On Monday, November 21, at the penultimate session of this fall's series of Lunch Colloquiums, Dr. Marilynne McKay, Professor Emerita of Dermatology in the School of Medicine, gave us the skinny on a subject other than her area of academic expertise, but one on which she's an expert nonetheless, "Doctors in the Sherlockian Canon."  As she explained at the start, she's a long-time member of the Baker Street Irregulars (which is not the humongous collection of crazies some might suppose but a prestigious literary society dedicated to the study of all things Holmes in which membership is granted by invitation only--and granted to only a privileged and productive few--facts this girl reporter had to discover by some detective work of her own when modesty prevented Marilynne from pointing them out herself).  Work for the BSI has kept Marilynne especially busy this past year. She recently contributed a chapter to a book sponsored by the society, Nerve & Knowledge: Doctors, Medicine, and the Sherlockian Canon, and even more recently presented on the same subject at a national conference, so, luckily for us, and busy-ness aside, when the Lunch Colloquium planning committee extended our invitation, she was primed to share the results of her research with us, as well.

Of course, as she pointed out at the start, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was himself a doctor, as is Doyle's second-most-famous creation, Holmes' friend and foil, Dr. Watson.  This most of us in the audience knew--given that most of us had raised our hands when Marilynne asked if we'd read some, even all, of the Holmes material. But what most of us didn't know was that Doyle had modeled Holmes himself on Dr. Joseph Bell, Doyle's Professor of Surgery in Edinburgh where he'd received his training. And why was he a good model for Holmes?  Well, Wikipedia confirms what Marilynne offered as the answer to that question:

In his instruction, Joseph Bell emphasized the importance of close observation in making a diagnosis. To illustrate this, he would often pick a stranger and, by observing him, deduce his occupation and recent activities. These skills caused him to be considered a pioneer in forensic science (forensic pathology in particular) at a time when science was not yet widely used in criminal investigations.

Bell was pleased with his fictional avatar, pleased enough that he wrote an introduction to the first of the novels in the Sherlockian canon, A Study in Scarlet.

Before moving on to discuss the many other doctors that play some sort of part in creating and/or inhabiting the canon, Marilynne took time to place the variety of their professional practices in the context--the decidedly complex context--of the medical world-that-was from the early 19^th century on.  As she explained, the three primary categories of "doctor" were "physician," "surgeon," and "apothecary," with "bone-setters, herbalists, midwives, and chemists" making up a fourth, catch-all category of much less highly regarded but still much used "others."  Physicians were the most highly regarded of all--in that earning the title (and the right to be called "Dr. So-and-So") required a medical doctorate from Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, or a foreign university and also licensure by the Royal College of Physicians (granted when one passed an oral exam).  Surgeons trained as apprentices to experienced practitioners of their bloody craft for many years and took university courses, too, but were not required to take a university degree. And they were known as "Mr. So-and-Sos" only, and not as "Drs." For them, licensure meant acceptance into the Guild of Barber-Surgeons or, a little later in time, acceptance into the College of Surgeons (of London, Edinburgh, etc.). Apothecaries, then as now, were medical professionals, pharmacists, who formulated and dispensed medicines to physicians, surgeons, and patients.  But then, as not now, they also provided simpler sorts of medical care for patients, doing some hands-on doctoring such as general practitioners do today, especially in villages where physicians and surgeons weren't readily available. Of course, they trained for the work, in long apprenticeships, and also earned licensure, by the Society of Apothecaries.

Marilynne proceeded to discuss examples of doctors in all these categories (and then some) from the four novels and fifty-six stories that comprise the Sherlockian canon.  And she discussed real-life figures on whom some of the characters were based, as well (for even then, the events of this hugely popular body of material often could be described as "ripped from the headlines"). Among the real-life figures who influenced Doyle's work were two still familiar to us today--Dr. Livingstone (we presume) and the journalist who found him in deepest darkest Africa, Henry Morton Stanley.  (And by the way, Stanley was correct to address Livingstone as "Dr." since he had earned licensure by the Royal College of Physicians of Glasgow after study at universities in Glasgow and London, though he didn't live the life of a practicing physician and is most often described as a missionary and explorer.)

Should you wish to know more about the fifty-or-so fictional doctors who appear in the Sherlockian canon (some clients, some victims, some criminals), or more about their real-life counterparts, or more about the doctor who created the former from the latter, and from his own experience, of course, I'd suggest you browse around the wealth of material available on the internet. (I've had a  wonderful time doing just that.) Or just ask Marilynne to join you over coffee (or something stronger) sometime--and get her talking (for longer than our Colloquium timetable would allow) about this fascinating subject on which, it's clear, she knows a lot more than "the skinny" aforementioned.  Indeed, one might say that her body of knowledge on Doyle and Holmes is absolutely obese--and a good deal deeper than skin deep.

 --Gretchen Schulz