The Real Sherlock Holmes The Medical Life of Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle

Dr. John Raffensperger

Picardy Place

The lost diaries of Arthur Conan Doyle relate his adventures with Dr. Joe Bell, the

Edinburgh surgeon who was the model for Sherlock Holmes.

This program explains how an education at the Edinburgh school of medicine gave

them the ability to diagnose obscure medical conditions, solve crimes, save the lives

of an American president and the Russian tsar as well as to avert a crisis between

Britain and the united states.

The program also illustrates how the literature of Conan Doyle reflect his years as a

medical student and young physician.

If you would like Dr Raffensperger to present this program live, or internationally via

Skype, please get in touch with his publisher, MX Publishing

steve@mxpublishing.co.uk

Edinburgh School of Medicine

Founded in 1697. A world medical center.

Benjamin Rush, signer of Declaration of Independence

Founders of first U.S. medical schools

1847 Simpson discovered chloroform, professor of midwifery.

1869 Lister , professor of surgery, discovered antisepsis.

The Firm of Girdlestone

“Edinburgh University may call herself with grim jocoseness, the alma mater of her students, but if she is a mother at all, she is one of a very stoic and spartan cast.”

“Speaking generally of my university career,I took my fences in stride and balked at none of them, still won no distinction in the race. I was always one of the ruck, a 60% man at examinations.”

Academia: “One long weary grind of botany, chemistry, anatomy, physiology and a whole list of compulsory subjects.”“No attempt at friendship between professors and students.” “Strictly business arrangement, 4 guineas for anatomy lectures.”ACD lived at home—in poverty.

The Real Sherlock Holmes

1878, Dr. Joe Bell chose ACD, a 2ND year student, to be his clerk.

He singled me out from the drove of studentswho frequented the wards. I had to array his outpatients,make simple notes of their cases, and then show them in, one by one to the large room in which Bell sat in statesurrounded by his dressers and students.

Master surgeon, teacher, expert diagnostician,

sparse, lean, tall, angular nose, long sensitive

fingers, gray eyes, twinkling with shrewdness.

I thought of my old teacher, Joe Bell, of his eagle face,of his curious eyes, of his eerie trick of spotting details.

It is most certain to you, that I owe Sherlock Holmes.

− Letter from ACD to Bell.

His 1st Operation, Round the Red Lamp“The corridor opened on a small hall with a fringe of poorly clad people seated all round on open benches. A young man, with a pair of scissors stuck like a flower in his buttonhole and a notebook in his hand was passing from one to another, whispering and writing.

“Anything good?”asked the third year man.

“You should have been hereyesterday,” said the outpatientclerk, “We had a regular field day.A popliteal aneurism,a colles fracture, a spina bifida,a tropical abscess and an elephantiasis.

How’s that for a single haul?”

Surgical Amphitheater

The tiers of horseshoe benches rising from the floor to the ceiling were already packed, and the novice as he enteredsaw vague curving lines of faces in front of him,and heard a deep buzz of a hundred voices,and sounds of laughter from somewhere above him.

Only a single row of heads intervened between them and the operating table. It was of unpainted deal, plain, strong and scrupulously clean. A sheet of brown water-proof coveredhalf of it and beneath stood a large tin tray full of sawdust.

On the further side, in front of the window, there was a board strewn with glittering instruments-forceps, tenacula, saws, canulas, and trocars. A line of knives, with long thin delicate blades lay at one side. Two young men, lounged in front of this, one threading needles, the other doing something to a brass coffeepot-like thing which hissed out puffs of steam.

I went out on the whaler a struggling youth,I came back a powerful, full grown man.

Clerkships

Worked to pay tuition & support family.

Cannon explosion:

On arrival, I found a man with a lump or iron sticking out ofhis head. I tried not to show the alarm I felt and did theobvious thing by pulling out the iron. I could see the cleanwhite bone, so I could assure them that the brain had notbeen injured. I pulled the gash together, staunched thebleeding and bound it up.

A Five Horse PracticeDr. Reginald Ratcliffe Hoare, Birmingham.

Filled as many as 100 prescriptions a day, tonics, pills, ointments.On the whole, I made few mistakes, though I have been known to send out ointment and pill boxes with elaborate directions on the lid, but nothing inside.

Three confinements in one day. Started to write short stories.

Gelsemium. In a letter to the British Medical and Surgical Journal, while a clerk with Dr. Hoare, ACD described the effects of overdose of self-administered Gelsemium, a drug used to treat neuropathic pain.

I felt great depression and a severe frontal headache, diarrhea and general lassitude.

The drug acts as a motor paralyzer, but the system may learn to tolerate gelsemium as it may opium.

I’ll Tell You a Most Serious Fact

that opium dries the mucous tract

and constipation and causes thirst

and stimulates the heart at first

and then allows it’s strength to fall

releases the capillary wall

the cerebrum is first affected

contracted pupils are detected

on tetanus you must not bet

secretions gone except the sweat

lungs and sexual, don’t forget

1881, Bachelor of Medicine, Master of SurgeryA first and two seconds in exams at end of first session.

Arthur was one of my best students. He was always interestedin anything connected with diagnosis. − Dr. Bell

Very kind and considerate manner toward poor people. − fellow student

MAYUMBAShip’s surgeon on voyage to Africa, 12 pounds/month.

Seasickness. Malaria. Tropical fevers.

Surgery:

He was an old soldier who had lost a good many teeth,but who had continued to find room between his nose and chin for a black clay pipe. Lately, there had appeared a small sore on his nose which had spread and become crusted.

An epitheliomatous cancer caused by the irritation of the tobacco smoke. I removed the growth. I got only a sovereign.

Did most admirably.

Dermoid cyst of eyebrow:

Hair, rudimentary jaw and teeth. That can only be, I think, that every cell in the body has the power, latent in it by which it may produce the whole individual.

General Practice in Southsea

Vaccinated a baby, a man with consumption,a gypsy child with measles,grocer with epileptic fits.House call on a lady with dyspepsia-died with a bleeding gastric ulcer,old man with mitral regurgitation,cirrhosis, Bright’s disease and an enlarged spleen.

“Ah,” said I.

I always prided myselfon being quick at diagnostics.

“Bronchial, I presume.”

“Yes—but here to read the gas meter.”

Nine Years in Southsea

Saw plenty of suffering among his patients and their families.

Won a reputation as a hard-working, compassionate young doctor.

Eye refractions. Delivered his first daughter.

Campaigned for compulsory vaccination for smallpox and typhoid for soldiers, and examination of “harlots” for venereal disease.

Doctor of Medicine

July 1885, presented his thesis and took an oral examination at Edinburgh.

Tabes Dorsalis: Myelopathy of the spinal cord; weakness, diminished reflexes, shooting pains, ataxia, dementia, deafness, impaired pupillary response to light.

ACD attributedthe diseaseto syphilis.

“Well-written,unique scientificwriting.”JAMA, 1982,

247 [5] 646-650.

The Young ACD

Disputes “Cure” for TB.

Koch, a world famous German bacteriologistclaimed he had a cure for tuberculosis.ACD was skeptical

1890. Made a special trip to Berlin. After visiting hospital wards, he decided Koch’s treatment was experimental, premature and incomplete. He was correct.

1890. Gave up general practice to become an eye doctor.

1891. Studied in Vienna, set up a practice in London as a specialist in diseases of the eye but gave up and turned to writing full time.

Honor Bound to Join

ACD volunteered to work as a physician in a war zone hospital: an epidemic of cholera, “death in its vilest, filthiest form.”

As one who was under your care at Bloemfontain in Langman’s hospital, I and others owe my life to your kindness and care. − a soldier’s letter.

MY LULU IS A ZULU

When you’ve shouted Rule Britania,

When you’ve sung ‘God save the Queen’,

When you’ve finished killing Kruger with your mouth,

Will you kindly drop a shilling in my little tambourine,

For a gentleman in khaki ordered south?

The Scarlet Homes of SherlockFinally, after a century of waiting and doubts over its veryexistence, the first of the three "lost" diaries of Sir ArthurConan Doyle has been discovered and published. This firstjournal was written in 1878 by Conan Doyle when he was anineteen-year-old student at the University of EdinburghMedical School. It contains stories of high adventurebeginning with Conan Doyle's clerkship under the legendaryDoctor Joseph Bell, the real-life inspiration for the world'smost famous literary detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Join a young Arthur Conan Doyle, Dr. Bell, and others ontheir journey to America for a secret forensic mission tosolve a string of grisly and mysterious murders. Along theway, meet Conan Doyle's real-life contemporaries - such asfellow University of Edinburgh student, Robert LouisStevenson.

The Mystery of the Scarlet Homes of Sherlock is an excitingmix of murder, mayhem, literary history, humanity, andhumour that is sure to please both new and long-timeSherlock Holmes fans everywhere.

May 22nd 2016

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