Today, our guest, Bill Monroe, from the UH Honors
College, tells us about doctors and detectives. The
University of Houston presents this series about
the machines that make our civilization
run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
Many of you know that Arthur
Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a
medical doctor; but how many know that the model
for the world's most famous detective was Doyle's
mentor at the University of Edinburgh, Dr. Joseph
Bell?
Conan Doyle was seventeen when he met Dr. Bell, and
the 39-year old professor made an indelible
impression. Doyle soon became Bell's assistant in
his ward, where the young medical student played
Watson to Bell's Sherlock Holmes. There the
magisterial teacher demonstrated dazzling powers of
observation. As Doyle would later describe him, Dr.
Bell "would sit in his receiving room" and with an
impassive face would "diagnose the people as they
came in, before they even opened their mouths. He
would tell them details of their past life; and
hardly would he ever make a mistake."
Thus the great detective's propensity for close
observation and his famous capacity for deduction
derive from the medical practice of one Scottish
physician. But the method of Joe Bell was a
harbinger of the power and popularity of modern
science. By the turn of the century, the Sherlock
Holmes tales had become best sellers, the first
real popular blockbusters. And through Doyle's art,
a fictional detective's uncanny knack for
clarifying the mysterious and simplifying the
complex was becoming known and admired throughout
the world.
Since he first appeared in 1887, the reputation of
the world's greatest detective has only become more
pervasive. According to the New York
Times, Sherlock Holmes is the most portrayed
character in movie history. Over 75 different
actors have brought his aloof certainty to the
screen. Our collective fascination with Holmes is
understandable: Wouldn't it be nice if villains
could all be identified, and the causes of our
diseases, individual and social, could be
determined with absolute certainty?
A man of
varied interests, including the supernatural, Doyle
himself grew tired of his most famous creation.
Holmes's solutions began to seem reductive as well
as deductive. By the 1890s Dr. Doyle wanted to move
on and tried to kill off the rational monster he
had created. But soon enough, the author was forced
by popular demand to bring the virtuoso detective
back to life. Yet he did so so grudgingly that one
of Doyle's biographers dubbed him "The Man Who
Hated Sherlock Holmes." Society, on the other hand,
has remained enthralled by the power of
explanations that put forth a single definite cause
for things that go wrong. If Doyle grew bored with
Holmes's dazzling solutions, perhaps it was
because, as a physician, he knew that illness was
rarely so simple, and as a novelist, he knew that
life never was.
I'm Bill Monroe, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
William Monroe is professor of English and Associate
Dean of the Honors College at the University of
Houston. His book Power to Hurt: The Virtues of
Alienation was selected as an outstanding
academic book of the year by Choice magazine
for 1999. Other publications include the play
Primary Care, which deals with end-of-life
issues related to Alzheimer's Disease, and articles
on the relationship between reading and the practice
of medicine and on the images of physicians in
literature. He is currently at work on a book to be
called American Job: Flannery O'Connor, Alien
Prophet.
Booth, Martin, The Doctor and the Detective: A
Biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. New York:
St. Martin's Press, 2000.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, Memories and
Adventures. Boston: Little, Brown, 1924.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, Sherlock Holmes: The
Four Novels and the Fifty-Six Short Stories
Complete, 2nd ed. New York: Crown Publishers,
1975.
Meyer, Karl, E., The Curious Case of the Immortal
Sleuth. The New York Times (19 Jan. 2000),
pp. B1 and B8.
Wood, James Playsted, The Man Who Hated
Sherlock Holmes: A Life of Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle. New York: Pantheon, 1965.
Artist's image of Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle in his
student clinic.
(From the Stark Munro
Letters, A. C. Doyle, 1895)
Almost as famous (and cinematic) as Sherlock Holmes
was Doyle's book,
Lost World. This image,
titled
The Swamp of the Pterodactyls, is
from a 1912 edition of that book.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2003 by John H.
Lienhard.
