1982 Was the Last Full Biography of the Surgeon Who Shaped Sherlock Holmes

Joseph Bell taught Arthur Conan Doyle at the University of Edinburgh, and Doyle built Sherlock Holmes around the surgeon's habits of observation. A new biography examines those habits in detail.

Lindsey Fitzharris published Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, a look at the Scottish surgeon who inferred a patient's occupation and personal habits from appearance alone. Bell could also identify ailments by looking at a person. In one case, he determined a patient's route to the infirmary by identifying the clay on the patient's boots. Doyle used that incident in The Sign of the Four. Bell worked with a local police surgeon on prominent murder cases.

Fitzharris said she pursued the subject because no one had written a big commercial book on Bell. 'There was a book in 1982 by a guy named Ely Liebow,' she said. 'So people in the Sherlockian world, they know a bit about Bell through him, but I really wanted to bring a medical history lens to it.'

Fitzharris has written on related medical history before. Her 2017 book The Butchering Art covered Scottish surgical pioneer Joseph Lister, and 2022's The Facemaker examined Harold Gillies, the surgeon who rebuilt the faces of soldiers wounded in World War I. In 2020, she hosted the Smithsonian Channel series The Curious Life and Death Of.., in which she conducted virtual autopsies, tested blood samples, and interviewed witnesses. Last year she and her husband, caricaturist Adrian Teal, published the illustrated children's book Dead Ends! Flukes, Flops, and Failures that Sparked Medical Marvels.

The biography returns to the Edinburgh of Doyle's medical training, a period marked by body snatchers and surgeons' discovery of ether. The book's account of Bell's methods rests on the 1982 volume by Liebow and on the record of Bell's work with police surgeons.

Fitzharris is a medical historian and science communicator. The biography is titled Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes.