If Holmes was the scion of the chevalier Dupin, he was also the offspring of the flesh-and-blood diagnostic genius Joseph Bell. Bell (1837–1911) was born in Edinburgh to a long line of Scottish physicians. His grandfather Sir Charles Bell had identified the type of facial paralysis now known as Bell’s palsy. An 1859 graduate of the University of Edinburgh, Joseph Bell began teaching there soon afterward. He quickly became renowned throughout the university, astounding students with a diagnostic ability that to the uninitiated appeared to verge on witchcraft.
In 1878, during Conan Doyle’s second year of medical school, he was chosen to work as Bell’s clerk. “For some reason which I have never understood,” he wrote, “he singled me out from the drove of students who frequented his wards and made me his outpatient clerk, which meant that I had to array his outpatients, make simple notes of their cases, and then show them in, one by one, to the large room in which Bell sat in state surrounded by his dressers and students. Then I had ample chance of studying his methods and of noticing that he often learned more of the patient by a few quick glances than I had done by my questions.”
Conan Doyle recalled one memorable case, in which Bell confronted a man he had never seen:
He said to a civilian patient: “Well, my man, you’ve served in the army.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Not long discharged?”
“No, sir.”
“A Highland regiment?”
“Aye, sir.”
“A non-com. 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.”
In another case, a woman unknown to Bell entered the lecture hall with a small child in tow. “He greeted her politely,” one of Conan Doyle’s biographers wrote, “and she said good morning in reply.” The following exchange ensued:
“What sort of crossing did you have from Burntisland?” Bell asked.
“It was guid,” came the answer.
“And had you a good walk up Inverleith Row?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you do with the other wain?”*…
“I left him with my sister in Leith.”
“And would you still be working at the linoleum factory?”
“Yes.”
“You see, gentlemen,” Bell told his students, “when she said good morning I noticed her Fife accent, and, as you know, the nearest town in Fife is Burntisland. You notice the red clay on the edges of the soles of her shoes, and the only such clay within twenty miles of Edinburgh is the Botanical Gardens. Inverleith Row borders the gardens and is her nearest way here from Leith. You observed the coat she carried over her arm is too big for the child who is with her, and therefore she set out from home with two children. Finally, she has dermatitis on the fingers of her right hand, which is peculiar to the workers at the linoleum factory at Burntisland.”
BELL’S DIAGNOSTIC SORCERY WAS born of the potent combination of minute observation and rigorous scientific method. “Use your eyes, sir! Use your ears, use your brain, your bump of perception, and use your powers of deduction,” one student, Harold Emery Jones, recalled his having said. “These deductions, gentlemen, must, however, be confirmed by absolute and concrete evidence.” Jones, a classmate of Conan Doyle’s, recalled Bell’s greeting a new patient and, turning to his students, saying:
Gentlemen, a fisherman! You will notice that, though this is a very hot summer’s day, the patient is wearing top-boots. When he sat on the chair they were plainly visible. No one but a sailor would wear top-boots at this season of the year. The shade of tan on his face shows him to be a coast-sailor, and not a deep-sea sailor—a sailor who makes foreign lands. His tan is that produced by one climate, a “local tan,” so to speak. A knife scabbard shows beneath his coat, the kind used by fishermen in this part of the world. He is concealing a quid of tobacco in the furthest corner of his mouth and manages it very adroitly indeed, gentlemen. The summary of these deductions shows that this man is a fisherman. Further, to prove the correctness of these deductions, I notice several fish-scales adhering to his clothes and hands, while the odor of fish announced his arrival in a most marked and striking manner.
Bell was so keen an observer that seemingly irrelevant details could acquire great significance for him alone—significance that might be confirmed only years later. More than three decades before Alexander Fleming isolated penicillin from mold in 1928, Bell instructed a group of nurses this way: “Cultivate absolute accuracy in observation, and truthfulness in report….For example, children suffering from diarrhoea of a wasting type sometimes take a strong fancy for old green-moulded cheese, and devour it with best effect. Is it possible that the germs in the cheese are able to devour in their turn the bacilli tuberculosis[?]”
For Bell, traces on a patient’s body that might go unnoticed by others stood as silent witnesses to a life. “Nearly every handicraft writes its sign-manual on the hands,” he told an interviewer in 1892. “The scars of the miner differ from those of the quarryman. The carpenter’s callosities are not those of the mason. The shoemaker and the tailor are quite different. The soldier and the sailor differ in gait—though last month I had to tell a man who was a soldier that he had been a sailor in his boyhood….The tattoo marks on hand or arm will tell their own tale as to voyages; the ornaments on the watch chain of the successful settler will tell you where he made his money. A New Zealand squatter will not wear a gold mohur, nor an engineer on an Indian railway a Maori stone.”
Once Bell’s connection to Sherlock Holmes became known, the world press regularly sought him out to watch the original in action. In an 1893 interview, a reporter for the Pall Mall Gazette asked him, “Is there any system by which the habit of observation is to be cultivated among the police?”
“There is among doctors,” Bell replied. “It is taught regularly to the students here….It would be a great thing if the police generally could be trained to observe more closely….The fatal mistake which the ordinary policeman makes is this, that he gets his theory first, and then makes the facts fit it, instead of getting his facts first of all and making all his little observations and deductions until he is driven irresistibly by them…in a direction he may never have originally contemplated.”
Those words might have issued from the mouth of Sherlock Holmes. In hindsight, they would be an unimpeachable diagnosis of police behavior in the Slater case.
BELL ALSO WORKED AS a forensic expert for the British Crown, and here, too, he was a worthy father to his fictional heir. Though he did this work for decades, he was a man of such utter professional discretion that only a few of his cases are known. “For twenty years or more I have been engaged in the practice of medical jurisprudence on behalf of the Crown, but there is little I can tell you about it,” he said in 1893. “It would not be fair to mention that which is the private knowledge of the Crown.”
One case that is known—it concerned one of the most celebrated crimes in Victorian Britain—is that of the wife-murderer Eugène Chantrelle. A Frenchman, Chantrelle settled in Edinburgh in the 1860s, teaching languages at a private school there. In 1868, he married one of his pupils, sixteen-year-old Lizzie Dyer, whom he had seduced and impregnated. Their decade-long union was tempestuous and, increasingly, violent. “My dear Mama,” Lizzie Chantrelle wrote in a letter home. “I might have been sleeping for an hour or more, when I was awakened by several severe blows. I got one on the side of the head which knocked me stupid….My jaw bone is out of place, my mouth inside skinned and festering and my face all swollen.”
In 1877, Chantrelle insured his wife’s life for more than a thousand pounds. One day soon afterward, their maid heard moaning from Lizzie Chantrelle’s bedroom. She found her unconscious; on the bedside table were orange segments, grapes, and a glass of lemonade, half drunk. The maid called to Chantrelle, then ran for a doctor. Returning, she saw the glass had been emptied and the fruit removed. She also saw Chantrelle exiting through the bedroom window.
Lizzie Chantrelle died a short time later; her doctor ruled the death a case of coal-gas poisoning. Thinking the case would interest Sir Henry Littlejohn, Scotland’s most eminent forensic scientist, the doctor called him in. Littlejohn brought Bell along. Examining Mrs. Chantrelle’s room, “Bell and Littlejohn found evidence of poison everywhere,” Bell’s biographer Ely Liebow has written. “There were many brownish spots on [her] pillow, a few on her nightgown, and analysis revealed that these spots contained opium in a solid form, along with minute traces of grape-seed fragments. The same combination was found in her alimentary canal.” Interviewing local chemists, Bell learned that Chantrelle had recently bought a large quantity of opium.
Besides this positive evidence, there was a spectacular piece of negative evidence: Though Lizzie was supposed to have been killed by a gas leak, the maid told investigators that she had smelled gas only when she returned from fetching the doctor—not when she first found her mistress unconscious. To Bell, it was the absence of gas that was the truly striking thing.
An investigation by the gas company found a broken gas pipe outside Lizzie’s bedroom. “The maid, who had heard and seen the arguments and blows over the years, felt that Chantrelle himself had ripped the pipe loose,” Liebow wrote. “Chantrelle objected that he didn’t know the pipe existed.” Unconvinced, Bell made further inquiries in the neighborhood and discovered a pipefitter who had repaired that pipe the year before. Eugène Chantrelle, he recalled, had taken an unusual interest in the pipe and its workings. Tried and convicted, Chantrelle was hanged in Edinburgh in 1878.
IN THE LATE 1880s, when the fledgling writer Conan Doyle was casting about for a detective, he did not have far to look. Though Bell, who appeared to grow weary of the press attention, often took pains to say that he was not the inspiration for Holmes, the affinity was plain to any reader who knew him.
One such reader was Robert Louis Stevenson, a writer Conan Doyle had long admired. A fellow Scot, Stevenson had studied engineering and law at the University of Edinburgh between 1867 and 1875, graduating the year before Conan Doyle entered. Though the two men apparently never met, Conan Doyle wrote a series of letters to Stevenson expressing his pleasure in works like Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In 1893, Stevenson, who suffered from tuberculosis and had moved to Samoa for his health, sent Conan Doyle a reply that, as the Conan Doyle biographer Michael Sims notes, “blended the praise of a reader and the condescension of a rival.”
“Dear Sir,” Stevenson wrote. “You have taken many occasions to make yourself agreeable to me, for which I might in decency have thanked you earlier. It is now my turn; and I hope you will allow me to offer you my compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes. That is the class of literature I like when I have the toothache. As a matter of fact, it was a pleurisy I was enjoying when I took the volume up; and it will interest you as a medical man to know that the cure was for the moment effectual.”
To this paragraph, Stevenson appended a resonant last line. “Only one thing troubles me,” he wrote. “Can this be my old friend Joe Bell?”
* “Wain” (or “wean”) is Scots dialect for “child.”