Joe Bell was a man who liked to keep busy. In addition to his hospital and police work, he gradually built one of the largest private practices in Edinburgh, sustaining it throughout his career. Each day he made up to twenty house calls, trundling from appointment to appointment in his elegant barouche.
On one occasion, he called on Hugh Black—a minister at St. George’s United Free Church, where Bell was an elder. Black’s wife, who had summoned Bell, was concerned that her husband was coming down with a cold. The minister dismissed his wife’s worries, insisting that he would be well enough to deliver his sermon the next morning.
When Bell arrived at the house, he stepped into Black’s study, took a seat opposite him, and began telling him a joke. When the minister laughed heartily at the punchline, Bell shot to his feet and pointed a stern finger at his patient, as if he had caught him in a lie. “Ye’ll no preach the morrow,” Bell said. He knew by the sound of the minister’s rattling laugh that the cold was deep-seated, and the only remedy was rest.
Bell also secured a fourth revenue stream for a time by working as a medical examiner for an insurance company. The nineteenth century witnessed a surge in the number of people taking out life insurance policies. This was driven in part by concern over the prevalence of diseases such as smallpox, tuberculosis, and cholera.
It was a system, however, that was open to abuse. The most egregious perpetrators of fraud in the industry were corrupt doctors who were paid by patients to send insurance companies medical examination reports that omitted unfavorable findings. So common was this practice that by the middle of the century, insurance companies were regularly employing their own medical referees to submit thorough and unbiased reports for review.
Bell’s talents were especially suited to this role. He once correctly identified a man sent to him by insurers as a former soldier. Poking the subject in his bare ribs after he had stripped to the waist, Bell declared, “You have belonged to the volunteers.” The man confirmed this, but said that his military service had ended some years before. Though Bell knew the man was not in the army, his musculature still betrayed to Bell his previous career. Bell’s clients, the insurers, must have been delighted to have such a keen pair of eyes on their side.
That Bell was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes was still known to only a handful of people, including Robert Louis Stevenson, who had by then guessed the truth.
While Bell split his time between this sideline, his private practice, his collaborations with Henry Duncan Littlejohn, and his duties on the wards of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, he also continued to monitor Conan Doyle’s success. The interview in The Bookman had inaugurated what turned into a flurry of correspondence with his old clerk in the spring of 1892.
In one letter, Conan Doyle thanked Bell for further story suggestions. “Your letters are really of great value to me and I am exceedingly obliged to you for the details which you so kindly furnished. The deserter-cobbler is admirable, and I wish I had a dozen more such cases.” In the same letter, Conan Doyle also told Bell that he was “insatiable for material,” as he had committed to writing twelve more stories for The Strand.
“Your sketch too of the crime is capital,” he continued. “It wants a sort of second plot to run parallel with the first, and to drag some other red herring across the scent besides the ex-soldier. But there is the nucleus—and indeed much more than the nucleus, of something very good. I shall certainly—with your kind permission—avail myself of the idea.” He ended the letter by saying that he had asked the bookseller to send Bell a “complete edition of my little yarns,” and thanked him “once more very heartily for the ‘tips.'”
That Bell was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes was still known to only a handful of people, including Robert Louis Stevenson, who had by then guessed the truth. Since the publication of the interview in The Bookman, however, interest in the identity of the unnamed “professor of medicine at Edinburgh University” had been growing.
Harry How, who had been working as a features writer for The Strand Magazine since its inception, was determined to get the scoop. After all, what better place to reveal the mysterious professor’s identity than in the very magazine responsible for making the fictional detective an international sensation? And so, How appeared on Conan Doyle’s doorstep one afternoon in the summer of 1892, seeking an audience with the acclaimed author.
“I found him totally different from the man I expected to see; but that is always the case,” How wrote in the article he soon published. “There was nothing lynx-eyed, nothing ‘detective’ about him—not even the regulation walk of our modern solver of mysteries.” Instead, he was greeted by a “happy, genial, homely man” who grasped his hand heartily and welcomed him to his house.
After a tour of Conan Doyle’s “prettily-built and modest-looking red-brick residence” at 12 Tennison Road in South Norwood, the two men availed themselves of the author’s luxuriantly wallpapered study. They lit cigars, and settled into their chairs to discuss Conan Doyle’s childhood and his early steps into adulthood. Before long, the conversation turned to his time as a medical student at the University of Edinburgh.
What better place to reveal the mysterious professor’s identity than in the very magazine responsible for making the fictional detective an international sensation?
“There I met the man who suggested Sherlock Holmes to me—here is a portrait of him as he was in those days, and he is strong and hearty, and still in Edinburgh now,” Conan Doyle told the journalist, handing him a photograph. “I was clerk in Mr. Bell’s ward,” he continued. “A clerk’s duties are to note down all the patients to be seen, and muster them together. Often I would have seventy or eighty. When everything was ready, I would show them in to Mr. Bell, who would have the students gathered round him. His intuitive powers were simply marvelous.”
Conan Doyle then regaled How with several stories of Bell’s observational sorcery: the man whose alcoholism was revealed by a flask hidden in his breast pocket; the cobbler whose trade was betrayed by wear on the inside of his trousers where he rested his leg against the lapstone.
“He was continually before me—his sharp, piercing grey eyes, eagle nose, and striking features,” he said, puffing on his cigar. “He was most kind and painstaking with the students—a real good friend—and when I took my degree and went to Africa the remarkable individuality and discriminating tact of my old master made a deep and lasting impression on me, though I had not the faintest idea that it would one day lead me to forsake medicine for story writing.”
Conan Doyle realized that he had provided enough details to pique How’s curiosity about the Edinburgh professor. Shortly after the interview, he penned a slightly panicked letter to Bell.
I am afraid that my little sketches have had the effect of setting a newspaper man on your trail with as great persistence as even Holmes showed to any of his criminals. Mr Harry How… was out here yesterday, and on my mentioning in the course of the interview about the influence which your teaching had in making us observe, de-duce [sic] he departed with all intentions of writing to you and getting all he could from you to embellish his article with. I thought that I would write to you independently to say that I have nothing to do with the matter, and that I hope you won’t consider me in the least in deciding whether to give him what he wants or not. I should be so sorry if you were bothered in any way in consequence of my having made use of your teachings.
Bell replied in his usual jovial manner, agreeing to the reproduction of his photo in the forthcoming article. He also told his former student that he’d be happy to answer any further questions the journalist might have. “Your permission will rejoice the cockles of Mr Harry How’s heart,” Conan Doyle replied.
Not long after this exchange, Bell wrote a lengthy letter to Harry How in which he downplayed any influence he may have had on the creation of Sherlock Holmes.
“Dr. Conan Doyle has, by his imaginative genius, made a great deal out of very little, and his warm remembrance of one of his old teachers has colored the picture,” he wrote, with characteristic modesty. “In teaching the treatment of disease and accident, all careful teachers have first to show the student how to recognize accurately the case. The recognition depends in great measure on the accurate and rapid appreciation of small points in which the diseased differs from the healthy state.”
Sharing some of Sherlock Holmes’s bafflement at those who failed to notice a world of detail in apparent trifles, Bell went on to explain his method to the journalist:
The soldier and the sailor differ in gait, though last month I had to tell a man who said he was a soldier that he had been a sailor in his boyhood. The subject is endless: the tattoo marks on hand or arm will tell their own tale as to voyages; the ornaments on the watch chain of the successful settler will tell you where he made his money. A New Zealand squatter will not wear a gold mohur, nor an engineer on an Indian railway a Maori stone. Carry the same idea of using one’s senses accurately and constantly, and you will see that many a surgical case will bring his past history, national, social, and medical, into the consulting-room as he walks in. Dr. Conan Doyle’s genius and intense imagination has on this slender basis made his detective stories a distinctly new departure, but he owes much less than he thinks to yours truly Joseph Bell.
Captivated by Bell’s letter, Harry How asked if he could reproduce it verbatim in the article that was scheduled to appear in The Strand’s August issue. Bell consented.
A short while later, Conan Doyle wrote to Bell with another warning. Holmes’s popularity had brought the author many inconveniences, and he worried about the effect How’s interview would have when published. “I fear that one effect of your identity being revealed to the readers of the ‘Strand’ will be that you have ample opportunity for studying lunatic letters, and that part at least of the stream which pours upon me will be diverted to you,” he wrote.
By then, Conan Doyle was receiving dozens of inquiries addressed to Sherlock Holmes each month—requests for autographs, advice, even locks of hair.
You will hear alas from the youth in the South of Portugal, from the American lady with the curved spine, from the Liverpool merchant who burns to know who Jack the Ripper is, from many folks who believe that their neighbours are starving maiden aunts to death in hermetically sealed attics, and in short you will bless me and my yarns when you look at your postbox.
As yet, and in spite of his former student’s prescience, Bell could not imagine the enormity of what would follow. The next month, The Strand ran a feature entitled “A Day with Dr. Conan Doyle,” profiling the author and, for the first time in print, naming Joseph Bell as the real Sherlock Holmes. What Conan Doyle had most feared was about to be unleashed upon his old professor.
______________________________________________
