A physician’s failed practice launched Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) trained as a doctor in Edinburgh and opened a practice in Portsmouth that attracted few patients. While he waited, he wrote. The result, four Holmes novels and fifty-six stories, made Sherlock Holmes the fictional figure portrayed more often than any other on screen.
Doyle arrived on 22 May 1859 in an Edinburgh house at 11 Picardy Place, born into an Irish Catholic family scattered in 1864 by his father’s alcoholism. Wealthy uncles paid for Jesuit schooling at Stonyhurst, which he found harsh and medieval, and a year in Feldkirch, Austria. His baptism record gives Arthur Ignatius Conan as forenames and plain Doyle as surname, and he was knighted as Doyle in 1902.
While studying medicine at Edinburgh he sold his first story in 1879 and published a paper on gelsemium as a poison. He served as doctor on the Greenland whaler Hope in 1880 and on a voyage to West Africa, then arrived in Portsmouth in 1882 with under £10. The practice floundered, as did a later attempt at ophthalmology in London, where by his own account no patients came at all.
A Study in Scarlet, written in three weeks at 27, sold outright for £25 in 1886. Holmes owed his deductive method to Doyle’s teacher Joseph Bell, whom Robert Louis Stevenson recognised at once. Monthly stories in The Strand made Doyle rich, but he found Holmes a distraction and killed him in The Final Problem in 1893; public outcry forced his return in The Hound of the Baskervilles, and the stories ran until 1927. The Lost World (1912) launched a subgenre of its own.
Doyle stood twice for Parliament, backed compulsory vaccination and Congo reform, and investigated two closed criminal cases whose exonerations helped lead to the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907. Family tragedies turned the former agnostic toward spiritualism, and his public faith in the faked Cottingley Fairies broke his friendship with Harry Houdini.
Source: Arthur Conan Doyle
