November 24, 2010 • 24 mins
Arthur Conan Doyle wasn't the first person to write a mystery novel, but his focus on scientific methods and brilliant protagonist made the stories of Sherlock Holmes world-famous. Yet is Sherlock Holmes based on a real person? Tune in to find out.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Fair Dowdy and I'm de Blaine and Chalker Boardy,
and today we're going to explore a mystery about one
(00:20):
of the most iconic mystery solvers out there, Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes being Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle's consulting detective, the
hawk face super sleuth who has always been able to
somehow use his powers of deduction to solve mysteries and
always get the bad guys. He always knows what's going on,
(00:41):
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 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
(01:04):
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 a kid
like playing detective. But I mean there's mentions in other
literary works like novels. There's that recent movie starring Robert
(01:24):
Downey Jr. There's even a new BBC television series which
I think it kind of modernizes the whole thing. Yeah,
there's some controversy around these modern takes on homes. Some
of the true sherlockyans, the fervent Sherlock Holmes fans, don't
really like the fact that in the new series he's
using cell phones and text messaging and so forth. But
(01:45):
you know, these are the times and and this is
the homes that we have now. But even even though
Colmes 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. 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,
(02:07):
an actual detective who worked for Scotland Yard. Some people
think that he's based on Conan Doyle himself, or he's
completely made up, or he could be just completely fiction,
and in fact he is fiction, but he was based
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 a minute to take a closer
look at Doyle and what led him to his homes inspiration. Yeah.
(02:32):
So Conan Doyle was born May eighteen fifty nine in Edinburgh, Scotland.
He was the second of a huge family ten kids,
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
(02:52):
and storytelling, helped him along, you know, helped develop his
imagination and inspired him to read po and Burne and
Jonathan Swift. So he was a creative child, yet 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,
(03:14):
I think, before returning to Scotland to prepare for entry
into the University of Edinburgh Medical School, which is another
surprise I think for a lot of people that he
had a medical background. Yes, he had some medical aspirations
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
(03:35):
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 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,
(03:56):
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 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,
(04:18):
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 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,
it would call it freaky. Connan Doyle would take notes,
(04:42):
diligently interviewed these patients they'd come in, and his mentor,
doctor Bell, would somehow know what was going on. These
people were total strangers, new patients, he'd 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 Condo was really impressed by
(05:05):
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 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. In Bell's journals,
(05:27):
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, 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
(05:49):
at an exhibit that the Royal College of Surgeons in
Edinburgh has about Conan, Doyle and Bell and the real
trilat Holmes. Still it's a permanent display there and he
has that some letters and so what they What we
can entertain from that is that they weren't that close.
But still conn and Doyle must have been inspired by
this skill, this like guessing power that the doctor had.
(06:13):
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 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 eighty seven and he was born
into really a medical focused family. His dad, his uncles
(06:37):
were all well known surgeons. They were all involved in
the medical field, so he kind of followed in their footsteps.
He was 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
(06:57):
which sounds like somebody else I can think. Yep, it's true.
A lot of these features, like the nose especially, are
thought to 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 costume on,
he even has the outfit. Yeah, and he's he's kind
(07:18):
of an interesting guy, not just the super focused doctor,
but he's an amateur poet and a bird watcher and
an average shooter when he's not busy with you know,
medicine and that sort of thing. So he has these
interesting hobbies. I guess you'd say, definitely, But his main
focus still is medicine, and in his profession he did
a lot of things of note. He started Scotland's first
(07:40):
training course for nurses, which is 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 a 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 away. Yeah, she
(08:04):
apparently checked out his words 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 prominence, was for teaching
a particular method for diagnosing patients. And we've alluded to
that a little bit before, with his experience and being
(08:27):
able to identify 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
(08:47):
put their faith in you. Yeah, I mean it. It
worked 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 of carefully, did you 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
(09:10):
of outrageous. There's a woman walks in with a little child,
and the doctor immediately says, oh, how is 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
(09:31):
really 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 mention 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,
(09:53):
we'll give that a try. After a few beers. But
he had never met her before, It's 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.
(10:15):
That 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
(10:37):
where 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, I left the kid with my sister. Um, yeah,
(11:01):
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 been exactly encouraged either, But it worked for a
lot of people. And it turns out that people say
(11:24):
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,
which is kind of I mean, taking it a step further,
but um, not exactly living up to the point of
(11:48):
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
he recognized that this was a valuable skill for his profession,
and so he wanted to train his students to have
(12:08):
the same abilities and taught them to look for those
really specific details that gave someone away, you know, like
everything from the way a person walked, for instance, a
sailor would walk differently from a soldier. Um, look at
their hands, which hands are not only give you big
clues about someone's age, but maybe even a person's profession.
(12:32):
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 of callouses than say a carpenter or something, and
that he could by observing you could guess which profession
(12:53):
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, all those kind of things. And he
also had them closely studied subjects that could help them
make certain distinctions when they were coming up with diagnoses,
(13:16):
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 does this person have on them? What
markings can I see? But also can I recognize certain sense,
certain taste, certain sites. Yeah, And the way he did
(13:39):
that with maybe sometimes a little questionable yep. According to
UH column A two nine column and The Forensic Examiner,
written by 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 had this gross
(14:01):
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
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 a finger, and then they
(14:25):
all have to do the same, and sure enough passed
it around. He's correct bitter tasting, and they all agree
with everyone's grossed out. And then at the end, though,
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
(14:46):
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'd been looking straight at them. So this
was a key lesson in his method that he was
trying to teach a magician. 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
(15:08):
in a homes esque sort of way. So 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 RAN's Land,
that author we mentioned earlier, asserted that he was involved
(15:33):
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 Bell worked with
(15:54):
a toxicologist from the university named Sir Henry little John
and helped prove that trell 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 staged the murder to make it look like
she had died from the gas leak. Yeah. I mean,
(16:15):
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 he
(16:35):
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 this one,
(16:58):
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 set 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
(17:18):
be as good as anything we have 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
(17:39):
come up with the theory first, 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 all
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 come along
(18:02):
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 a bit of
(18:23):
an influence on 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. Still
(18:44):
today there's the Joseph Bell Center for Forensics, 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 you hear a little
(19:06):
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,
(19:27):
there's actual evidence behind it. I 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
(19:49):
the advantage of being able 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
out patient ward. Yeah, so that pretty much steals it.
That's it. And Belle was really humble about this. You
would think maybe if you have kind of Doyle right
(20:11):
to you and say you are 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
(20:33):
own talents in his own training. 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. Yeah,
(20:53):
and what he said isn't entirely untrue either. Conan Doyle
does seem to have added a little bit of himself
off 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 that to the author.
Bill was actually kind of a nice, charming guy, right.
(21:15):
He was known to be really carrying, funny, compassionate, whereas
conn and Doyle I think was more prone to having
maybe what was closer or not manic depression as Holmes did.
Holmes character did, but maybe something closer to that type
of personality. You wouldn't want him to be your personal
(21:35):
doctor maybe if you were Queen Victoria. Definitely, but I
think Cabell fit the Bill a little better. Um. 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,
(21:55):
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 in terms of
that basic method and approach, Bell definitely inspired Home and
Holmes still has a lot of influence on characters today. Definitely.
(22:18):
One notable example, Dr Gregg House on the show House
the House creator David Shore has even acknowledged that Doctor
was inspired by Holmes. Well, and it's funny because I
mean when I was reading about Bell in his sort
of gotcha things that he would do with his patients,
I mean I did think of House right away. I
(22:39):
definitely did too. And I think that I've even heard
that before that Sherlott Holmes was an inspiration for House.
But I just assumed, maybe as many people have, that
it was just the detective part of it, the part
where House always has to solve the mystery in the
kind of grumpy demeanor exactly. But now I can see
that it's actually closer to the original idea than I suspectedly.
(23:00):
All Right, well, I think that about wraps that for
the real Sherlock Holmes here. But we're definitely curious about
what your favorite home story is. We were trying to
pick ours and couldn't quite decide, So if you want
to email us, you can find us at History Podcast
at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Twitter
at Miston History and we have a Facebook fan page.
(23:22):
So lots of ways to share your favorite mystery. Yes,
there are, and if you want to find out a
little bit more about some of the ideas that we
talked about here, such as luck Ards exchange principle and
how that worked. You can find it by coming to
our homepage and typing in luck Ards exchange principle, and
that's at www. Dot how stuff works dot com. For
(23:48):
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Fair Dowdy and I'm de Blaine and Chalker Boardy,
and today we're going to explore a mystery about one
(00:20):
of the most iconic mystery solvers out there, Sherlock Holmes.
Holmes being Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle's consulting detective, the
hawk face super sleuth who has always been able to
somehow use his powers of deduction to solve mysteries and
always get the bad guys. He always knows what's going on,
(00:41):
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 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
(01:04):
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 a kid
like playing detective. But I mean there's mentions in other
literary works like novels. There's that recent movie starring Robert
(01:24):
Downey Jr. There's even a new BBC television series which
I think it kind of modernizes the whole thing. Yeah,
there's some controversy around these modern takes on homes. Some
of the true sherlockyans, the fervent Sherlock Holmes fans, don't
really like the fact that in the new series he's
using cell phones and text messaging and so forth. But
(01:45):
you know, these are the times and and this is
the homes that we have now. But even even though
Colmes 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. 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,
(02:07):
an actual detective who worked for Scotland Yard. Some people
think that he's based on Conan Doyle himself, or he's
completely made up, or he could be just completely fiction,
and in fact he is fiction, but he was based
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 a minute to take a closer
look at Doyle and what led him to his homes inspiration. Yeah.
(02:32):
So Conan Doyle was born May eighteen fifty nine in Edinburgh, Scotland.
He was the second of a huge family ten kids,
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
(02:52):
and storytelling, helped him along, you know, helped develop his
imagination and inspired him to read po and Burne and
Jonathan Swift. So he was a creative child, yet 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,
(03:14):
I think, before returning to Scotland to prepare for entry
into the University of Edinburgh Medical School, which is another
surprise I think for a lot of people that he
had a medical background. Yes, he had some medical aspirations
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
(03:35):
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 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,
(03:56):
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 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,
(04:18):
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 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,
it would call it freaky. Connan Doyle would take notes,
(04:42):
diligently interviewed these patients they'd come in, and his mentor,
doctor Bell, would somehow know what was going on. These
people were total strangers, new patients, he'd 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 Condo was really impressed by
(05:05):
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 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. In Bell's journals,
(05:27):
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, 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
(05:49):
at an exhibit that the Royal College of Surgeons in
Edinburgh has about Conan, Doyle and Bell and the real
trilat Holmes. Still it's a permanent display there and he
has that some letters and so what they What we
can entertain from that is that they weren't that close.
But still conn and Doyle must have been inspired by
this skill, this like guessing power that the doctor had.
(06:13):
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 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 eighty seven and he was born
into really a medical focused family. His dad, his uncles
(06:37):
were all well known surgeons. They were all involved in
the medical field, so he kind of followed in their footsteps.
He was 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
(06:57):
which sounds like somebody else I can think. Yep, it's true.
A lot of these features, like the nose especially, are
thought to 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 costume on,
he even has the outfit. Yeah, and he's he's kind
(07:18):
of an interesting guy, not just the super focused doctor,
but he's an amateur poet and a bird watcher and
an average shooter when he's not busy with you know,
medicine and that sort of thing. So he has these
interesting hobbies. I guess you'd say, definitely, But his main
focus still is medicine, and in his profession he did
a lot of things of note. He started Scotland's first
(07:40):
training course for nurses, which is 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 a 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 away. Yeah, she
(08:04):
apparently checked out his words 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 prominence, was for teaching
a particular method for diagnosing patients. And we've alluded to
that a little bit before, with his experience and being
(08:27):
able to identify 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
(08:47):
put their faith in you. Yeah, I mean it. It
worked 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 of carefully, did you 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
(09:10):
of outrageous. There's a woman walks in with a little child,
and the doctor immediately says, oh, how is 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
(09:31):
really 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 mention 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,
(09:53):
we'll give that a try. After a few beers. But
he had never met her before, It's 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.
(10:15):
That 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
(10:37):
where 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, I left the kid with my sister. Um, yeah,
(11:01):
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 been exactly encouraged either, But it worked for a
lot of people. And it turns out that people say
(11:24):
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,
which is kind of I mean, taking it a step further,
but um, not exactly living up to the point of
(11:48):
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
he recognized that this was a valuable skill for his profession,
and so he wanted to train his students to have
(12:08):
the same abilities and taught them to look for those
really specific details that gave someone away, you know, like
everything from the way a person walked, for instance, a
sailor would walk differently from a soldier. Um, look at
their hands, which hands are not only give you big
clues about someone's age, but maybe even a person's profession.
(12:32):
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 of callouses than say a carpenter or something, and
that he could by observing you could guess which profession
(12:53):
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, all those kind of things. And he
also had them closely studied subjects that could help them
make certain distinctions when they were coming up with diagnoses,
(13:16):
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 does this person have on them? What
markings can I see? But also can I recognize certain sense,
certain taste, certain sites. Yeah, And the way he did
(13:39):
that with maybe sometimes a little questionable yep. According to
UH column A two nine column and The Forensic Examiner,
written by 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 had this gross
(14:01):
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
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 a finger, and then they
(14:25):
all have to do the same, and sure enough passed
it around. He's correct bitter tasting, and they all agree
with everyone's grossed out. And then at the end, though,
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
(14:46):
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'd been looking straight at them. So this
was a key lesson in his method that he was
trying to teach a magician. 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
(15:08):
in a homes esque sort of way. So 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 RAN's Land,
that author we mentioned earlier, asserted that he was involved
(15:33):
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 Bell worked with
(15:54):
a toxicologist from the university named Sir Henry little John
and helped prove that trell 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 staged the murder to make it look like
she had died from the gas leak. Yeah. I mean,
(16:15):
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 he
(16:35):
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 this one,
(16:58):
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 set 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
(17:18):
be as good as anything we have 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
(17:39):
come up with the theory first, 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 all
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 come along
(18:02):
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 a bit of
(18:23):
an influence on 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. Still
(18:44):
today there's the Joseph Bell Center for Forensics, 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 you hear a little
(19:06):
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,
(19:27):
there's actual evidence behind it. I 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
(19:49):
the advantage of being able 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
out patient ward. Yeah, so that pretty much steals it.
That's it. And Belle was really humble about this. You
would think maybe if you have kind of Doyle right
(20:11):
to you and say you are 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
(20:33):
own talents in his own training. 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. Yeah,
(20:53):
and what he said isn't entirely untrue either. Conan Doyle
does seem to have added a little bit of himself
off 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 that to the author.
Bill was actually kind of a nice, charming guy, right.
(21:15):
He was known to be really carrying, funny, compassionate, whereas
conn and Doyle I think was more prone to having
maybe what was closer or not manic depression as Holmes did.
Holmes character did, but maybe something closer to that type
of personality. You wouldn't want him to be your personal
(21:35):
doctor maybe if you were Queen Victoria. Definitely, but I
think Cabell fit the Bill a little better. Um. 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,
(21:55):
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 in terms of
that basic method and approach, Bell definitely inspired Home and
Holmes still has a lot of influence on characters today. Definitely.
(22:18):
One notable example, Dr Gregg House on the show House
the House creator David Shore has even acknowledged that Doctor
was inspired by Holmes. Well, and it's funny because I
mean when I was reading about Bell in his sort
of gotcha things that he would do with his patients,
I mean I did think of House right away. I
(22:39):
definitely did too. And I think that I've even heard
that before that Sherlott Holmes was an inspiration for House.
But I just assumed, maybe as many people have, that
it was just the detective part of it, the part
where House always has to solve the mystery in the
kind of grumpy demeanor exactly. But now I can see
that it's actually closer to the original idea than I suspectedly.
(23:00):
All Right, well, I think that about wraps that for
the real Sherlock Holmes here. But we're definitely curious about
what your favorite home story is. We were trying to
pick ours and couldn't quite decide, So if you want
to email us, you can find us at History Podcast
at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Twitter
at Miston History and we have a Facebook fan page.
(23:22):
So lots of ways to share your favorite mystery. Yes,
there are, and if you want to find out a
little bit more about some of the ideas that we
talked about here, such as luck Ards exchange principle and
how that worked. You can find it by coming to
our homepage and typing in luck Ards exchange principle, and
that's at www. Dot how stuff works dot com. For
(23:48):
more on this and thousands of other topics, is that
how stuff works dot com. The how stuff Works dot
Com i phone app is coming soon. Get access to
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