A doctor learns to observe
At Edinburgh, Conan Doyle served as a clerk to the surgeon Joseph Bell. Bell could infer a patient’s occupation or habits from details of dress, speech and movement, a habit of observation that Conan Doyle later acknowledged in his detective. After a voyage as a ship’s surgeon and a short-lived partnership in Plymouth, he opened a practice at Southsea. He was practising there when A Study in Scarlet introduced Holmes and Watson in 1887.
In Southsea he also experimented with telepathy and attended séances. Conan Doyle was publicly defending Spiritualism by 1917, before the death of his son Kingsley the following year. Lectures abroad subsequently made him one of the movement’s most visible advocates.
Fiction and testimony
In The Parasite, a physiologist’s diary records his growing fear that a mesmerist can direct his actions against his will. Howard Pyle illustrated the 1895 Harper edition. Conan Doyle’s name appears on two other books here in a different capacity. He contributed a letter to The Blue Island, whose communications were attributed to W. T. Stead, and a historical introduction to G. Vale Owen’s Life Beyond the Veil. In each, his public endorsement helped introduce another person’s account to readers.
