September 18, 2021 • 24 mins
This 2010 episode from past hosts Sarah and Deblina covers Arthur Conan Doyle's brilliant protagonist Sherlock Holmes, who became world-famous. But was Sherlock Holmes based on a real person?
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Sherlock Holmes came up on the show this week.
Although Grace Thomaston, who was called Mrs Sherlock Holmes, really
did not seem to be too fond of that nickname,
even though she didn't like it very much. The Sherlock
Holmes name drops seems like a good excuse to pull
our episode about who the real Sherlock Holmes was. Pull
(00:23):
that out for Today's Saturday Classic. This episode is from
previous hosts Sarah and Deblina, and it originally came out
on novemb Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
(00:46):
the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina chuker Boardy,
and today we're going to explore a mystery about one
of the most iconic mystery solvers out there, Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes being Scott Ash writer Arthur Conan Doyle's consulting detective,
the hawk Face super sleuth who has always been able
(01:07):
to somehow use his powers of deduction to solve mysteries
and always get the bad guys. He always knows what's
going on, even if he looks like he's in a
haze of opium or whatnot. I think it was cocaine,
but who who's counting of Cotton Doyle. He wasn't really
the first to invent the modern detective story, but he
(01:28):
did introduce this kind of science of detailed observation and
classification into it, which, as we'll see later, has actually
some influence. It's had some influence on the field of forensics. Yeah.
But even if you haven't read any of his writing,
you probably know the character of Sherlock Holmes. I mean
he's in everything. You've probably been played Sherlock Holmes as
(01:49):
a kid like playing detective. But I mean there's mentions
in other literary works, like novels. There's that recent movie
starring Robert Downey Jr. There's even a new BBC television
series which I think it kind of modernizes the whole thing. Yeah,
if there's some controversy around these modern takes on homes,
some of the true sherlakeans, the fervent Sherlock Holmes fans,
(02:12):
don't really like the fact that in the new series
he's using cell phones and text messaging and so forth.
But you know, these are the times, and and this
is the homes that we have now. But even even
though Holmes is of such a big part of our
consciousness and such a big part of pop culture, a
lot of people probably couldn't tell you if he's real.
And that's a that's a big question that's out there.
(02:33):
And if you go on the Internet and you google
is Sherlock Holmes real, you'll find maybe some different opinions
about that. Some people think maybe he's based on a
real person, an actual detective who worked for Scotland Yard.
Some people think that he's based on Connon Doyle himself
or completely made up, or he could be just completely fiction.
And in fact he is fiction, but he was based
(02:54):
on an actual person. And that's what we're going to
talk a little bit about today. But before we get
into that, let's take committed to take a closer look
at Doyle and what led him to his homes inspiration. Yeah. So,
Conan Doyle was born in May eighteen fifty nine in Edinburgh, Scotland.
He was the second of a huge family ten kids,
(03:14):
and his father had a lot of trouble in business
and life. He was a failed architect. He was an alcoholic,
but fortunately Conan Doyle's mother nurtured his love of history
and storytelling, helped him along, you know, helped develop his
imagination and inspired him to read Poe and Jules Byrne
and Jonathan Swift. So he was a creative child, yea.
(03:38):
He got an artistic side through his mom. He continued
his education in England. He had some schooling there and
then he went to Austria for about a year or
so I think, before returning to Scotland to prepare for
entry into the University of Edinburgh's medical school, which is
another surprise I think for a lot of people that
he had a medical background. Yes, he had some medical
(03:59):
aspiration Jen's um and actually ended up getting his Bachelor
of Medicine and Master of Surgery qualifications in eighteen eighty
one and an m d in eighteen eighty five. He
even went on to have a sort of a semi
successful medical career. He I think he practiced for at
least ten years or so, so he didn't have to
be spending all his time writing detective fiction. Well, I
(04:20):
think that was what he wanted to be doing. He
was writing even while he was practicing as a doctor.
That's he started the Sherlock Holmes series at that time
started writing stories, so it was definitely there from the beginning.
But it was someone that he had met his second
year of medical school who really inspired this literary character
that Conan Doyle became so famous for, and that was
(04:42):
Dr Joseph Bell. Yeah. So Kennon Doyle clerked for this
doctor Bell in the Royal Infirmary and he he was
just sort of his assistant. You know, he interviewed new
patients before they went in to see the doctor. But
this is interesting part. Bell didn't really need that assistance
because it seemed like he always kind of knew what
(05:03):
was going on with his new patients, sometimes before he
even saw them. Yeah, it was kind of freaky, for
lack of a better word, would call it freaky. Conan
Doyle would take notes, diligently interview these patients they'd come in,
and his mentor, Dr Bell would somehow know what was
going on. These people were total strangers, new patients, he'd
(05:26):
never met them before, but he would be able to
say things like how they make their living, where they from,
even maybe where they'd been that day. And Conny was
really impressed by the skill. And that's why, as anyone
would be I would be. But it's interesting they're not
actually friends. And you might think, um, this impressionable young
(05:49):
Conan Doyle would try to build a relationship with this guy,
especially since he becomes such a major influence on his
character later. But yeah, they're they're not good buddies. And
Bell's journals, which he kept from the eighteen sixties until
his death, uh, there's no mention of Doyle, so you
know they must have He must have not had a
huge impression on the doctor. He would think. I mean,
(06:11):
I if I don't write in a journal, but if
I were to write in a journal, I'd probably write
about my best friends and the people who are a
big influence in my life. And he did not appear there.
That journal was actually on display at an exhibit that
the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh has about Conan
Doyle and Bell and the real Sherlock Holmes. Still it's
a permanent display there, and he has that in some letters.
(06:34):
And so what they what we can ascertain from that
is that they weren't that close. But still Conan Doyle
must have been inspired by this skill, this like guessing
power that the doctor had. So that makes us wonder
How did the doctor do this? How is he able
to determine all of these minute details about someone's life
(06:55):
before he really talked to them. Hold that thought. We're
going to get into that a little more. First, a
little bit of background on Bell. He was born in
eighteen thirty seven and he was born into really a
medical focused family. His dad, his uncle's were all well
known surgeons. They were all involved in the medical field,
so he kind of followed in their footsteps. He was
(07:16):
educated at the Academy and the University in Edinburgh and
practiced as a doctor in Scotland. He was described as
being a thin, wiry guy, had a high nose, acute face,
penetrating gray eyes, and a high discordant voice which sounds
like somebody else I can yep. It's true. A lot
of these features, like the nose especially, are thought to
(07:38):
be very homes like, and people say that Bell even
wore a cloaked coat in a deer stalker hat, which
which are homes trademarks. He even has the cost dumn on,
he even has the outfit. Yeah, and he's he's kind
of an interesting guy, not just the super focused doctor,
but he's an amateur poet and a bird watcher and
an aviad shooter when he's not busy with medicine and
(08:02):
that sort of thing. So he has these interesting hobbies,
I guess you'd say, but his main focus still is medicine,
and in his profession he did a lot of things
with note he started Scotland's first training course for nurses,
(08:22):
which was kind of a big deal, and agreed to
teach some of the first female medical students too, even
though that was pretty controversial at the time there was
a lot of prejudice against these women who wanted to
study medicine. He was also Queen Victoria's a personal physician
whenever she was in Scotland, which I find very interesting
and I swear Queen Victoria like makes an appearance in
almost every podcast she works. Yeah, she apparently checked out
(08:47):
his wards and liked what she saw and decided to
make him her personal doctor. So one of the things
he was best known for, besides all of these accolades
and positions of prominent was for teaching a particular method
for diagnosing patients. And we've alluded to that a little
bit before, with his experience and being able to identify
(09:10):
certain things about patients before even interviewing them. And basically
what this all comes down to is that he thought
it was important to make a study of people, both
in order to notice the small details that distinguished the
sick from the healthy, and also just to impress patients
with your knowledge of of them so that they'll put
their faith in you. Yeah, I mean it. It worked
(09:31):
for his assistant. You can imagine that it would work
for his patients pretty well too, definitely. And so he
told his students that a diagnosis rested on three things
observed carefully, did do shrewdly, and confirm with evidence. And
he put this into practice for them too. Yeah, we
have an example for you that is just kind of outrageous.
(09:53):
There's a woman walks in with a little child, and
the doctor immediately says, oh, I was your walk from
this small town in Fife? And did you have to
walk up the ever life row? And what do you
do with the other one? And are you still working
at the linoleum factory. Okay, that's a lot of really
(10:13):
specific personal question, very specific stuff. And this was all
without ever having met her before. This was their first encounter,
and and oh I shouldn't mentioned here that this is
all sort of our English translation from the Scottish vernacular
at the time, which I didn't think we should attempt
to pronounce. But maybe next time. Maybe next time, we'll
(10:34):
give that a try. After a few beers. But he
had never met her before, so how did he do this?
He quickly noticed small things about her. Her Fife accent,
that's how we recognized she was from Fife. The red
clay on her shoes, which could have only come from
the botanical gardens area, which was near the road that
(10:56):
he asked her if she had walked up. That's like
something that would happen on a detective show totally. The
coach she had slung over her arm was too big
for the child who was with her, so it must
have been for another kid, which means that she must
have left home with two kids. And she had dermatitis
on her right hand, which was peculiar to workers who
worked in the specific linoleum factory in that town where
(11:19):
he had ascertained that she was from. So all of
these really super specific minute details. He suddenly put that
together upon meeting her, who knows, maybe in the matter
of seconds, and decided that it was correct. And sure enough,
she answered each question. In this conversation, she was like, yep,
(11:39):
I left the kid with my sister. Um, yeah, it
was a good walk. I mean, she answered all of
these questions in the affirmative and proved that he had
ascertained correctly. Who would have thought he was a wizard
or something. I don't know. I think that would disturb
me a little bit if somebody was that spot on
about everything. Yeah, I don't know if I would have
(12:00):
been exactly encouraged either, But it worked for a lot
of people. And it turns out that people say that
he was right most of the time, but if he
wasn't there were occasions where the patient would say, oh,
that's not correct, and a lot of times he would
then go further and expose that they were lying. Yeah,
(12:22):
which is kind of I mean, taking to the step further,
but um, not exactly living up to the point of
putting your patients at ease at that point, I guess
probably not, but at least getting the job done, which
is getting to the heart of the problem. His goal
was diagnosing, so he got to the truth one way
or another most of the time. Yeah, And I mean
(12:43):
he recognized that this was a valuable skill for his profession,
and so he wanted to train his students to have
the same abilities and taught them to look for those
really specific details that gave someone away, you know, like
everything from the way person walked, for instance, a sailor
would walk differently from a soldier. Um look at their hands,
(13:07):
which hands are not only give you big clues about
someone's age, but maybe even a person's profession. And he
even went so far as to say that you could
tell the difference between different types of callouses on the
hands tell what somebody did based on that. Yeah, Like
he he asserted that a mason would have different types
(13:28):
of callouses than say a carpenter or something, and that
he could by observing you could guess which profession a
person was in. And then also some more obvious things too,
like ornaments and tattoos and clothing and posture and just
a person's overall demeanor, things that might give away where
they're from, where they're going, what's going on where they've traveled,
(13:49):
all those kind of things. And he also had them
closely studies subjects that could help them make certain distinctions
when they were coming up with diagnoses, such as diverse
odors of poisons, even perfumes. They had to sort of
sample all these things and learn I guess the technical
aspect of it too, not just looking at okay, what
(14:10):
does this person have on them? What markings can I see?
But also can I recognize a certain sense, certain tastes,
certain sites. Yeah, and the way he did that was
maybe sometimes a little questionable yep. According to UH column
two tho nine column and The Forensic Examiner, written by
(14:31):
a Dr. Catherine Ramslin, she describes this funny kind of
training exercise or trick that Bell used with his students
when teaching them his method. Basically, he had this gross
container of amber colored fluid, which he told them up
front was disgusting, bitter tasting. But he told them that
it was a potent drug, and since they needed to
(14:54):
learn how various substances taste and smell, they should follow
his example and taste it right now. So he stuck
a finger in it, licks the finger, and then they
all have to do the same, and sure enough pass
it around. He's correct, it's bitter tasting. They all agree
with everyone's grossed out. And then at the end, though
(15:18):
Bell tells him that they've missed the most important part
the finger that he dipped into the liquid wasn't the
same one that he tasted, so he didn't actually taste
this disgusting stuff at all. Yeah, so they hadn't really
observed him at all. They had missed the most important thing,
even though they had been looking straight at them. So
this was a key lesson in his method that he
(15:40):
was trying to teach a magician, or he could have.
So Bell didn't just use this method for teaching and
to help his patients. He also used it to help
solve crimes in a homes esque sort of way. So
(16:00):
there's another little connection that we can see there. He
actually admitted to a reporter in the eighteen nineties that
he had been involved for about twenty years two decades
or so, that he had been working on criminal cases
for the crown, but he wouldn't divulge any details about this.
But RMS Land, that author we mentioned earlier, asserted that
(16:21):
he was involved in a few really big cases, and
one of them was the case of Elizabeth Chantrelle. She
was this young woman who was murdered by her no
good husband, Eugene Chantrelle for her insurance money, and he
tried to make it seem like it was an accidental death,
that she had been killed by coal gas poisoning, but
(16:42):
Bell worked with a toxicologist from the university named Sir
Henry little John and helped prove that Chantrell had actually
been poisoned. She hadn't been poisoned by the gas. She
had been poisoned by something else entirely, and her husband
had staged the room and stay the murder to make
it look like she had died from the gas leak. Yeah.
(17:04):
I mean, this guy didn't do any favors. He had
pretty much made it clear that he wanted to kill
his wife because he had insured her life around this time,
and then sure enough later when she fell ill, he
tried to blame it on this gas leak, but they
found out that it was narcotic poisoning. And I think
(17:24):
he was also involved in the Jack the Ripper case.
You may have heard of it. You may have heard
of this exciting case. Several sources more than just Ramslin,
they connect Bell to this case, but there's no real
record that reveals who he suspected, which one of the
suspects he thought was the real killer involved here. Yeah,
and he worked with Little John the toxicologist again on
(17:47):
this one, studied the case and did handwriting analysis of
the Ripper letters. And this part is really sad. But
the two men prepared reports on it and sent them
to Scotland Yard. But apparently the reports don't exist anymore. Yeah,
it would be nice to know what his guess was.
I think so, I mean, he seems like a pretty
reliable source. He'd be as good as anything we have
(18:10):
for the Ripper murders, definitely. But he believed that this method,
when used in solving crimes, was superior to the tunnel
vision of ordinary cops. Um. What that means, basically is
that ordinary policeman, this is Bell's opinion, when they come
up with the theory, they come up with the theory first,
(18:30):
and then they try to find the facts to support that.
He believed in getting the facts first and then making
observations and deductions to come up with an ultimate hypothesis
until it makes sense, until it all makes sense. And
he did think that you could come up with a
hypothesis and use that as a guide, but he believed
that you should be flexible and accept new facts that
(18:51):
come along and use that to kind of revise it
along the way, Yeah, don't become a slave to your hypothesis.
So maybe indirectly through holmes character. Bell's approach to solving
crimes has been a big influence in kind of combining
forensic science and crime investigation, which we see a lot
of today. It's kind of the norm, but he was
(19:12):
a bit of an influence in that. One main example
of this is Edmund Lockard. Sherlock Holmes was one of
his big heroes and Lockard established the world's first private
crime lab in nineteen ten, which was just a year
before Bell died. So clearly very influenced indirectly by Bell's work. Yep.
(19:33):
Still today there's the Joseph Bell Center for Forensic Statistics
and Legal Reasoning in Edinburgh, which was established in two
thousand one, and there they still honor and use Bell's
methods and approach to teaching forensics, statistics, law, artificial intelligence,
and ontological studies. Yeah, so useful stuff today. But after
(19:55):
you hear a little bit about this guy, Joseph Bell,
it seems like the connection to Sherlock Holmes is very obvious.
I mean, it's easy to see how he would have
led to his character's creation, but it's We're not just
like finding convenient comparisons and making it all match up.
There's more than that. There's actual evidence behind it. I
(20:18):
think Bell would be proud. Bell would definitely approve there's
some hard evidence to back it up. In a letter
to Bell on May fourth, which is still owned by
Bell's ascendants, Conan Doyle said this quote, it is most
certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes. And though
in the stories I have the advantage of being able
(20:39):
to place the detective and all sorts of dramatic positions,
I do not think that his analytical work is in
the least an exaggeration of similar effects which I have
seen you produce in the Outpatient Ward. Yeah, so that
pretty much steals it. That's it. And Bell was really
humble about this. You would think maybe if you have
kind of Doyle right to you and say you are
(21:01):
Sherlock Holmes, you might brag about that a little bit.
I would think it was pretty cool. I would think
it was definitely cool. But he basically said later that
Conan Doyle had made a bigger deal out of out
of what there was, and that Sherlock Holmes was really
Conan Doyle. You know it was. His genius was a
result of Conan Doyle's own talents and his own training.
(21:24):
And he even said, quote, you yourself are Sherlock Holmes
and you well know it. So here he is just
kind of denying this major influence and maybe he just
didn't want the attention. He was happy enough with his
with his own accolades, accomplishments. Yea, And what he said
isn't entirely untrue either. Conan Doyle does seem to have
(21:48):
added a little bit of himself to holmes character, as
a lot of writers do in their works. His eccentric personality,
Holmes's eccentric personality that is, for example, many people often
attribute to the author. Bill was actually kind of a nice,
charming guy, right. He was known to be really carrying, funny, compassionate,
(22:08):
whereas conn and Doyle I think was more prone to
having maybe what was closer not manic depression as Holmes
did Holmes character did, but maybe something closer to that
type of personality. Prickly, you wouldn't want him to be
your personal doctor, maybe if you were Queen Victoria, definitely,
But I think the bell fit the Bill a little better. Um.
(22:31):
They we also see different influences from other people who
lived in Edinburgh at the time and that during that
same period who show up as part of Holmes character,
such as Sir Robert Christensen, who was another professor at
the university and he is said to have influenced holmes
knowledge of poisons. So it's a mix, yeah, as as
most characters are. I'd say yeah, but I mean still
(22:54):
in terms of that basic method and approach, Bell definitely
inspired Homes and Holmes still has a lot of influence
on characters today. Thanks so much for joining us on
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
(23:16):
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(23:39):
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Happy Saturday. Sherlock Holmes came up on the show this week.
Although Grace Thomaston, who was called Mrs Sherlock Holmes, really
did not seem to be too fond of that nickname,
even though she didn't like it very much. The Sherlock
Holmes name drops seems like a good excuse to pull
our episode about who the real Sherlock Holmes was. Pull
(00:23):
that out for Today's Saturday Classic. This episode is from
previous hosts Sarah and Deblina, and it originally came out
on novemb Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class,
a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to
(00:46):
the podcast. I'm Sarah Dowdy and I'm Deblina chuker Boardy,
and today we're going to explore a mystery about one
of the most iconic mystery solvers out there, Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes being Scott Ash writer Arthur Conan Doyle's consulting detective,
the hawk Face super sleuth who has always been able
(01:07):
to somehow use his powers of deduction to solve mysteries
and always get the bad guys. He always knows what's
going on, even if he looks like he's in a
haze of opium or whatnot. I think it was cocaine,
but who who's counting of Cotton Doyle. He wasn't really
the first to invent the modern detective story, but he
(01:28):
did introduce this kind of science of detailed observation and
classification into it, which, as we'll see later, has actually
some influence. It's had some influence on the field of forensics. Yeah.
But even if you haven't read any of his writing,
you probably know the character of Sherlock Holmes. I mean
he's in everything. You've probably been played Sherlock Holmes as
(01:49):
a kid like playing detective. But I mean there's mentions
in other literary works, like novels. There's that recent movie
starring Robert Downey Jr. There's even a new BBC television
series which I think it kind of modernizes the whole thing. Yeah,
if there's some controversy around these modern takes on homes,
some of the true sherlakeans, the fervent Sherlock Holmes fans,
(02:12):
don't really like the fact that in the new series
he's using cell phones and text messaging and so forth.
But you know, these are the times, and and this
is the homes that we have now. But even even
though Holmes is of such a big part of our
consciousness and such a big part of pop culture, a
lot of people probably couldn't tell you if he's real.
And that's a that's a big question that's out there.
(02:33):
And if you go on the Internet and you google
is Sherlock Holmes real, you'll find maybe some different opinions
about that. Some people think maybe he's based on a
real person, an actual detective who worked for Scotland Yard.
Some people think that he's based on Connon Doyle himself
or completely made up, or he could be just completely fiction.
And in fact he is fiction, but he was based
(02:54):
on an actual person. And that's what we're going to
talk a little bit about today. But before we get
into that, let's take committed to take a closer look
at Doyle and what led him to his homes inspiration. Yeah. So,
Conan Doyle was born in May eighteen fifty nine in Edinburgh, Scotland.
He was the second of a huge family ten kids,
(03:14):
and his father had a lot of trouble in business
and life. He was a failed architect. He was an alcoholic,
but fortunately Conan Doyle's mother nurtured his love of history
and storytelling, helped him along, you know, helped develop his
imagination and inspired him to read Poe and Jules Byrne
and Jonathan Swift. So he was a creative child, yea.
(03:38):
He got an artistic side through his mom. He continued
his education in England. He had some schooling there and
then he went to Austria for about a year or
so I think, before returning to Scotland to prepare for
entry into the University of Edinburgh's medical school, which is
another surprise I think for a lot of people that
he had a medical background. Yes, he had some medical
(03:59):
aspiration Jen's um and actually ended up getting his Bachelor
of Medicine and Master of Surgery qualifications in eighteen eighty
one and an m d in eighteen eighty five. He
even went on to have a sort of a semi
successful medical career. He I think he practiced for at
least ten years or so, so he didn't have to
be spending all his time writing detective fiction. Well, I
(04:20):
think that was what he wanted to be doing. He
was writing even while he was practicing as a doctor.
That's he started the Sherlock Holmes series at that time
started writing stories, so it was definitely there from the beginning.
But it was someone that he had met his second
year of medical school who really inspired this literary character
that Conan Doyle became so famous for, and that was
(04:42):
Dr Joseph Bell. Yeah. So Kennon Doyle clerked for this
doctor Bell in the Royal Infirmary and he he was
just sort of his assistant. You know, he interviewed new
patients before they went in to see the doctor. But
this is interesting part. Bell didn't really need that assistance
because it seemed like he always kind of knew what
(05:03):
was going on with his new patients, sometimes before he
even saw them. Yeah, it was kind of freaky, for
lack of a better word, would call it freaky. Conan
Doyle would take notes, diligently interview these patients they'd come in,
and his mentor, Dr Bell would somehow know what was
going on. These people were total strangers, new patients, he'd
(05:26):
never met them before, but he would be able to
say things like how they make their living, where they from,
even maybe where they'd been that day. And Conny was
really impressed by the skill. And that's why, as anyone
would be I would be. But it's interesting they're not
actually friends. And you might think, um, this impressionable young
(05:49):
Conan Doyle would try to build a relationship with this guy,
especially since he becomes such a major influence on his
character later. But yeah, they're they're not good buddies. And
Bell's journals, which he kept from the eighteen sixties until
his death, uh, there's no mention of Doyle, so you
know they must have He must have not had a
huge impression on the doctor. He would think. I mean,
(06:11):
I if I don't write in a journal, but if
I were to write in a journal, I'd probably write
about my best friends and the people who are a
big influence in my life. And he did not appear there.
That journal was actually on display at an exhibit that
the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh has about Conan
Doyle and Bell and the real Sherlock Holmes. Still it's
a permanent display there, and he has that in some letters.
(06:34):
And so what they what we can ascertain from that
is that they weren't that close. But still Conan Doyle
must have been inspired by this skill, this like guessing
power that the doctor had. So that makes us wonder
How did the doctor do this? How is he able
to determine all of these minute details about someone's life
(06:55):
before he really talked to them. Hold that thought. We're
going to get into that a little more. First, a
little bit of background on Bell. He was born in
eighteen thirty seven and he was born into really a
medical focused family. His dad, his uncle's were all well
known surgeons. They were all involved in the medical field,
so he kind of followed in their footsteps. He was
(07:16):
educated at the Academy and the University in Edinburgh and
practiced as a doctor in Scotland. He was described as
being a thin, wiry guy, had a high nose, acute face,
penetrating gray eyes, and a high discordant voice which sounds
like somebody else I can yep. It's true. A lot
of these features, like the nose especially, are thought to
(07:38):
be very homes like, and people say that Bell even
wore a cloaked coat in a deer stalker hat, which
which are homes trademarks. He even has the cost dumn on,
he even has the outfit. Yeah, and he's he's kind
of an interesting guy, not just the super focused doctor,
but he's an amateur poet and a bird watcher and
an aviad shooter when he's not busy with medicine and
(08:02):
that sort of thing. So he has these interesting hobbies,
I guess you'd say, but his main focus still is medicine,
and in his profession he did a lot of things
with note he started Scotland's first training course for nurses,
(08:22):
which was kind of a big deal, and agreed to
teach some of the first female medical students too, even
though that was pretty controversial at the time there was
a lot of prejudice against these women who wanted to
study medicine. He was also Queen Victoria's a personal physician
whenever she was in Scotland, which I find very interesting
and I swear Queen Victoria like makes an appearance in
almost every podcast she works. Yeah, she apparently checked out
(08:47):
his wards and liked what she saw and decided to
make him her personal doctor. So one of the things
he was best known for, besides all of these accolades
and positions of prominent was for teaching a particular method
for diagnosing patients. And we've alluded to that a little
bit before, with his experience and being able to identify
(09:10):
certain things about patients before even interviewing them. And basically
what this all comes down to is that he thought
it was important to make a study of people, both
in order to notice the small details that distinguished the
sick from the healthy, and also just to impress patients
with your knowledge of of them so that they'll put
their faith in you. Yeah, I mean it. It worked
(09:31):
for his assistant. You can imagine that it would work
for his patients pretty well too, definitely. And so he
told his students that a diagnosis rested on three things
observed carefully, did do shrewdly, and confirm with evidence. And
he put this into practice for them too. Yeah, we
have an example for you that is just kind of outrageous.
(09:53):
There's a woman walks in with a little child, and
the doctor immediately says, oh, I was your walk from
this small town in Fife? And did you have to
walk up the ever life row? And what do you
do with the other one? And are you still working
at the linoleum factory. Okay, that's a lot of really
(10:13):
specific personal question, very specific stuff. And this was all
without ever having met her before. This was their first encounter,
and and oh I shouldn't mentioned here that this is
all sort of our English translation from the Scottish vernacular
at the time, which I didn't think we should attempt
to pronounce. But maybe next time. Maybe next time, we'll
(10:34):
give that a try. After a few beers. But he
had never met her before, so how did he do this?
He quickly noticed small things about her. Her Fife accent,
that's how we recognized she was from Fife. The red
clay on her shoes, which could have only come from
the botanical gardens area, which was near the road that
(10:56):
he asked her if she had walked up. That's like
something that would happen on a detective show totally. The
coach she had slung over her arm was too big
for the child who was with her, so it must
have been for another kid, which means that she must
have left home with two kids. And she had dermatitis
on her right hand, which was peculiar to workers who
worked in the specific linoleum factory in that town where
(11:19):
he had ascertained that she was from. So all of
these really super specific minute details. He suddenly put that
together upon meeting her, who knows, maybe in the matter
of seconds, and decided that it was correct. And sure enough,
she answered each question. In this conversation, she was like, yep,
(11:39):
I left the kid with my sister. Um, yeah, it
was a good walk. I mean, she answered all of
these questions in the affirmative and proved that he had
ascertained correctly. Who would have thought he was a wizard
or something. I don't know. I think that would disturb
me a little bit if somebody was that spot on
about everything. Yeah, I don't know if I would have
(12:00):
been exactly encouraged either, But it worked for a lot
of people. And it turns out that people say that
he was right most of the time, but if he
wasn't there were occasions where the patient would say, oh,
that's not correct, and a lot of times he would
then go further and expose that they were lying. Yeah,
(12:22):
which is kind of I mean, taking to the step further,
but um, not exactly living up to the point of
putting your patients at ease at that point, I guess
probably not, but at least getting the job done, which
is getting to the heart of the problem. His goal
was diagnosing, so he got to the truth one way
or another most of the time. Yeah, And I mean
(12:43):
he recognized that this was a valuable skill for his profession,
and so he wanted to train his students to have
the same abilities and taught them to look for those
really specific details that gave someone away, you know, like
everything from the way person walked, for instance, a sailor
would walk differently from a soldier. Um look at their hands,
(13:07):
which hands are not only give you big clues about
someone's age, but maybe even a person's profession. And he
even went so far as to say that you could
tell the difference between different types of callouses on the
hands tell what somebody did based on that. Yeah, Like
he he asserted that a mason would have different types
(13:28):
of callouses than say a carpenter or something, and that
he could by observing you could guess which profession a
person was in. And then also some more obvious things too,
like ornaments and tattoos and clothing and posture and just
a person's overall demeanor, things that might give away where
they're from, where they're going, what's going on where they've traveled,
(13:49):
all those kind of things. And he also had them
closely studies subjects that could help them make certain distinctions
when they were coming up with diagnoses, such as diverse
odors of poisons, even perfumes. They had to sort of
sample all these things and learn I guess the technical
aspect of it too, not just looking at okay, what
(14:10):
does this person have on them? What markings can I see?
But also can I recognize a certain sense, certain tastes,
certain sites. Yeah, and the way he did that was
maybe sometimes a little questionable yep. According to UH column
two tho nine column and The Forensic Examiner, written by
(14:31):
a Dr. Catherine Ramslin, she describes this funny kind of
training exercise or trick that Bell used with his students
when teaching them his method. Basically, he had this gross
container of amber colored fluid, which he told them up
front was disgusting, bitter tasting. But he told them that
it was a potent drug, and since they needed to
(14:54):
learn how various substances taste and smell, they should follow
his example and taste it right now. So he stuck
a finger in it, licks the finger, and then they
all have to do the same, and sure enough pass
it around. He's correct, it's bitter tasting. They all agree
with everyone's grossed out. And then at the end, though
(15:18):
Bell tells him that they've missed the most important part
the finger that he dipped into the liquid wasn't the
same one that he tasted, so he didn't actually taste
this disgusting stuff at all. Yeah, so they hadn't really
observed him at all. They had missed the most important thing,
even though they had been looking straight at them. So
this was a key lesson in his method that he
(15:40):
was trying to teach a magician, or he could have.
So Bell didn't just use this method for teaching and
to help his patients. He also used it to help
solve crimes in a homes esque sort of way. So
(16:00):
there's another little connection that we can see there. He
actually admitted to a reporter in the eighteen nineties that
he had been involved for about twenty years two decades
or so, that he had been working on criminal cases
for the crown, but he wouldn't divulge any details about this.
But RMS Land, that author we mentioned earlier, asserted that
(16:21):
he was involved in a few really big cases, and
one of them was the case of Elizabeth Chantrelle. She
was this young woman who was murdered by her no
good husband, Eugene Chantrelle for her insurance money, and he
tried to make it seem like it was an accidental death,
that she had been killed by coal gas poisoning, but
(16:42):
Bell worked with a toxicologist from the university named Sir
Henry little John and helped prove that Chantrell had actually
been poisoned. She hadn't been poisoned by the gas. She
had been poisoned by something else entirely, and her husband
had staged the room and stay the murder to make
it look like she had died from the gas leak. Yeah.
(17:04):
I mean, this guy didn't do any favors. He had
pretty much made it clear that he wanted to kill
his wife because he had insured her life around this time,
and then sure enough later when she fell ill, he
tried to blame it on this gas leak, but they
found out that it was narcotic poisoning. And I think
(17:24):
he was also involved in the Jack the Ripper case.
You may have heard of it. You may have heard
of this exciting case. Several sources more than just Ramslin,
they connect Bell to this case, but there's no real
record that reveals who he suspected, which one of the
suspects he thought was the real killer involved here. Yeah,
and he worked with Little John the toxicologist again on
(17:47):
this one, studied the case and did handwriting analysis of
the Ripper letters. And this part is really sad. But
the two men prepared reports on it and sent them
to Scotland Yard. But apparently the reports don't exist anymore. Yeah,
it would be nice to know what his guess was.
I think so, I mean, he seems like a pretty
reliable source. He'd be as good as anything we have
(18:10):
for the Ripper murders, definitely. But he believed that this method,
when used in solving crimes, was superior to the tunnel
vision of ordinary cops. Um. What that means, basically is
that ordinary policeman, this is Bell's opinion, when they come
up with the theory, they come up with the theory first,
(18:30):
and then they try to find the facts to support that.
He believed in getting the facts first and then making
observations and deductions to come up with an ultimate hypothesis
until it makes sense, until it all makes sense. And
he did think that you could come up with a
hypothesis and use that as a guide, but he believed
that you should be flexible and accept new facts that
(18:51):
come along and use that to kind of revise it
along the way, Yeah, don't become a slave to your hypothesis.
So maybe indirectly through holmes character. Bell's approach to solving
crimes has been a big influence in kind of combining
forensic science and crime investigation, which we see a lot
of today. It's kind of the norm, but he was
(19:12):
a bit of an influence in that. One main example
of this is Edmund Lockard. Sherlock Holmes was one of
his big heroes and Lockard established the world's first private
crime lab in nineteen ten, which was just a year
before Bell died. So clearly very influenced indirectly by Bell's work. Yep.
(19:33):
Still today there's the Joseph Bell Center for Forensic Statistics
and Legal Reasoning in Edinburgh, which was established in two
thousand one, and there they still honor and use Bell's
methods and approach to teaching forensics, statistics, law, artificial intelligence,
and ontological studies. Yeah, so useful stuff today. But after
(19:55):
you hear a little bit about this guy, Joseph Bell,
it seems like the connection to Sherlock Holmes is very obvious.
I mean, it's easy to see how he would have
led to his character's creation, but it's We're not just
like finding convenient comparisons and making it all match up.
There's more than that. There's actual evidence behind it. I
(20:18):
think Bell would be proud. Bell would definitely approve there's
some hard evidence to back it up. In a letter
to Bell on May fourth, which is still owned by
Bell's ascendants, Conan Doyle said this quote, it is most
certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes. And though
in the stories I have the advantage of being able
(20:39):
to place the detective and all sorts of dramatic positions,
I do not think that his analytical work is in
the least an exaggeration of similar effects which I have
seen you produce in the Outpatient Ward. Yeah, so that
pretty much steals it. That's it. And Bell was really
humble about this. You would think maybe if you have
kind of Doyle right to you and say you are
(21:01):
Sherlock Holmes, you might brag about that a little bit.
I would think it was pretty cool. I would think
it was definitely cool. But he basically said later that
Conan Doyle had made a bigger deal out of out
of what there was, and that Sherlock Holmes was really
Conan Doyle. You know it was. His genius was a
result of Conan Doyle's own talents and his own training.
(21:24):
And he even said, quote, you yourself are Sherlock Holmes
and you well know it. So here he is just
kind of denying this major influence and maybe he just
didn't want the attention. He was happy enough with his
with his own accolades, accomplishments. Yea, And what he said
isn't entirely untrue either. Conan Doyle does seem to have
(21:48):
added a little bit of himself to holmes character, as
a lot of writers do in their works. His eccentric personality,
Holmes's eccentric personality that is, for example, many people often
attribute to the author. Bill was actually kind of a nice,
charming guy, right. He was known to be really carrying, funny, compassionate,
(22:08):
whereas conn and Doyle I think was more prone to
having maybe what was closer not manic depression as Holmes
did Holmes character did, but maybe something closer to that
type of personality. Prickly, you wouldn't want him to be
your personal doctor, maybe if you were Queen Victoria, definitely,
But I think the bell fit the Bill a little better. Um.
(22:31):
They we also see different influences from other people who
lived in Edinburgh at the time and that during that
same period who show up as part of Holmes character,
such as Sir Robert Christensen, who was another professor at
the university and he is said to have influenced holmes
knowledge of poisons. So it's a mix, yeah, as as
most characters are. I'd say yeah, but I mean still
(22:54):
in terms of that basic method and approach, Bell definitely
inspired Homes and Holmes still has a lot of influence
on characters today. Thanks so much for joining us on
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
(23:16):
if you heard an email address or Facebook U r
L or something similar over the course of the show
that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is
History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old
health stuff works email address no longer works, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in
History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts,
(23:39):
Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else
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