Lindsey Fitzharris for Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes

This October Lindsey Fitzharris joins us to celebrate Sleuth-Hound: The Case of The Real Sherlock Holmes.

The book tells the untold story of the Edinburgh doctor who became Arthur Conan Doyle's model for Sherlock Holmes, and his adventures in the criminal underworld of Victorian Britain. Throughout nineteenth-century Edinburgh, the surgeon Joseph Bell was known for his extraordinary talent for detection and diagnosis. To the amazement of onlookers at the Royal Infirmary, he could read a patient's ailments, occupation, and personal habits from a single glance. Though such deductive powers were all quite "elementary" to Bell, they had a profound influence on the medical student and budding writer Arthur Conan Doyle. Soon enough, Bell's methods helped spark the creation of fiction's most iconic detective. Since Sherlock Holmes first appeared in 1887, he has become a global phenomenon. Yet the man Conan Doyle credited as Sherlock's prototype has slipped into the shadows.

In Sleuth-Hound, Fitzharris brings Bell centre stage, recounting how his work took him from ward to witness box as a medical detective. He worked closely with the police surgeon Henry Duncan Littlejohn and a pioneering ballistics expert named Dr. Watson and even collaborated with Conan Doyle to overturn a homicide conviction. Bell's forensic investigations took him from gaslit alleyways to Gilded Age drawing rooms, put him on the trail of poisoners and child killers, and even drew him into the hunt for Jack the Ripper. By scrutinizing a scratch on a desk, a trace of cigar ash, or the slightest peculiarity of a man's gait, Bell could turn the smallest clues into revelations. His sharp mind forever changed the way we read bodies, detect crimes, and serve justice.

Lindsey Fitzharris is a New York Times bestselling author and medical historian who brings the grisly, surprising, and deeply human history of medicine to life. She is the author of The Butchering Art-winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing and shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize and the Wolfson History Prize-and The Facemaker. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and appears regularly on CNN, BBC, C-SPAN, and NPR.