Biography Examines Joseph Bell, the Scottish Surgeon Who Inspired Sherlock Holmes

Ars Technica notes that Doyle created one of the most beloved fictional detectives of all time in Holmes, a character who has spawned countless novels, films and television series. Far fewer people know about Bell, the surgeon who taught Doyle when the author was still a young medical student.

The report describes Fitzharris as a noted science communicator with a fondness for the medically macabre. It says she published a biography of Scottish surgical pioneer Joseph Lister, The Butchering Art, in 2017, and followed it with 2022's The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I. That book focused on Harold Gillies, a World War I surgeon who rebuilt the faces of injured soldiers. Ars Technica called the Lister biography a great, if occasionally grisly, read.

In 2020, Fitzharris hosted a Smithsonian Channel documentary, The Curious Life and Death Of..., which explored famous deaths ranging from drug lord Pablo Escobar to magician Harry Houdini. According to Ars Technica, she performed virtual autopsies, experimented with blood samples, interviewed witnesses and conducted real-time demonstrations in hopes of gleaning fresh insights. Last year she and her husband, caricaturist Adrian Teal, collaborated on an illustrated children's book, Dead Ends! Flukes, Flops, and Failures that Sparked Medical Marvels.

Ars Technica describes Sleuth-Hound as an eminently readable biography. The report presents Bell's story as the central case, with Fitzharris returning to the medical history subjects that have shaped her previous books and documentary work.

Editor's Summary A new biography by Lindsey Fitzharris examines Joseph Bell, the University of Edinburgh surgeon who taught Arthur Conan Doyle and is described as the real-life inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. The book, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, follows Fitzharris's earlier biographies of Joseph Lister and Harold Gillies. According to Ars Technica, it is an eminently readable account of the surgeon behind one of fiction's most enduring detectives.