Sleuth-Hound (featuring Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris)

0:07 Before there was Sherlock Holmes, there was Dr. Joseph Bell.

0:11 Bell was Arthur Conan Doyle's mentor in medical school, and he left a mark. Bell could determine a patient's profession, where they had lived recently, their diagnosis, and so much more just by making simple observations about their appearance and their behavior. As he would tell his students, the method was quite elementary.

0:30 Elementary.

0:32 On today's show, we're interviewing Dr. Lindsay Fitzharris, whose new book, Sleuth Hound, is all about Dr. Joseph Bell and forensic science in the 19th century. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Elementary Universe.

0:57 Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I think the universe is the biggest murder mystery of all.

1:03 Oh, hi.

1:04 I'm Kelly Wienersmith. I study parasites and space, but I am getting more and more interested in medical history. But, okay, is the universe the greatest murder mystery of all just because so many people have died over the course of the existence?

1:16 Yeah, okay, fair enough.

1:17 The universe is responsible for basically every death in history.

1:20 But what is the mystery there? Like, we all know it's coming.

1:26 No, I just think of scientists as detectives, essentially, trying to figure out what happened. How does it all work? How does it all come together? We are sifting through the clues and trying to understand what happened.

1:37 Yeah, absolutely.

1:39 It's so easy to look around and get frustrated by what we don't know already.

1:44 But what we do know is incredible and vast.

1:48 And there's so many things that we couldn't see that we figured out sort of indirectly. And that's part of why I love history of science is just the journey that we went on to get here is so amazing.

2:01 Like, you know, your dog did something gross because now you can smell it.

2:06 Yep.

2:06 No, that example hits real close to home. My dog just snuck into my office and I need to take care of that in a minute.

2:15 But when I was a kid, I was not just like interested in the nature of the universe. I gobbled up the Sherlock Holmes books because it was so fascinating to me to see somebody use that process, you know, like think clearly, make observations, try to stitch it together. In the end, it's the data that tells you the truth, right?

2:34 It doesn't matter if you're solving a murder mystery, if you're trying to understand what's inside a neutron star. It's the same process, right? Follow the data.

2:41 And what I love about Sherlock Holmes is not only that he was based on a real-life physician, but also that Arthur Conan Doyle, during his life, did a little medical sleuthing of his own. Like, for example, Robert Koch thought that he had a treatment for tuberculosis, which was killing loads of people back then.

3:00 He called it tuberculin.

3:01 And Arthur Conan Doyle went to Germany to try to like learn about this.

3:05 And he ended up being totally skeptical. And there's like books on this topic.

3:08 But anyway, so yeah, like Arthur Conan Doyle was involved in some detective work in his own life. And Lindsay Fitzharris's book has some amazing stories where Conan Doyle is working with other people trying to solve mysteries.

3:21 And this book is a real page turner.

3:23 In the end, we're all just trying to solve mysteries.

3:25 That's right.

3:26 And the mystery of where you can get your hands on Sleuth Hound is one that's easy to solve.

3:30 You can get it just about anywhere.

3:31 But instead of hearing Daniel and I talk about the book, let's go ahead and bring Lindsay Fitzharris on the show to talk all about her new book, Sleuth Hound, The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes. Dr. Lindsay Fitzharris is a truly epic medical historian. In 2021, she hosted the Smithsonian Channel series, The Curious Life and Death Of, which was about mysterious deaths throughout history. But I'm most excited about her amazing books. She wrote The Butchering Art About Victorian Surgery, which I referenced a million times during our episode about the history of anesthesia. She also wrote The Facemaker about the origins of cosmetic surgery to improve the lives of soldiers that were disfigured during World War II.

4:09 And today we're talking about her most recent book, Sleuth Hound, The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes.

4:14 Welcome to the show.

4:15 I am so excited to be here. And I was saying before we went on live that I was a little bit nervous because you guys cover big topics like the origins of life and history. Do aliens exist? And I'm a medical historian. I'm always looking to the past. You guys are always looking to the future. So I'm a little bit a little bit nervous about the conversation.

4:34 Hopefully I can keep up here. You're amazing.

4:37 And I think you need to like to understand how we're doing science now. You need to understand how we did it in the past and have an appreciation for that. And also, I feel like history helps you really appreciate how far we've come, like especially the stories about surgery without anesthesia.

4:50 Holy cow.

4:51 Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Well, if you like that, I got a book coming your way because after Sleuth Hound, I'm writing a book called Ether Wars, which is about that moment when ether is discovered. But here's the crazy bit about the story. It's showcased by a dentist named Morton. Some people out there might know this story. And right after that, he tries to patent it. And four other people step forward and try to claim ownership of this discovery.

5:14 And so it's really this kind of instance of medical capitalism in America. And it ruins all these men's lives. And it's about what we do when something changes the world, who gets ownership of it. And, you know, I think that can resonate with today with AI and those kinds of fights that are breaking out, who gets to control it, who gets to own it. And so I'm really looking forward to it. It's going to be my first American medical history story. Of course, I will be still talking about the impact in Britain today. And the discovery of chloroform that happened shortly after. But yeah, I'm going to take you back to the very early Victorian operating theaters when there was no anesthesia. And let me tell you,

5:51 it was pretty brutal.

5:53 I can't wait.

5:54 Well, I love these stories because they showcase the human side of science and of medicine. So much of it is driven by ambition and sometimes greed and pettiness. But that just tells you not that science is flawed, but that it's a human endeavor. And there's no way that scientists across the globe are colluding to do anything. They're, if anything, working to undermine each other at all costs. Yeah.

6:20 Oh, my gosh. Preach, Daniel. I mean, honestly, and this is such an interesting point, because with my first book, The Butchering Art, which was about the father of antiseptic surgery, Joseph Lister, it's interesting. At the end of his life, he actually asked that his personal correspondence, anything that didn't have to do with his science and his discoveries, be destroyed. Now, thankfully, that didn't happen, because what I learned about Lister was that he was very much a product of his Quaker upbringing.

6:46 He was raised by an amateur scientist. His father had a microscope, which was an unusual instrument in medicine in the 19th century. And so he brings the microscope to medical school. And it's kind of like his lightsaber moment. You know, this is what's going to help him solve this moment, this mystery in medicine. And all of that is because of his upbringing. And his father really encourages him to stay in medicine. He has a mental health breakdown at one point and leaves medical school. His father encourages him to go in. And so you're absolutely right that science and medicine isn't created in a vacuum. And it's also why we know that there aren't any global conspiracies because everybody is very competitive, especially doctors. They all

7:26 want to be the first. And I very much doubt that they're colluding on anything.

7:30 Something else I'm excited to hear your thoughts on are about how the process has changed. You know, sometimes people imagine science as like a way to do things. And we went from not doing science to doing science. But, you know, it's evolving. It's a method that's changing. And it's important not just to remember like what people didn't know.

7:48 200 years ago or 100 years ago, but how they were trying to figure things out and how that process has evolved. Because as Kelly says, it helps us understand how it can evolve in the future and how like aliens might do it differently, for example.

8:03 Oh, here we are. We're already five minutes in and we got to the aliens. This is what I was waiting for. But yeah, no, I absolutely, you know, one of the things, it was interesting during the COVID pandemic because a lot of people were saying, well, look, these experts keep changing their opinions and And that was unsettling to the public, but actually to me as a medical historian, that was comforting because, of course, as scientists and doctors are studying the virus, they're learning more, they're changing their advice, and that's exactly what you want to see. My husband, who is an illustrator, he's a caricaturist, and I wrote a children's book called Dead Ends, which is all about failure in medicine and the need to fail.

8:42 Oh.

8:43 Because failure teaches us sometimes more than the success. And one of my favorite stories involves the clockwork saw. It was this circular saw. I actually have a prototype in my office, my weird office. And it was a massive failure. It was invented in the 19th century when doctors and surgeons wanted to be faster in the operating theater. And it wound up and you would release it and it would spin continuously. And WHB Winchester, who invented it, brought into the operating theater and he accidentally took off his assistant's finger. And it was just a complete failure. And so he learned that too much speed was actually a bad thing. And so I love the clockwork saw because I don't think we talk enough about failure in in

9:22 science and medicine to the public. And I think the COVID pandemic was this sort of opportunity to communicate that process. And maybe doctors didn't do that as well as they should have. And maybe that's where we need to kind of improve that education with the public about how these vaccines are created and how you learn about viruses and how a lot of what we learned about COVID was built on what we already knew about other similar viruses.

9:46 So it was an interesting experience to live through. I also have to say that as a medical historian, I completely was in denial about where we were heading in 2020, which is really shameful. I don't know how you guys dealt with it, but I remember specifically I was shooting the Smithsonian series and my manager said something about the schedule.

10:06 And I said, I don't think this is going to become a thing. But then I said, well, you know, as medical historians, we're taught that a pandemic goes through certain psychological phases. And the first is denial. And we kind of laughed nervously. Nervously. And then I thought, oh my gosh, is this where we're heading? And the second phase is blaming others, you know, that you can't catch it, that it's, you know, like with HIV, it's a gay disease, you know, that we went through all that. And so you go through these different psychological processes until you sort of accept that this is happening. And so I also went through that because there was a moment where I should have known better, but I thought, No way we're

10:43 going to end up in this kind of global pandemic. And here we were.

10:46 I am so with you.

10:48 I remember it was my daughter's birthday party and they canceled school right before the Saturday where we were going to have her birthday party. And they're like, we don't know when we're going to come back. And I was like, that's weird. And then I was like, I shouldn't think that's weird. Things have been scaling up. But I was like, but we'll be back on Monday probably. And then we, you know, we weren't back for a year.

11:07 It was like years later.

11:08 Yeah, I did not see it coming.

11:10 I didn't.

11:11 I should have, but it blew my mind.

11:13 We just completely lost, you know, that time. It's weird when I think back on it because sometimes it's still... Like you think about 2020 and you think, that was only like a year ago. It just feels like time has moved fast and slow at the same time. But, you know, my grandmother was alive at that time and I would call her and she kept saying, have you ever heard of anything like this? And I thought, of course I have. You know, I was working on a book about World War I and we went through a pandemic at the very end of that. And, you know, it's just one of those things. It's weirdly comforting to know, again, not a global conspiracy. This is what happens in human history today. And we often bungle it as well, which

11:52 is a very human trait. You know, we don't want to believe it's happening. And we kind of shut down. And it's scary. But yeah, I think that failure in medicine is something that we don't talk about enough. And of course, there's a lot of failure in my books, too. And Joseph Lister fails in certain ways. And Harold Gillies, who was rebuilding soldiers' faces, failure was his constant companion on those words. And so it is an important thing to acknowledge in medical history.

12:18 And hey, the future is hard to predict, which is why we have these processes to gather data, to change our minds when we get new data. You just got to follow the data. New data means new conclusions. That's just the way it works. So that's what I love about your book and these stories is that it shows us how the process works. and why I can't perfectly predict the future.

12:38 Yeah. I mean, a lot of people look to me, by the way, I thought my moment had come in the pandemic. I was like, yes, medical historian, I'm finally relevant. Like I can finally, you know, talk about something that people, you know, instead of useless cocktail party, you know, tips or whatever. But I did say that early in the pandemic.

12:53 I said, look, I can't predict the future. And you're absolutely right. Even when going into a pandemic and looking at past pandemics, there's so many variables and There's so many, you know, we control our fate ultimately. And I always say to people that today is the best day to be alive. That is my superpower that I am one of the few people in 2026 who could make you feel good about living today. Today is the best day to be alive and tomorrow will be even better. And having gone through breast cancer myself in 2022, I can say that, you know, every day it's getting a bit better in terms of, you know, how we handle these viruses and these diseases. And so if anybody is out there and going through their own diagnoses, just hold on

13:33 to that thought. You're not in the 19th century on that operating table without any anesthesia. Yeah. Well, yeah.

13:38 And we live in a time where we got what the COVID vaccine in a year or something like that.

13:42 That is amazing to.

13:43 Get a vaccine that quickly and then get it like scaled up and sent out to the population.

13:47 Like, holy cow.

13:48 Yeah. Yeah. It was crazy. And actually, I got called up. I don't know how it worked in the US. So everybody listening, I have this Chicago accent, but I've lived in the UK now for 24 years. But. we got called up on like a lottery basis. And so I got called up and the day I got my vaccine was the anniversary of the first ever vaccine by Edward Jenner for smallpox. And I thought that was just so nerdy and amazing. And I tried to tell people at the center and they just didn't care because they had more important things to do, which was to save people's lives.

14:18 But I'm always filled with the useless knowledge as I walk into hospitals, but it was pretty cool to get that on that anniversary. And for people who don't know, the smallpox vaccine. So there was there was inoculation before Jenner came along, but inoculation and vaccine were different terms in the past. And so inoculation used the live smallpox virus, which was very deadly and very dangerous. You could become contagious through that process, whereas Jenner took the cowpox virus and used it to create the vaccine. And in fact, The term vaccine, which he coined, comes from the Latin words meaning from the cow. So that's the first ever vaccine was the cowpox vaccine that Jenner created. But there

14:59 was inoculation before that time.

15:02 And we eventually used the smallpox vaccine to wipe smallpox off the face of the planet in the 80s.

15:07 Like, I mean, amazing.

15:08 The only human virus to ever be eradicated. It is actually incredible. And it's one of those viruses, like, don't think too closely about, like, what would happen if that came back. Like, that's all I can just say is, like, if that was ever used as a biological weapon or something. Like, let's not go there. But that's where my, because, like, I love, you know, obviously medical history, but I love horror.

15:29 I love Stephen King. So I'm always going to kind of, like, the darkest, worst place. That's often what I think about when I think about the virus.

15:35 But there you go.

15:36 But we have eradicated it. It's the first and only human virus we've eradicated, I believe. Yeah. All right.

15:41 Well, so usually I am not super optimistic about stuff.

15:44 And so I'm glad that we had like an optimistic, uplifting chat to start things off. But let's transition to talking about your amazing book, because I would love to geek out about vaccines with you all day long. But you also wrote this great book.

15:54 Well, I'll come back. I'll come back. OK, awesome.

15:57 That sounds good.

15:58 So I think a lot of people know that Arthur Conan Doyle is the guy who created Sherlock Holmes. But I think far fewer people know that he also had a bunch of medical training before that. So could you tell us a bit about his life and his medical training and how he ended up meeting the man who would inspire Sherlock Holmes?

16:14 Yeah. So Sleuth Hound is about the origins of Sherlock Holmes. Most people think Sherlock Holmes began at 221B Baker Street, which is why I have the 221B sign. door behind me right there. I know people can't see it on the podcast, but I had my husband create the door because my office wasn't silly enough. But yeah, most people think he began at 221B Baker Street, you know, with the hat and the pipe and the cocaine. But he actually began somewhere far more obscure. He began on a hospital ward in Edinburgh. where a Scottish surgeon named Joseph Bell was teaching students how to read a human body like a crime scene. Bell had this incredible knack at being able to tell everything about a patient before they

16:54 ever spoke a word, where they came from, what they did with their hands, a callus, a stain, a limp. All of these were clues to Bell if you only knew how to see them. And in 1878, Arthur Conan Doyle becomes one of his students. So one of the things that you might not know is that Conan Doyle actually qualified as a doctor. And he practiced as a doctor for quite some time while he started his writing career.

17:18 And eventually his writing took off and he just abandoned medicine because the writing paid a lot better. But he was a fully trained doctor. And it was Joe Bell who had this incredible characteristic, this method of seeing that he then bestowed upon Sherlock Holmes and became kind of one of Sherlock Holmes's most famous traits.

17:41 So if Bell is the inspiration for Holmes, is Conan Doyle himself the inspiration for Watson? Is Watson basically.

17:48 The stand-in for Doyle? Oh, that's a good question. Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny because at the very end of Sleuth Hound, there's a postscript. And it's a very strange postscript. But I thought, you know what, I'm going to put this in because there was a writer in the 1940s named Irving Wallace. And he wrote an essay on how Bell was the original Sherlock Holmes. And Adrian Conan Doyle, the youngest son of Conan Doyle, took great offense to this and said that his father was Sherlock Holmes. Oh.

18:15 But this was such a strange argument to make because Conan Doyle literally says Joe Bell was the inspiration. I mean, there is a clip of Conan Doyle speaking. And this is incredible because he was a man who was born in 1859. And we actually have a clip of him on film speaking. And in it, he talks about Bell and the influence he had on the creation of this character.

18:35 But Adrian Conan Doyle just took great offense. So in the postscript, I talk about this weird fight that broke out in the 40s and 50s. Because it allowed me to end the book on this incredible quote from Conan Doyle's youngest child, Jean. And she gave this quote in 1993. Now, remember, Conan Doyle, born in 1859, his daughter is alive in 1993.

18:55 So you can do those math. Wow. Only men can do this, by the way. And she said, she said, it was most certainly Joseph Bell who gave my father the idea for Holmes. He has said it in black and white. What further proof do you need? And I thought that's the perfect way to end this book. And so, so like I said, Conan Doyle, he didn't make it a secret. He outs Bell as the inspiration for this character in 1892, very shortly before he kills off the character.

19:26 So it was really a, there was a media frenzy in, in Bell's own time around him and about him being the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.

19:35 Some of the stories in the book about the, like, deductions that Bell could make.

19:40 Feel like, could that, is that really, could he really have done that?

19:43 Like, how much do you think was, like, over exaggeration or like the story growing over time or was he really this amazing like you know the kinds of deductions in the books i think.

19:53 He was really that amazing and actually when you first so here here's a really weird uh fact a confession so to speak I had never read Sherlock Holmes at the time I had sold this book. I never read the original Holmes story. And then when I sold the book, I decided that I wasn't going to read it right away because I knew that the comparisons to Sherlock Holmes had dogged Bell at the end of his life. He found them rather reductive. And I wanted to tell the story of the real man behind the myth and to give it that medical history lens that I felt he deserved as a doctor and somebody who also understood helped with forensic science. This is kind of the first moment that medicine enters the courtroom. So I purposely put that off.

20:37 But Belle, when you first read the book in the first couple chapters, there's so many stories that feel so Sherlockian, almost to the point where I make the case that Conan Doyle probably transplanted a lot of these stories directly into the And I don't think that they were exaggerated because everybody believes this about Bell. He was a wonder in Edinburgh. It was said that his students actually thought it was a magic trick and they thought that perhaps he had gotten sight of the clerk's notes before he went into the consulting room. But this was always proven wrong when a last minute patient came in and he would do this trick that he had. It was observational wizardry and it was a phenomenal thing that he could do.

21:22 And Conan Doyle never forgot it.

21:24 Well, it's like magic in plain sight, though, right? It's like there's no magic about it. The process is obvious. He tells you exactly how he did it. It's the best kind of mystery because it's the kind where you're like, oh, I should have figured that out. I had all that same information. It's the incredible power of forensic research. I love that.

21:43 Yeah, absolutely. And also, if you think about it, you know, when I talk to a lot of doctors, I say to them, are you surprised that the original detective was a doctor? Because, you know, they had Bell had to cut through the petty deceits of his patients. You know, his patients weren't always giving him all the full information.

22:02 For instance, there's a story of a woman walking into the consulting room and he says, show me your cutty pipe. And she's very embarrassed. And then he says, show me the pipe. And she pulls the pipe out. And then she's ushered out of the room. And he tells the students, I knew that she smoked a Cuddy pipe because I could see the superficial burn on her cheek. I could see the cancerous ulcer on her lip, which you only get from a lifetime of smoking. And so he was able to sort of cut through the noise and to get to the real diagnosis in that sense. And so this was the method that he ended up teaching Arthur Conan Doyle. And at the time, policing in the 19th century was really in its infancy as well. And so

22:40 you really did get this sense of the bumbling Bobby, you know, the Jack the Ripper crimes couldn't be solved. And there was all these kind of mishaps and mistakes. And so when Sherlock Holmes comes into existence in fiction, there was this idea, if we can only apply that kind of scientific method to policing, how would it change everything in the way we capture criminals? All right.

23:05 Well, I am desperate to learn about how we did policing before we used observation and forensic science. But first, let's take a break. So All right, we're back, and we are talking to Lindsay Fitzharris about the incredible story of the true inspiration of Sherlock Holmes, a man who actually had incredible observational powers. And before we went to break, we heard that the police picked up these techniques. And I was wondering, what did they do before they used forensic science? Was it all just random guessing? I mean, it's hard to put yourself in the minds of those folks.

23:55 It was a strange time. You know, in fact, there was this thing that was called trial by beer, the beer that the body lays on. So B-I-E-R. And so what would happen is you would bring somebody close to the body, and if the body spontaneously began to bleed, then it was a sign that they had murdered this person.

24:18 Really unscientific, right? And people were sometimes executed on the basis of this quote evidence. I share a few stories of this in Sleuth Town. So yeah, there wasn't a science, and you can imagine a lot of innocent people were convicted in earlier periods. You start to get a professional police force in sort of the 1830s. You get the Bow Street Runners in London, eventually replaced by the Met.

24:42 And so you start to get a professional police force. But again, it was a lot of, you know, trial and error. And so this book is as much about the story of Joe Bell, but it's also about his relationship with this man, Henry Duncan Littlejohn, who was a police surgeon in Edinburgh. He was a brilliant forensic scientist.

25:01 And it's about how they partnered up and solved some of the biggest crimes in the 19th century. But in between that story is the story of forensics and the story of the expert witness. And this is when medicine first enters the courtroom. And so what little John is teaching his students in Edinburgh is how to be that expert witness, you know, how to do the autopsies, how to look at the evidence, how to convey that to a jury. And he's involved in some of the highest profile cases. And he brings his friend Joe Bell on unofficially, much like Sherlock Holmes, to work on several of these cases.

25:34 So I always like to tell a small story and a big story. You know, it's a story about Bell, but it's also a story about the development of forensics at this time. And there were a lot of competing theories. For instance, there was phrenology, which we know was based in racist beliefs. But here's the thing about phrenology. A lot of people call it a pseudoscience, but I don't think you should call it a pseudoscience because it was a science that did harm in the 19th century. It was taken seriously by scientists and doctors, and so it was used. I think calling it a pseudoscience outright, like how we would understand it today, minimizes its impact that it had in the 19th century. I think that needs

26:14 to be acknowledged. But you had things like phrenology, You had something called optography, which was this idea that the eyeball acted like a lens of a camera and that you might be able to extract the last image a person saw before they died off the lens of their eyeball. So you might be able to catch the murderer, you know, and, you know, whenever I put this on social media, people always inevitably ask, well, did it work? Because it. Kind of sounds like it could, you know, it sounds like it has that plausibility. It could be in Bobfest, right, Kelly?

26:45 That's right. Yeah. It sounds like a plausible, absurd kind of thing. And so they even discuss this in relation to the Ripper crimes. And so you have all of these trial and errors. You have, you know, some things that caused harm, some things that just outright didn't work. And then the pulse of it is you have the development of the expert witness in people like Joe Bell and and Henry Duncan Littlejohn. And so that is also part of the story. It's not just about Sherlock Holmes.

27:10 It is about expert medicine in the courtroom.

27:14 Help me understand why this development came so late. I mean, we've had like experimental science since Galileo and Francis Bacon. You know, why are people still relying on, you know, mysticism and stories and superstition?

27:27 You know, some of it had to do with the way doctors were taught in the 19th century. And so one of the things I discuss in Sleuth Hound is how forensic science was much more progressive in Edinburgh. And there was a good reason for that. They start teaching it at the end of the 18th century, whereas you don't get a professorship in 18th. England until I think the 1830s. So they're quite far behind in England compared to Scotland. by the time forensic science starts developing. In Scotland, they were just more scientifically minded for various reasons.

27:59 Was it the haggis? I bet it's the haggis.

28:02 It was the haggis. It was in the blood sausage, and it really fueled the brain. But if you think about it, too, Edinburgh is a much smaller city. So when you were training as a doctor like Arthur Conan Doyle was, you had one university, you had one hospital. Whereas in London, there were multiple hospitals and multiple universities.

28:22 And so your training wasn't standardized across the board. And actually, this was one of the issues that Lister faced when he was invited to come back to London to teach. He was up in Glasgow and up in Edinburgh. And he worried about that because he felt that there had to be some kind of standardized antiseptic method adopted across England.

28:40 So Edinburgh is just this incredibly progressive city. in science and medicine at the time. They have the famous Burke and Hare crimes, which I don't know if you guys know this story.

28:52 Tell us.

28:53 Yes, I love telling people when they don't know this story. So Burke and Hare. So in the early 19th century, doctors needed a lot of bodies. And the only legal bodies you could dissect were those of murderers who had been executed. And there weren't that many.

29:08 Sorry, why did doctors need a lot of bodies? Just to figure out what's inside them?

29:12 They needed a lot of bodies to learn anatomy.

29:13 Okay.

29:14 Yeah. So this became part of the medical experience. This is part of how the training started to change. And it was a lot more focused on the actual science of the body and anatomy. And so they needed a lot of bodies to teach medical students. And of course, there weren't that many legal bodies to dissect. And so you get this kind of economy that grows around this and you get the body snatchers or the resurrection men.

29:36 And these guys would go out into the graveyards and they would steal bodies. They were they were very good at it. They would only open the grave at the top of the grave. You know, you would think that they'd open the whole thing, but they only dig down from the head of the grave. They would use instruments to break the coffin lid, and then they would use chains to pull the body out. They could do this very quickly. They could steal as many as, you know, 10 or 12 bodies in a single night. Wow. And this was really important to what medicine becomes. Well, Burke and Hare decide this is a good gig, right? Like selling bodies to the anatomists could be very lucrative, but they didn't want to go out into the graveyards in

30:13 the middle of the night. And so they decided to just skip that part and start killing people and selling those fresh bodies to the anatomists in Edinburgh.

30:22 Early disruptors. These are the tech bros of the 1800s.

30:26 They were thinking outside of the box, guys. And they do eventually get caught because the bodies were suspiciously fresh and recognizable. And the way that they were killing these people became known as burking. So what they would do is they would put their full body weight onto the victim. They would get the victim drunk. They would put their full body weight onto the victim and hold the nose, pinch the nose, hold the mouth shut and they would suffocate them. And so that became a term in the 19th century, birking. A lot of people call Burke and Hare body snatchers. They were never body snatchers. They were just full out murderers. They were caught. Hare turns King's evidence.

31:03 He gets to walk away from all of this. But William Burke ends up swinging for the crime. And because it's in Scotland and they want to do an additional punishment, they end up publicly dissecting Burke. And they take his skin and they make various trinkets out of it, including a book, a pocketbook bound in human skin, which you can now see at Surgeon's Hall in Edinburgh. If you ever go visit, I've held it. Oh, yeah. I have held it. It feels just like leather, unsurprisingly.

31:32 It is leather.

31:33 And they have DNA tested some of these. Yeah, exactly. It is leather. And they have DNA tested some. It actually was so, I don't want to say it was so common, but it was common enough that it had a term, anthropodermic bibliopathy. binding books in human skin. It was a thing in the 19th century. You guys think we're bad with our true crime addiction now. The 19th century was a wild ride. Burke and Hare were very much a part of that dark underworld of medicine in Edinburgh.

32:05 And Robert Christensen, who was one of the first toxicologists, actually helped convict Burke. And he ends up teaching Henry Duncan. Little John is also, he also teaches Joe Bell. And so Bell is very much, you know, coming up in that tradition of early forensics in the 19th century.

32:24 And did they feel differently from a moral point of view towards dead bodies?

32:28 I mean.

32:28 I know different cultures have different attitudes about it and different people have different attitudes about it. How big a deal was it to steal somebody's body? Is it as big a deal as it is today? I mean, it sounds like a big deal.

32:40 I feel like, yeah, today you definitely would end up with like your own Netflix series if you were just like out there digging up bodies.

32:47 That's not a career tip, everybody.

32:49 Not a suggestion, guys. It's a quick way to fame, but you know. I think there's a series called The Mortician where something like that is going on. But yeah, it was, you know, everybody had a different opinion about it. But the public were really fearful of this. There was a view of a physical resurrection. And so you wanted your body to be intact. And of course, you just didn't want your body of your grandmother to end up in the dissection room chopped up into little pieces.

33:17 Let me push on that for a minute. Why not?

33:19 Yeah.

33:20 Why does somebody object to having their grandmother be dissected?

33:23 Because of the physical resurrection. But also remember that the only legal bodies to dissect at this time were those of executed criminals. So there was that kind of, you know, shame around that, that it was somehow seen as like a punishment.

33:38 Because, for example, I'd be very happy to have my body be like used for science or med students or whatever. you know, taxidermy or whatever. Wow. Yeah, I mean, I don't care, whatever.

33:50 Daniel's there for the human skin book. Like, yeah, he's fine with that.

33:54 Special edition of my book, Bound in Me. There you go.

33:57 Yeah.

33:58 One copy only.

34:00 Only one available. Yeah, no, I mean, but here's the difference. Consent, right? And so these people obviously weren't giving consent. And a lot of, you know, anatomical collections that we see in the U.S. and in the U.K., are comprised of people who never gave consent. These bodies were stolen and these body parts were put into jars to study. They are important and it's important to acknowledge that medicine became what it became because they had access to these bodies and they had access to these collections. But yeah, there was this real fear around the resurrection men in the 19th century.

34:35 There was a story about how one time this one graveyard in this village, they found out that a body had been stolen And the people in the village went to the graveyard and dug up their relatives and dragged the coffins back to their house until the graveyard could be made secure. And they would make it secure with things like cemetery guns and watchmen. And they also had coffin collars so that they would put around the corpse so you couldn't drag it out by a rope. So there were ways to protect the body, but of course that cost money. And so a lot of the bodies that end up being stolen, you know, come from the poorer graves. And so a lot of medicine was built on on the backs of the poor. All right.

35:15 I've gotten this way off track by asking all these stories about bodies. Take us back to sleuth hounds and Dr. Bell.

35:22 Yeah.

35:22 So one of the parts of the book that I was just like so drawn into that I had to like cancel the rest of the stuff that I had going on that day so that I could keep reading was about how we got to the point where we could identify people.

35:34 More than once.

35:34 So like if you're a repeat criminal offender, how do we know that in an era where like you don't have fingerprints or, you know, photos on social media yet?

35:43 Like, Yeah.

35:43 Can you walk us through that history? Because that was amazing.

35:46 You know, I feel like this, of course, you would ask this question, because to me, this was like one of the most Alphonse Bertillon, who is the French police officer who creates this this method for measuring. He has 11 measurements. and how to measure a perpetrator. It's a very complicated system, but let me take you back. So you're absolutely right that in the early part of the 19th century, if you ended up being prosecuted and later you were released and then you were caught again, you could just use an alias, like nothing was stopping you from doing that. And so it was really difficult to identify repeat offenders. And there was a real concern about this, especially in Britain, because in the middle of the 19th century,

36:26 the colonies in Australia stop, you know, accepting criminals from Britain. And so Britain is suddenly worried about, you know, all these repeat offenders that might be walking around in Britain. And so there's this concern about this. And there's a French police officer named Alphonse Bertillon, and he starts putting his mind to this. And he creates these 11... different measurements.

36:48 So like one of them is from the tip of the finger to the crook of the elbow and a measurement of the foot and all of it was highly choreographed so that it was standardized and there was no way to do it incorrectly. And then after he created that system, he also created abbreviations for all this so you could basically put all of it on an index card and it would include a photo, the front of the person and the side of the person. So that's kind of the mugshot that we have today. And this was supposed to help identify repeat offenders. Now, when I was writing this section, it was so, I felt like it was really complicated. And I remember my husband, remember, artist.

37:29 So we're both like artistic, we're not scientific. And I remember showing him the abbreviation because I give an example of of somebody who has a scar on his left arm and yada, yada, yada, and the eye color. And then I show what that would have looked like in Bertillon's system. And it's absolutely, it looks like a science equation.

37:49 And my husband said, oh, that bastard, you know, it seems so, so complicated and so crazy, but actually it was more simple than what they had before, you know? So, So Bertione, he becomes very famous. He almost becomes as famous as Sherlock Holmes. But that is quickly replaced with fingerprinting within 10 to 15 years, which is obviously more effective and a simpler process. But we still have the mugshot.

38:15 And so, yeah, there was all of these problems that had to be solved in the 19th century. How do we, you know, identify repeat offenders? And also, it's not even just, you know, repeat offenders. There's a story in Sleuth Hound where I talk about shipwreck and this this sailor who died and the mother believes that maybe he had survived and then lo and behold a few years later a man in Australia steps forward and claims to be him and he doesn't look anything like him he's like 300 pounds and apparently the other guy was very slim he doesn't have the tattoo that her son had allegedly there were so many things but she just wanted to believe it and she ends up giving him money each year and she ends up dying thinking that was her son

38:57 and And then later he's brought up on fraud. And of course, it wasn't him at all. So there were all kinds of reasons why, you know, being able to identify somebody correctly was important back in the 19th century. So all of that kind of taps into forensics. And I talk about, you know, the first ballistic fingerprint, the first time that we match a bullet to a gun.

39:17 All of this is, you know, background to the world that Bell grew up in.

39:21 But it still seems to me like practically impossible. Like you get somebody in your police station, you're trying to figure out if they're the same as somebody else. You have to like match them against all of your records.

39:33 Right.

39:33 It reminds me of when I was a kid and you'd use a credit card and then they have like a book with all the credit card numbers that had been stolen and they had to like sift through it. And at least those are in order, right?

39:43 Yeah. Yeah.

39:44 But you know, if somebody's real name is, you know, Albert Alphonse and they come in with an alias and You know, Zeus Zanzibar or something. You have no idea where to start looking. You have to look through your whole catalog to see if it's a match. It seems terribly impractical.

39:57 Yeah. I mean, and also, of course, like people change. They age, you know, they gain weight, they lose weight, they change. And so it definitely wasn't, you know, maybe the science that Bertillon hoped it would be. Like I said, thankfully, fingerprinting sort of replaces that pretty shortly within that period.

40:13 But yeah, when you think about how did they catch anybody in the 19th century, it's incredible. It also kind of tells us why they never caught Jack the Ripper. You know, it was sort of the golden era of being a murderer because it was difficult. You know, now we have DNA and, you know, do you watch true crime and you think, have they ever seen a true crime episode? Like they're never going to get away with that, but they still try it. But the 19th century definitely was, was the time to get away with, with murder because it was a lot more difficult to trace those kinds of crimes.

40:44 And we are back to, it is way better now, which I love.

40:47 And so, so what I was going to say is a lot of what the early forensics is built on the brutalized bodies of women who never got justice in the past. So something we can kind of like talk about a little bit about, you know, the victims who fed the science that, you know, is featured in Sleuth Hound.

41:05 Okay, let's take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about just that. So Okay, we're back. And so let's talk about this sad topic, which is that a lot of what we learned was from the bodies of victims.

41:34 And a lot of those victims' bodies were women.

41:37 Yeah, I mean, and this also kind of holds true today. You watch a lot of true crime and you see a lot of the victims are women. But certainly this struck me when I was writing Sleuth Hound because it is a fun book about Sherlock Holmes and about Joe Bell and Arthur Conan Doyle and all of that. But it is a story about a lot of women who were murdered by their husbands and never received any justice at all. Oh, man. And I do make the point that a lot of the forensic advances in the 19th century were born out of these brutalized bodies. And so one of them was a woman named Jane Kelly, who in 1888, the same year that Ripper started killing, was murdered by her husband. And Belle and Little John perform

42:17 the autopsy. They find out that there's more than 50 injuries on her body. But at the trial, he is not convicted of murder. He is convicted of culpable homicide, a lesser offense, because she was drunk during the time of her murder. And between, I think it was something like, yeah, it was between 1850 and 1900, no man in Scotland was convicted of murdering his wife when the wife was seen to be drunk or or to be nagging. Wow.

42:46 So she was partially responsible for her own death. And so time and again... We had.

42:52 Positive points for Scotland earlier, but now....

42:56 Not so good, not so good. Yeah, so it was sobering, you know? And then from there, I kind of move on to the Ripper crimes because talk about the most famous five female victims who never received any justice at all. And Jo Bell and Little John... Do work on that case. I won't give too much away, but they they claim to have solved it. They exchanged envelopes with the name of Ripper and it had the same name on it.

43:22 And then later, Little John works on a case of a man named William Berry, who was in Whitechapel during the murders. And he had the opportunity. He fits the profile well. And then he goes up to Dundee in Scotland. And one day he this is what he claims. He wakes up and his wife is dead. And he was just he was he had this compulsion to chop her up and put her in a box. I mean, we've all been there, right? You wake up, your spouse is dead.

43:47 You're like, oh, I'm going to cut him up. I'm going to put him in a box. It was just like this weird story. So he goes and he confesses it. And he says that he's worried that he'll be seen as Jack the Ripper. And then, of course, the media picks up on it. And people do believe he's Jack the Ripper himself. And so that story is also fascinating.

44:02 And the man who ended up hanging William Barry said that Barry confessed to being Jack the Ripper. But I do think that it's such a weird story. Like he thought that the police would believe him that he just that she just died this sort of natural death and that, you know, he just he just ended up cutting her up and putting her in the box. And he has no idea why he did that. So.

44:22 As one does.

44:24 As one does. There was a lot of there was a lot of alcohol in the 19th century. I mean, it was it was a wild time. But so Ripper appears in Sleuthound and also, you know, Ripper not being caught in the hysteria around Jack the Ripper. explains a lot about why Sherlock Holmes became such a famous character.

44:42 You know, there was this real increase in literacy at the time. People were consuming true crime through the newspapers. And here you come with Sherlock Holmes, and it's just fascinating and really, you know, puts to shame the bumbling Bobby. And here in Sherlock Holmes, he can solve all these crimes.

44:59 But here's something that you might not know, because I didn't know this going into the book. But Conan Doyle absolutely hated Sherlock Holmes. Like he just could not stand the character. He couldn't wait to kill him off. And he was shocked when he did kill him off.

45:14 But he admired Belle.

45:15 He admired Belle. But I think that the issue with Sherlock Holmes was he wanted to be seen as a more serious writer. And he felt like these detective stories were not very serious. He couldn't understand why people enjoyed them so much. And so eventually he kills off Sherlock Holmes around the time that he also outs Joe Bell as the inspiration. And so it's very much like Sherlock Holmes is dead. Long live Sherlock Holmes. And there is this media frenzy around Bell. And by the way, he doesn't just out Bell, but he puts Bell's address in the dedication. He doxes him. Why would he put his address in there? It was so funny. So there's this real media frenzy. And at that same time in Sleuth Town, as you will see, There is this high profile murder

46:04 case that happens in Scotland. It involves a country mansion, a murder dressed up like an accident. And it's just this brilliant case. And it even has a ballistics expert named Dr. Watson, I swear to God. And I read a letter from Bell that said, my dear Watson. And I thought, you know, it doesn't get any better as a nonfiction writer than this.

46:25 So how did Bell feel when he got outed and his address was shared? Like, was Bell excited to now be famous? Or yeah, what did he think?

46:32 So in 1892, Conan Doyle does an interview. This is before he kills off Sherlock Holmes. And the journalist says something to the effect of this is amazing. It all has come from your imagination. And he says, well, you know, I had this professor who was really the inspiration for it. He does not name Bell at that point, but Bell reads the interview. And he writes to Conan Doyle and he says, am I the professor you're talking about? And by the way, Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he also knew Bell. And when he read Sherlock Holmes, he wrote to Conan Doyle and said, but one thing bothers me. Could this be our old friend, Joe Bell? So people who knew Bell recognized him in

47:11 the character. So Bell writes to his old student. His student writes back. I've seen the letter. It says, yes, it's to you, Shirley, that I owe Sherlock Holmes. And they begin corresponding. And Conan Doyle asks permission to give his name to the journalist. But he does warn Bell that if he is outed as Sherlock Holmes, he will start getting letters from people who want him to solve crimes and all this kind of crazy. I mean, people really thought that Sherlock Holmes was a real person. And so Bell gives that permission. I think he's flattered at first.

47:41 But later he became sort of, you know, dogged by the comparisons. He found them reductive. And of course, Bell wasn't Sherlock Holmes in a lot of ways. He was a very empathetic person. He was a family man. He had three children. So for me, I really wanted to flesh out the man behind the myth. It wasn't just about him as a footnote to Sherlock Holmes, but it was him as a fascinating doctor. He helped reform nursing up in Scotland. He was a good friend of Florence Nightingale.

48:08 He was a proponent of women in medicine. He was fascinating beyond those kinds of stories about Sherlock Holmes. But of course, there is that great thread about him working with Little John on these high-profile murder cases, which I really enjoyed bringing to life. And you really do bring these stories to life and you have a lot of details about the cases and about the people. How hard is it to research a topic like this, you know, like what, 100, 150 years after it happened? Like where do you get the information from? Is it in museums?

48:39 Tell us your secrets.

48:40 It's the worst. You know what? It's like, you know, it takes me four years to write these books usually. And my dad is like, you got to write them faster.

48:48 And I'm like, I can't.

48:49 You know, this is just, it's a process, you know, it's just one of those things. I mean, luckily in 2026, like a lot of stuff is digitalized. So that's, that's wonderful. Actually, when I began this book and because I had just gone through breast or I was still going through breast cancer, I sent my research assistant, Dr. Kate, so up to Scotland.

49:07 She actually also transcribed Bell's diary for me because he had terrible handwriting. I mean, illegible really. And she has this superpower where she can read this 19th century handwriting. She did a brilliant job. Wow. But she went up there to pull some documents for me. And at one point, she accidentally pulled a human specimen. And there was a little bit of panic in the room because they didn't know if she had qualifications to handle these objects. And I said, I don't need the human specimens. I just need the transcripts of the trials, et cetera. Just take photos of that. But the point is that a lot of what Henry Duncan Littlejohn worked on as a police surgeon, he actually kept, you know, the murder weapons. He kept

49:47 the ropes that hang to the murderers. He kept the specimens. And so all of that is up in Edinburgh, which is fascinating. So they have a rich forensic collection up there. But there's letters. There's Bell's diary. Bell's diary had been in private collection in the Bell family for over 100 years. I don't know why they didn't let anybody have access to it beforehand. I guess they probably wanted enough time to pass between his passing and maybe the diary being used for a project. But I was really lucky to get access to that and to really dig into the man behind the myth. But it's not easy putting all of this together. And one of the things that really helped me was his partnership with Little John, who I

50:31 feel like is just as much a character in this book as Bell is. And I almost called it sleuth hounds. But it really, you know, Bell gives Conan Doyle the method. Little John gives him the world because Little John also taught Conan Doyle. And Conan Doyle doesn't out Little John as an inspiration. I also wonder if that's because he was the police surgeon, had this official role, and maybe he felt like this would be a little bit too much for his old professors. So, yeah, it's always a process, though, writing these books. It's never easy, but that's what I do as a historian. But my dad thinks I spend way too much time in the archives. But that's the thing.

51:10 have fun.

51:10 You're talking to the wrong person.

51:12 He wants the books faster.

51:13 He's the queen of over-research.

51:15 Yeah.

51:16 Oh, that's what makes me special.

51:18 Oh, yeah. Yeah. You got to be comfortable when you come out with it finally, right? You know, you got to make sure that, you know, everything you're saying. I say a lot of times, you know, with the rise of AI, of course, which is a big threat to writers now, you know, I talk about how what historians do, we still work with handwritten material that hasn't been scraped.

51:37 And So, for instance, with The Facemaker, which is about Harold Gillies, it opens with this soldier who has his face blown off during the Battle of the Somme, and I came across his diary. And if you asked AI to create an outline of a book about Harold Gillies before my book existed... they would have completely left him out. Now, of course, they would tell you about him because my book has been scraped by AI. But so this is the problem with that technology, especially when you're creating something.

52:06 But historians still very much work with the handwritten material. And what we do is analyze... You know, and contextualize. And the other thing is actually you guys might find this interesting. Medical historians aren't really interested typically in retrospective diagnosis. So, for instance, you might say Abraham Lincoln perhaps had Marfan's.

52:27 You know, a lot of people have said that about him because of his height and his weight and that kind of gaunt look.

52:31 Sorry, what's Marfan's?

52:33 You know, it's like a connective tissue disorder. Howard Stern has it. So people tend to be really tall and kind of gaunt. And there was a discussion about whether maybe Abraham Lincoln had it or Henry VIII having diabetes, for instance. Mm-hmm. And that's all interesting, but here's the point that medical historians make, which is that what we know today isn't what we're going to know tomorrow, okay?

52:58 And we're always changing our views. And so there is no such thing as a pure science, like a pure fact, right? We're always reassessing how we understand the world. So for medical historians, what interests us most is how people contextualize and understood their experience of illness in the past, not what we might in 2026 think that they were suffering from, that they had no clue they were suffering from that.

53:22 Because if we bring that lens, that 2026 lens, onto the past, what will happen in 100 years if that lens changes again? Does it really tell us a truth about the past? I mean, the best we can say is how people understood that experience themselves. So when Joseph Lister comes along and says, you need to wash your hands.

53:43 And we can't understand why people were resistant to that. Well, you have to also understand that they didn't understand germs existed. And washing your hands didn't make sense if they were going to get dirty with the next patient. Why would you wash your hands? You have to get into that mindset. And that's why, you know, we should never laugh at the past, even though, I mean, I do laugh at the past. You know, there's plenty of weird stories like Robert Liston, the fastest knife in the West End, who accidentally removed somebody's testicle. And, you know, there's definitely like some odd moments, you know, in medical history. But the point is that they were doing the best with the information that was available at the time as we are.

54:19 And so I always ask audiences, what will we think is is absurd in a hundred years about today. And what's gonna get eliminated? I always point to chemo. I hope that we move to a place very soon where chemo is not sort of the dominant way of treating cancer. There's all kinds of therapies that are on the horizon.

54:39 We're gonna look back at it like it was barbaric, like the days of pre-anesthetic surgery. That's my hope at least. So, you know, we're always evolving. What we know today isn't what we know tomorrow. And that's why scientists and doctors should study the history of science and medicine, because that is a very powerful message, I think.

54:56 That was amazing.

54:56 I feel like we should end there because that was perfect.

55:00 That was awesome. Okay. All right.

55:02 This has been so much fun for me. Lindsay, I hope we have you on the show again. I absolutely loved your book. I highly recommend it to everybody. Thanks so much for coming to chat with us. Thank you so much for having me on.

55:20 Thanks everybody for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

55:28 Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

55:33 He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, D & K Universe. Come engage with us.

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