// ARS TECHNICA — HARDWARE & GADGET
Meet the real-life Scottish surgeon who inspired Sherlock Holmes
Lindsey Fitzharris chats with Ars about her new book, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the most beloved fictional detectives of all time in Sherlock Holmes, spawning countless novels, films, TV series, and so forth featuring the sleuth. Far fewer people know about the real-life inspiration for Holmes: a renowned surgeon at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh named Joseph Bell, who taught Doyle when the author was still a young medical student. Bell is the subject of a new, eminently readable biography, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, by medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris.
A noted science communicator with a fondness for the medically macabre, Fitzharris published a biography of Scottish surgical pioneer Joseph Lister, The Butchering Art, in 2017—a great, if occasionally grisly, read. She followed up with 2022’s The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I, about a WWI surgeon named Harold Gillies who rebuilt the faces of injured soldiers.
In 2020, Fitzharris hosted a documentary for the Smithsonian Channel, The Curious Life and Death Of…, exploring famous deaths, ranging from drug lord Pablo Escobar to magician Harry Houdini. Fitzharris performed virtual autopsies, experimented with blood samples, interviewed witnesses, and conducted real-time demonstrations in hopes of gleaning fresh insights. And last year she and her husband, caricaturist Adrian Teal, collaborated on an illustrated children’s book, Dead Ends! Flukes, Flops, and Failures that Sparked Medical Marvels.
With Sleuth-Hound, Fitzharris returns to the Edinburgh of The Butchering Art, of body snatchers and surgeons’ discovery of ether, which was also the Edinburgh of Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Bell. Bell was notorious for his peculiar method of diagnosis: he was able to infer a patient’s occupation and personal habits, as well as any ailments, just by looking at them. For instance, Bell once figured out the route a patient had taken walking to the infirmary by identifying the type of clay on the patient’s boots—an incident Doyle used in The Sign of the Four. Bell was also something of a medical detective, working with a local police surgeon on some of the most famous murder cases of his day.
Ars Technica: What drew you to writing an entire book about Joseph Bell?
Lindsey Fitzharris: I’ve known about Bell because I’m a medical historian and I knew that he was an inspiration for this character, but nobody had written a big commercial book on him. There was a book in 1982 by a guy named Ely Liebow. 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.
When I sold the Sleuth-Hound proposal, I had never read the original Sherlock Holmes tales. I decided to put off reading them initially because I knew enough about Bell to know that it became an irritating comparison; he found it rather reductive at the end of his life. I really wanted to bring the real man behind the myth to life in Sleuth-Hound, not just as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, not just as this parlor trick, but as this complex character. I’ve been talking to a lot of Sherlockians who have been really surprised at how much Bell is Sherlock, but also how much he isn’t Sherlock. That’s an interesting discussion as well: why Conan Doyle focused on this one aspect of him.
Ars Technica: What are some of the ways Bell is and isn’t Sherlock?
Lindsey Fitzharris: He had this Sherlockian way about him where he could tell everything about a person before they ever spoke a word: a callous, a stain, a limp, all were clues to Bell if you only knew how to see it. But in a lot of ways he wasn’t Holmes. For instance, he was a deeply empathetic character. He was very feeling for his patients. And he also was a family man. His wife dies when he’s in his 30s, and he doesn’t remarry his entire life. He holds th