Medical Casebook of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle: From Practitioner to Sherlock Holmes and Beyond

Medicine was his first love, although the world best remembers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for the legends of Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. For 15 difficult and grueling years, Doyle devoted himself to medicine— as a student at the University of Edinburgh, a general practitioner at Plymouth and Southsea, and a consultant in ophthalmology at London. Finally, he pledged himself full-time to writing—and became one of the world's best-known authors. Innumerable volumes have been written about Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, dissecting and conjecturing about virtually every aspect of their lives and every incident in the Holmes-Watson canon. The medical life of Doyle, to the contrary, has been poorly documented. There has been a popular notion, untrue, that Doyle was forced into literary endeavors because of his failure as a physician. Partly because of this belief but also due to the almost-smothering charisma of the Great Detective, the medical side