by Michael Sims
The University of Edinburgh’s own Francis Home had described the appearance of diphtheria’s choking gray membrane as “blankets of a bed that has been laid in.” Home promoted the local slang word croup, an onomatopoeic term for a noise in the throat, into the official name of the respiratory illness that caused the noise—although diphtheria was more severe. A Berwickshire-born surgeon who served as the school’s inaugural professor of materia medica (the origins, composition, and attributes of medicines), performed the world’s first vaccination against measles, and even served as surgeon of dragoons in Flanders, Home was one of the titans to whom students such as Joe Bell feared they might never measure up.
The effects of the disease had been known for centuries, although only recently had physicians recognized that what they were now calling diphtheria was identical to illnesses known in the mid-eighteenth century as epidemic croup, malignant sore throat, and the terrifying name morbus strangulatorius. Speculations about its cause ranged from gases produced by decaying animals to cold weather, from a marshy atmosphere to the inevitable supernatural explanations. Fortunately, magic was no longer proposed as etiology. Moreover, the discovery in 1876, during Arthur’s freshman year in medical school, of a microscopic bacterium that causes anthrax suggested that the cause of diphtheria might soon be found, after so many centuries of suffering.
In 1864, miserable with empathy for children choking from diphtheria’s mucus, Bell yearned to devise a method for removing it. No one had yet been able to invent an implement that could efficiently suction out the mucus. Finally, by sucking on a pipette, he drew the infected mucus from the throat of a child on whom he was operating—an act that pulled some of it into his own mouth.
Afterward he suffered from the disease himself for many months. During his convalescence, when the pain was declining after three miserable weeks of a fiercely infected throat, friends observed for the first time a nasal twang in Bell’s voice. He could feel a flapping membrane in his throat that seemed to disrupt enunciation. After three more weeks, he was almost mute and experiencing an alarming double vision. Although the pain in his throat lessened, swallowing became more difficult. Often part of a swallow of liquid came back into his nasal passages, requiring a pinch or two of snuff to clear his head. One leg almost ceased to function and he began to experience chest pain.
Prescribed rural bed rest by no less an authority than Syme himself, Bell retired to the family estate in Glendoick, north of Edinburgh on the river Tay. After losing the ability to walk alone even with a cane, Bell finally surrendered to the need for someone to hold one of his arms—and then for two people, one on each side. Eventually he was able to swallow again. Gradually speech returned, but his voice remained high-pitched. It was a full four months after the onset of his own diphtheria before Bell felt he could walk with most of his old speed, and he never lost the limp. By January 1865, Bell was presenting a talk to the Medico-Chirurgical Society, which was later published in the Journal as an admirably calm and detailed third-person account of what readers gradually realized was an autobiographical drama.
Having long since triumphed over dangerous illness, Joseph Bell made it clear that compassion was as crucial to medicine as a clever diagnosis. Demonstrating that clues invisible to the untrained eye could quickly inform a keen observer of another person’s character and history, he showed Arthur and other students that his diagnoses were not mere theater. He taught that experience must be buttressed by tireless study of the professional journals. Reinforcing these lessons through his indulgence of Arthur’s questions about methods, Bell served as a model of both scientific intelligence and moral commitment. Arthur never forgot his mentor’s demonstrations or their implications.
CHAPTER 3
Art in the Blood
“Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”
—SHERLOCK HOLMES, IN ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “THE GREEK INTERPRETER”
In a narrow cul-de-sac in Edinburgh lurked one of Arthur’s most vivid memories of his childhood. Growing up poor, amid other rowdy boys sporting in the closes and wynds of the city, he had had to learn to fight. Always a feud simmered between boys on opposite sides of the street. Having battled his way to the top of his own group, as temporary king of the poor lads from the flats, one day he went up against the top rich boy from the villas across the way. They tackled each other in a villa garden. Evenly matched, they kept at it without declaring a winner until both were bloody and exhausted.
“Oh, Arthur,” his mother exclaimed when she saw him, “what a dreadful eye you have got!”
“You just go across and look at Eddie Tulloch’s eye!” replied her unrepentant son.
On another occasion, a bootmaker’s lad on an errand, carrying a green baize bag, encroached upon the territory of Arthur and his chums. Arthur stepped up to fight him, and the boy responded by swinging the boot-filled bag against his head, knocking him almost unconscious.
He did not avoid fights on the street, but at home Arthur sought a quiet corner and a book. Born to an artistic legacy, he had been drawn to literature from his earliest memory, and from a young age he encountered writers. His father’s side career as a painter and illustrator, as well as the greater reputation of other family members, had introduced Arthur and his siblings to notable writers and artists, some of whom came to call. The Edinburgh Doyles were not well off, unlike some other branches of the family, and at times Arthur squirmed with embarrassment when wealthier relatives and other strangers visited his parents’ modest flat. One such visitor was a tall, smiling, prematurely white-haired man of about fifty. He seemed ancient to Arthur, who could not have been more than four, as he dandled the little boy on his knee. Later, as a young man, Arthur proudly recalled that he had once sat on the lap of William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Pendennis and Vanity Fair.
His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was the brother of English-born Richard “Dickie” Doyle, a well-known Punch illustrator and creator of the magazine’s famous logo of Punch and Judy. Charles and Dickie were the sons of Irish caricaturist and lithographer John Doyle, famous under the pen name “H.B.” for his sedate political caricature that eschewed the kind of grotesque personification employed by predecessors such as Thomas Rowlandson.
Charles was himself a talented artist, but he had not achieved the skill or renown of his relatives. Elegant, bearded, witty, but a lover of drink, Charles was a hopelessly impractical man, creative but undisciplined—and haunted by personal demons. He had worked for decades as an architectural draftsman, one of several assistants to the prominent architect Robert Matheson. As Scotland’s Clerk of Works, Matheson was known for his Italian Renaissance public buildings, including the New Register House in New Town, which he designed to complement Robert Adam’s original eighteenth-century Register House.
Charles’s most important work in Matheson’s office was helping to design a fountain for Holyrood Palace. This was a commission from the young Queen Victoria, who wanted Holyrood to have a forecourt fountain reminiscent of one erected by James V in the early sixteenth century at Linlithgow Palace in West Lothian. When completed, the Holyrood fountain rose almost twenty feet above the cobblestones, sporting a rearing unicorn and a round-hatted piper above a ring of traditional lion heads pouring water into the surrounding moat. On the master sketch of this artifact, which Matheson described as “more in the class of a work of Art than ordinary Building work,” Charles’s signature appeared alongside Matheson’s—an unusual degree of recognition under Matheson, who took most such credit for himself. Charles also submitted a design for one of the grand windows of the Glasgow Cathedral, but his name did not appear on the list of contributing artists.
Over the years, Charles Doyle had illustrated numerous books. In 1877 he still possessed enough skill to draw sixty fanciful, elegant pictures for Our Trip to Blunderland by “Jean Jambon,” a pseudonym comically Gallicizing the first name and other initials of John Hay Athole Macdonald, Solicitor General for Scotland
. Macdonald had amused himself during his off-hours by writing a nonsensical, pun-filled children’s book so taken with Lewis Carroll’s Alice tales that it cited them in the first paragraph.
But Charles’s sporadic career was in decline. His earlier illustrations for London publishers were little known in Scotland. Rather than sell his infrequent watercolors and drawings, he sank to trading them for spirits, and thus one Edinburgh pub accumulated a private gallery of Doyle artwork. By the time that Arthur was three years old, his father was sometimes so drunk that he could neither recall his own name nor rise from a crawl on the floor. He was even caught drinking furniture varnish.
Charles might sneak any small item out of the house to exchange it for drink. His humiliated wife would find herself facing irate tradespeople who presented bills for goods she had never seen—only to learn that Charles had bought them on credit and sold them for secret cash. At times he resorted to burgling his children’s coin boxes. To escape confinement in his room during one of his drinking bouts, Charles had been known to strip off his underwear, tie it together with bed linen, and risk his life and dignity using this cloth rope to climb out a window and scramble down a wall of the house.
Despite her frustrations and disappointments, Mary Doyle seems to have remained loyal toward and affectionate with Charles. “To know him was to love him,” she said later. Arthur seems to have tightly closeted his father’s secrets and discussed them little, if at all, with friends, alluding to them only obliquely in surviving letters to his mother.
For a quarter of a century, Charles labored in the Office of Works, a position he had held since the age of nineteen. At no point could his annual salary plus artwork fees have surpassed £300—too modest an income to house, feed, and educate a large family. As long ago as the early 1860s, barely thirty years old, Charles had been drinking so heavily and missing so many days that the Office of Works placed him on half pay for most of a year. His considerable talent and his amiable disposition endeared him to his superiors, Robert Matheson and Andrew Kerr, and the pair tolerated his flaws until they became unbearable. In June 1876, a few months before Arthur’s return to Edinburgh, the office retired Charles during restructuring. He was only forty-four. The retirement report provided a sanitized public version: Charles Doyle had “discharged his duties with diligence and fidelity,” and therefore he was granted an annual pension of £150.
Either Mary kept significant details from Arthur or he persisted in denying them. When she told him the retirement news in a letter, he asked innocently if his father had been unwell or if there might be some other reason for his retirement.
Thus most of the responsibility for the welfare of the children fell upon Arthur’s lively, resourceful, gray-eyed mother, whom he adored and idealized. It was she who provided emotional stability and introduced him to a love of learning. She told Arthur about Gustave Flaubert and Théophile Gautier, about the Goncourt brothers. Mary was gently chaffed in the family for reading even while performing household chores. He always remembered her stirring porridge with a spurtle—a stick shaped to prevent lumps in the oats—in one hand while the other held the Revue des Deux Mondes close to her nearsighted eyes. In the Revue, with its familiar brownish-yellow cover, Arthur first glimpsed the mostly fictional Middle Ages of chivalry and derring-do that captured his imagination.
Such devotion to literature helped inspire her son. Arthur’s skill with words improved rapidly when he read to his mother while she knitted. He first learned to read French by such independent means as laboriously spelling out and pronouncing the captions of illustrations in a volume of Jules Verne. Verne’s first popular novel was Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon), serialized in a magazine and then published in book form in 1863, when Arthur was four. During Arthur’s early childhood, many of Verne’s most popular works were published, including The Adventures of Captain Hatteras, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and From the Earth to the Moon. They whetted Arthur’s appetite for adventure and helped hone his fluency in French.
Mary also developed an appreciation for the U.S. physician and essayist Oliver Wendell Holmes, author of such popular works as The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, published the year before Arthur’s birth. His vivid anecdotes about the triumph of modern medicine helped shape Arthur’s views. The surname Holmes was spoken respectfully in the Doyle household.
Mary had an entire flock to worry over. When Arthur returned to Edinburgh from boarding school at the age of seventeen, his older sister, Anne Mary Frances Conan, called Tottie and later Annette, was barely twenty but already working as a governess in Portugal. She sent home every penny she could spare. Constance Amelia Monica (Conny) was twelve, and Caroline Mary Burton (Lottie) was ten. Arthur’s only brother, John Frances Innes Hay, nicknamed Duff, was three and a half. Jane Adelaide Rose, called Ida, was only one, and during Arthur’s first year of medical school his mother gave birth to another girl, Bryan Mary Julia Josephine, soon nicknamed Dodo.
The Doyle family’s financial straits, especially following Charles’s loss of his Office of Works position, had finally led Mary to resort to running a boardinghouse. Perhaps this development felt like closing a circle for Arthur’s parents. Around 1850, when Charles Doyle first came to Edinburgh, he had found lodging with a widow, whose daughter, the alluring Mary, soon caught his eye. But Arthur was ashamed of this situation, which he regarded as a fall from grace, and as the eldest son, he felt the burden of his siblings’ and parents’ expectation that he would rescue the family.
CHAPTER 4
Seven Weary Steps
Stonyhurst, that grand mediaeval dwelling house . . . Year by year, then, I see myself climbing those seven weary steps and passing through as many stages of my boyhood.
—ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, MEMORIES AND ADVENTURES
Despite the hard work in his college medical studies with Joe Bell, Arthur was much happier than he had been during his early childhood at Newington Academy in Edinburgh—his last extended experience of the city prior to eight years of boarding school. As a child he had walked only a couple of blocks, to Salisbury Place, for this first immersion in school, where the one-eyed, pockmarked headmaster, Patrick Wilson, wielded his tawse—a leather thong with slits and tails—with sadistic glee.
Life was a little better during two years under gentler Father Francis Cassidy at Hodder Place down in Lancashire in northern England, but the other teachers were not so kind. And Hodder, where Arthur spent two long years bare of holidays except for six weeks each summer, was the preparatory school for nearby Stonyhurst. At the renowned Jesuit school, masters punished infractions with fierce blows across the hand from a boot-sole-size strip of india-rubber called a tolley. Afterward, Arthur could not use his battered, throbbing hand even to turn a door handle and leave the room. The next morning, he would find it difficult even to grasp his portion of dry bread and watered milk in the incongruously elegant, marble-tiled dining room.
Proud, defiant Arthur yearned for respect and affection, but he refused to bow to bullying by supposed educators. He not only tried to bear punishment with a stoic lack of expression; he sought opportunities for mischief to prove that his spirit remained unbroken. Gradually, Arthur realized that he was more often beaten than many of his classmates, but he seems to have assessed this ratio as proof of his independence. Again and again he needed to prove himself—to others and to himself.
Fellow students learned that Arthur was a born storyteller who could enliven a rainy half-holiday (Wednesday and Saturday afternoons) with tales of heroic derring-do. Rapt students sat or squatted on the floor, resting chin in hand, and gazed at Arthur perched atop a desk. Although sometimes he demanded his payment of tarts before he would begin, and even though he might stall in midscene until a snack of apples reignited his narrative, the students applauded his storytelling. Gradually, he began to yearn for a more prominent and lasting venue.
Although only one friendship remained after Stonyhurst days, with a student named
Jimmy Ryan, Arthur got along well with most other students, such as classmate Patrick Sherlock, who was a distant relative of Arthur’s Irish aunt Jane Doyle. Probably young Patrick reminded Arthur of William Sherlock, the controversial divine who wound up dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London in the late 1600s; Arthur’s favorite historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay, featured Sherlock prominently in his History of England. Arthur often ran across this surname. Resentfully immersed in theology at Stonyhurst, the increasingly freethinking young man also may have been familiar with the writings of William Sherlock’s son. Thomas Sherlock’s defense of Christian doctrine regarding miracles was said to have helped inspire the philosopher David Hume—one of Edinburgh’s legendary sons, and a luminary in the Scottish Enlightenment—to write his determinedly rational “Of Miracles,” a notorious chapter in his 1748 Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. And 1868, the year that Arthur turned nine, saw publication of A Lost Name, a novel by the Irish ghost story writer and Gothic novelist Sheridan Le Fanu, which featured a character named Carmel Sherlock.
Arthur also resented the endless drilling in Latin and Greek and mathematics. He disliked Homer in his native tongue and he disliked Euclid in any language. Yet, between Hodder and Stonyhurst, he plodded through the seven classes, one concentrated in each year: elements, figures, rudiments, grammar, syntax, poetry, and rhetoric. His weakest subject was chemistry—Stonyhurst was advanced enough to have recently constructed a chemistry laboratory—but nonetheless Arthur wrote home threatening to frighten his siblings with chemical experiments.
At Stonyhurst Arthur discovered in himself a previously unrealized store of talent and imagination. In 1874, the year he turned fifteen, he watched other boys suffer loudly over an assignment to write poetry on the theme of Moses and the parting of the Red Sea. Arthur, in contrast, having loved verse as far back as he could remember, jumped into the task with glee: “Like pallid daisies in a grassy wood, / So round the sward the tents of Israel stood . . .”
