18th November 2013

In the Footsteps of Sherlock Holmes – Dr Joseph Bell

“It is to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle once wrote to his former lecturer at the University of Edinburgh.

 

A recent trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, led us, among other places, to the grave of the Edinburgh local luminary Dr Joe Bell (1837–1911). Reason enough to say a few words here about the man who served Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as the model for his fictional character Sherlock Holmes.

 

Strictly speaking, Joe Bell was a surgeon. Yet, as the US television series Dr House demonstrated even in the 21st century, medical diagnostics and detective work go hand in hand. Bell’s outstanding powers of observation and deduction utterly astonished his student Conan Doyle:

Sherlock Holmes statue in Edinburgh; Kurtz Detective Agency Nuremberg, Detective in Bamberg, Private Detective in Aschaffenburg, Detective Agency in Regensburg

"Sherlock Holmes Statue" Edinburgh, Schottland

Bell: "Well, my man, you've served in the army."

Man: "Aye, Sir."

"Not long discharged?"

"No, Sir."

"A Highland regiment?"

"Aye, Sir."

"A non-commissioned officer."

"Aye, Sir."

"Stationed at Barbados."

"Aye, Sir."

"You see, gentlemen," he would explain, "the man was a respectful man but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British." To his audience of Watsons it all seemed very miraculous until it was explained, and then it became simple enough. It is no wonder that after the study of such a character I used and simplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits.

(Compare this with the analysis of a person in the story The Greek Interpreter by Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes in the Diogenes Club.)

 

There are numerous such stories about Joe Bell. Among other things, it is said that he and his colleague Dr Littlejohn identified Jack the Ripper. It is also said that Bell’s hair turned from deep black to bright white overnight after the death of his beloved wife. After the later British Nobel Prize laureate Rudyard Kipling had read the first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, he wrote to Conan Doyle in admiration, asking: “Isn’t he my old friend, Dr Joe?”

 

Dr Joe Bell was an outstanding physician, logician and criminalistics expert – and an outstanding role model. Not only for Sherlock Holmes.

 

Incidentally, Dr Joseph Bell makes a brief appearance in Aidan Johnstone’s Livingstones Mahnung.

 

For those interested, here is a YouTube link to a documentary about Joe Bell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr0KnkmB98U.

 

The highly recommended Bell biography by Liebow:

https://amzn.eu/d/32dkaIL.

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