CONAN DOYLE By ARTHUR S. MAC NALTY, M.A., M.D. (OXON.), F.R.C.P. (LOND.) LONDON, ENG. nniHE late eighties and the early Vere Stackpoole, H. H. Bashford, I nineties of the last century Francis Brett Young and Austin Free- I produced a high level of liter- man. These are the names that come JL- ary output which for varied to one’s mind but there are many excellence is almost unique in our liter- more. ary history. Robert Louis Stevenson Even more closely than the Minister was still writing and new authors (play- of Religion the doctor is brought into wrights and novelists) who have now contact with the lives of his fellow achieved their meed of recognition mortals and, given the gifts of imag- were coming to the fore: Rudyard ination and composition, his material Kipling, Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, for a work of fiction is ready to hand. H. A. Jones, A. W. Pinero, H. G. Like Sir Walter Scott, his literary Wells, Stanley Weyman, Anthony ancestor, Arthur Conan Doyle was Hope, Hall Caine, Rider Haggard born in Edinburgh. The date was and many others. May 22, 1859. He came of an old In comparison, the plays and fiction Anglo-Norman family who had settled of the present day furnish a shadowy in Ireland for many generations. There contrast to this wealth of imaginative was a strong artistic strain in his literature. blood, his grandfather being the great Into this field of high endeavor caricaturist, John Doyle, who signed stepped the burly form of Conan Doyle his cartoons “H. B.,” while one of his to take by right of his imaginative uncles was Richard Doyle, the designer genius a leading place. His name will of the cover of Punch. Charles Doyle, endure if only because he was the crea- the novelist’s father, was a Civil tor of “Sherlock Holmes,” albeit, as Servant in the Government Office of this article will attempt to show, he has Works in Edinburgh and eked out his many other claims upon the gratitude meager salary of £240 per annum by of posterity. painting pictures and illustrating First of all he was a doctor, no bad books. He married Mary Foley, an training for a life of letters. There have Irishwoman, in 1855. They had six been many literary physicians from children, four girls and two boys, of St. Luke, “the beloved physician,” whom Arthur was the elder. It was a down to modern times: Sir Thomas hard struggle for the Doyles to bring Browne in the seventeenth century; up this family on so little. Conan Tobias Smollett and Oliver Gold- Doyle’s sympathy and appreciation smith in the eighteenth century; John of the fact that his mother bore the Brown, Charles Lever and Samuel burden of the strain were aroused at Lover in the nineteenth century; an early age. Often he said to her, Robert Bridges, the late Poet Laure- “When you are old, Mammie, you ate; Oliver Wendell Holmes and S. shall have a velvet dress and gold Weir Mitchell in the United States; glasses and sit in comfort by the fire.” and today Somerset Maugham, H. de In later life he proudly added: “Thank God, it so came to pass.” It is the medical practitioners in the vacations. mothers of Great Britain who have He was very poor in those days but the helped their sons to achieve greatness. bent to literature was already with Arthur described his boyhood as Spar- him and, as he tells us in “Through tan at home and more Spartan still at the Magic Door,” not infrequently the Edinburgh Day-school, which he the few coppers allowed for his lunch attended from the age of seven to went in the purchase of some second- nine, where a one-eyed tawse-brand- hand book such as Gordon’s Tacitus, ishing schoolmaster who might have Pope’s Homer or Addison’s Spectator. stepped out of the pages of Dickens As the student daily passed by the made their young lives a misery. twopenny tub filled with tattered Occasionally, distinguished London books “a combat ever raged betwixt friends of his artist grandfather came the hunger of a youthful body and to Edinburgh and visited the Doyles. that of an inquiring and omnivorous Conan Doyle was always pleased to mind.” But when the lunch was for- recall that he once sat on Thackeray’s gone the volume was treasured all the knee. more for the sacrifice. At school, young Doyle became a It was in these days that he wrote fighter: “Oh, Arthur what a dreadful his first short story: “The Mystery of eye you have got!” cried his mother the Sassassa Valley,” for which, to his one day; “You just go across and look great joy, he received three guineas at Eddie Tulloch’s,” retorted the from Chambers’ Journal. young victor. Before Conan Doyle qualified, he The Doyles were Roman Catholics paid a seven months visit to the Arctic and, after two years at Hodder, the Seas on a Whaler, the Hope, in the preparatory school, Arthur entered year 1880. He was rated as ship’s Stonyhurst where he remained until surgeon. The voyage enlarged his he was sixteen, winding up a successful knowledge of mankind and brought in public school career by taking honors fifty pounds to the family exchequer. in the London Matriculation Examina- At the end of 1881 he took his degree tion. Bernard Partridge of Punch and as Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Father Bernard Vaughan were among Surgery at Edinburgh. He now had a his school-fellows. profession which for the next ten years After a year at Feldkirch, which is a of his life he sedulously practiced and Jesuit school in the Vorarlberg prov- was eventually to abandon except for ince of Austria, to learn German, in a brief return during the South African October 1876 he entered the Univer- War. For the moment, some reference sity of Edinburgh as a medical student. must be made to his professional In a strenuous four year course (as it career. There seems little doubt that if was then) Conan Doyle worked and opportunity had served, Conan Doyle played hard. He passed his examina- might have been a great physician or tions creditably, he played as a surgeon. He had a sound knowledge forward in the Edinburgh University of his profession; he was endowed with Rugby team and he became a first- sympathy and imagination; but the class amateur boxer. At the same time narrow circumstances of home-life he earned money for his medical fees prevented him from taking those by acting as an unqualified assistant to unpaid hospital appointments which are the stepping-stones to the higher But Conan Doyle’s real ambition walks of medicine. His father’s health was to be an historical novelist. In had failed and it was incumbent 1889 “Micah Clarke,” a story of the upon him to earn money as the sole Monmouth Rebellion, was published mainstay of the family. So first of all by Longmans on the favorable report he went as ship’s surgeon on a voyage of their reader Andrew Lang. It was to West Africa and then, unfortu- followed by “The Sign of Four,” nately, joined in practice at Plymouth another Sherlock Holmes story, and in 1882 an eccentric fellow-student this in turn by “The White Com- whom he calls “Cullingworth.” The pany,” a study of Edward ill’s whole story of this man’s extraordi- reign. nary methods of practice and of his In 1890 Doyle was at the parting of heartless betrayal of Conan Doyle the ways. His literary success was can be read in Doyle’s book “The growing; his medical practice was Stark Munro Letters.” The associa- stationary. On returning from a visit tion culminated in Doyle leaving to Berlin where he had been to see Plymouth and in putting up his Koch’s work on tuberculin, he met plate as a medical practitioner in Sir Malcolm Morris, the dermatologist, Portsmouth. who urged him to seek a wider field In the intervals of waiting for for his activities. After some months patients Dr. Doyle wrote some fifty of study at Paris and Vienna (in the or sixty stories for many of the best latter city he wrote “The Doings of magazines. He did not contribute Raffles Haw”) he left Portsmouth and much to medical literature, but he set up in Wimpole Street as an eye- took his m.d . degree at Edinburgh and specialist. Three months sufficed for he wrote a paper on “The Gouty this experiment for at the end of that Diathesis.” He married Miss Hawkins time the memorable “Adventures of in 1885. His first novel, “The Firm of Sherlock Holmes” were appearing in Girdlestone,” a sensational romance, The Strand Magazine. The first came was already written and after wander- out in July, 1891; the last in 1927. ing from publisher to publisher lay The fifty-six stories in broken series neglected in a drawer. covered a period of thirty-six years Now came the beginnings of suc- and, as the author wrote, “those who cess, at first unrecognizable. When a first read of Sherlock Holmes as student, Conan Doyle had been greatly young men have lived to see their struck by the gifts of Joseph Bell, grown-up children following the same Surgeon to the Edinburgh Infirmary, adventures in the same magazine.” not only for diagnosis but also for Although, as I have hinted, the char- detecting occupation and character.