalizing accounts of the connections between Bell and Conan Doyle, this biography is required reading for anyone interested in Victorian medicine, in the history of detective fiction, and in Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
Dr. Joe Bell
Model for Sherlock HolmesBy Ely LiebowPopular Press
Copyright © 2007 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87972-197-8 Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................ixForeword..........................................................................................................................xivAfghanistan Perceived: Being the Birth of a Model Detective.......................................................................1I Heir the Bells or The Sign of the Four..........................................................................................11The Prior-y School: Not So Elementary.............................................................................................18Edinburgh University and the Royal Infirmary-A Study in Scarlet...................................................................33"Gladly Wolde He Lerne and Gladly Teche"-In Pursuit of a Career; A Wife; A Hospital; a Brace of Birds.............................41Here's to the Women: Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, Sophia Jex-Blake, the Nurses, the Medical Hopefuls.....................79"Bell the Busybody"-Editor, Mourner, Master Surgeon, Master Teacher, Forensic Expert For The Crown................................106Dr. Watson, Meet Sherlock Holmes: Dr. Bell, Meet Arthur Conan Doyle...............................................................125Impediments to Early Retirement, Or The Game's Still Afoot: Another Job, Another Book, Jack The Ripper............................150"I Read About You Everywhere": Joe Bell, Model for Sherlock Holmes................................................................172The Valley Afar: The Yellow-Leaf Days of a Religious Grandfather..................................................................192"Stand With Me Here on the Terrace": The Open Road, Open Graves, Old Memories.....................................................210Coda: Will the Real Model Rest Easy...............................................................................................222Notes.............................................................................................................................235Bibliography......................................................................................................................242Index.............................................................................................................................247
Chapter One
Afghanistan Perceived: Being the Birth of a Model Detective
It was a raw November morning, 1878, and the lambent blue flames of the gas lamps cast a reassuring light.
"I really don't think you should keep the chap waiting. I believe he's at the door now and frightfully cold." The speaker, thin and wiry, was leaning back in his chair, finger tips pressed together, and his aquiline profile danced in shadow on the wall. Again he urged his medical friend and assistant to hurry. "Observe him closely, though, for he looked most singular dancing outside just now from one foot to the other."
His colleague, grunting and chuckling to himself, went to the door and admitted a bluff, husky man, with wind-chapped cheeks. The man fiddled with an old dusty cap and his face was etched with worry.
"You know my method," said the speaker. "Bring him over here to the front of-the room and let us look at him."
"Good mornin', Sir," said the stranger, with a thick brogue.
"Good morning to you, my good man," said the wiry one, as his keen grey eyes took inventory of all his features. Again he turned to his assistant, moved a syringe from the edge of the table to a shelf, and said, "Well ... what troubles this fellow, eh?"
"How in the world ... sorry ... I mean he looks worried, but they all seem to do that. His face looks chapped, but without a history or without hearing from him, what is there to see?"
"Ah, but you do see. Yes indeed you see, we all see, but often you do not observe." Then turning to the worried stranger: "Your back-it's your back. How it must ache, but carrying a heavy hod of bricks won't improve it."
The stranger, a hod carrier indeed, stepped back as if from a blow, and then asked in a quizzical, canny manner, "I'm not saying ye're wrang, but wha' tell't ye I was a bricklayer to trade?"
Sherlock Holmes interrogating a client? No. The scene was the clinical surgery ampitheatre at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh. The grey-eyed man with the "Look of Eagles" was Dr. Joseph Bell, an extra-legal instructor of clinical surgery. His uncanny diagnostic skills were so great that the students had never seen him make a mistake after that all-searching glance. In the third row, next to J.W. Beggs and A.L. Curor, Arthur Conan Doyle, entranced by yet another of Dr. Bell's uncanny performances, furiously took notes!
Without Sherlock Holmes few indeed would ever have heard of Joseph Bell; without Dr. Joseph Bell, there would be no Sherlock Holmes as we know him. Oh, what a thing is irony.
Arthur Conan Doyle, to stretch irony to its limits, wanted to be remembered as a serious writer-the author of Micah Clarke and The White Company, but if he had never penned the first Sherlock Holmes story, he might not be remembered today; if he had not seen "the face of my old mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell," as he tried his hand at his first detective story, he would have had a totally different detective.
Although Joe Bell, as he was affectionately known to his students and to all of Edinburgh, is inextricably associated with Conan Doyle, his life is nearly as well known to students of medical history and the history of nursing as is Doyle's to every detective fiction aficionado. And like Danny Kaye's movie that begins in the middle for those who come in in the middle, we begin the private life of this dedicated soul in the middle.
The year is 1886 and Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle is a struggling young doctor in a modest home with a prepossessing title: Bush Villa in Southsea. He had been married less than a year, was making less than 300 a year, and his first novel, The Firm of Girdlestone, was being rejected by editor after editor.
Ever the Romantic and perennially the lover of adventure, the young doctor turned to a form that he had correctly analyzed in greater depth and detail than any critic of the day, the detective story. Like his fellow Scotsman, Boswell, Doyle was an inveterate journal-keeper, and from the age of eight he let us know that he was an insatiable reader, spending lunch money on the works of Mayne Reid, Sir Walter Scott, Dickens and Macaulay. Later he became fascinated with his countryman Stevenson, with Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and the Frenchman Emile Gaboriau.
When he finally wrote his first line of detective fiction, the image of Joe Bell at the university flashed upon his inward mind, but Doyle forgot little and was not a waster. In creating perhaps the most famous literary character of all time he did not completely forget Dickens and Collins; he owed much to Poe and Gaboriau; he even learned from the French master-criminal-turned-detective, Vidocq; but most of all he had learned directly from a deductive master, a demon of diagnosis-Dr. Joseph Bell, F.R.C.S.E., M.D. J.P. (Midlothian), D.L. (Edinburgh), etc.
In his autobiography, Sir Arthur himself...
