Special Episode: Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris & The Sleuth-Hound

0:44 Hi, I'm Erin Welsh, and this is This Podcast Will Kill You. Welcome to another installment in our TPWKY Book Club series. In this series, I invite authors of popular science and medicine books onto the show to chat about their work, and the method or inspiration or story behind their work. If you haven't tuned in before, we've been doing this for a few years now, so we've got a bunch of past episodes for you to check out if something catches your interest. The rodent experiments that inspired The Secret of NIMH, the story behind the aerobiome, the disease-themed movies that reveal so much about our society's fears and preoccupations. There are so many fascinating topics to choose from.

1:28 And if you'd like to see the full list of books that we featured so far in the series, as well as take a look at the ones that we'll be highlighting in future episodes, head on over to our website, thispodcastwillkillyou.com. Under the extras tab, you'll find a link to our bookshop.org affiliate page. which will take you to a bunch of TPWKY-related book lists, including one for this book club, as well as one for the TPWKY Kids Book Club, hosted by Erin Updike and posted on our socials. Check in regularly because we're always adding more books to these lists.

2:03 If you've got book suggestions, topic suggestions, a firsthand account you'd like to submit, or any other thoughts you want to share, the best way to get in touch is through the contact us form or the firsthand account form.

2:14 Both you can find on our website.

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2:44 Even if you've somehow managed to avoid watching the movies or reading the books that made them famous, you know who they are, and you might not be able to remember a time when you didn't. The beloved English detective Sherlock Holmes has firmly established himself in this cast of well-known characters— ever since first appearing in print in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1887 A Study in Scarlet. From that first appearance, Holmes has inspired thousands of plays, movies, TV shows, and other publications. But what is less commonly known is the inspiration behind this famous detective. As it turns out, Holmes was not just a figment of Conan Doyle's creativity.

3:27 He was based on a real person, Dr. Joseph Bell.

3:31 A physician that the author became acquainted with during his own medical training. In Sleuthound, The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, New York Times bestselling author and historian of medicine Dr. Lindsay Fitzharris shines a light on the man behind the icon, and in so doing, transports readers to a thrilling time in medicine and forensic science. In his role as pathologist, Bell had an unparalleled ability to look beyond the patient. to see the person as a whole, allowing for feats of diagnosis that, to observers, looked more like magic than medicine. But his deductive prowess was just one trait he lent to the fictional detective. Bell was also a frequent consultant to the Edinburgh police force, helping

4:18 to solve the most mystifying of crimes.

4:21 Through Dr.

4:22 Fitzharris's captivating writing and storytelling, Bell and his world come to life. Readers will feel like they're seated right next to Conan Doyle, watching Bell lecture on the importance of little distinctions at the Royal Infirmary. They'll get an insider's perspective on how Conan Doyle's homage to Bell changed the man's life in complex ways. And they'll be on the edge of their seats, waiting to see how Bell's insight helped to carry out justice. Erin and I have long been mega fans of Dr.

4:54 Lindsay Fitzharris.

4:56 Her earlier books, The Butchering Art and The Facemaker, are some of our favorite works on the history of medicine. And we are so very excited to share this conversation with you all. So let's just take a quick break and get started. So Lindsay, welcome back to the show. We're so excited to have you here.

5:37 I'm so excited as well. Like it's, you know, coming back to my friend's podcast.

5:41 I love it.

5:42 We have so much to talk about. Yeah, we do.

5:45 We really, really do. We're thrilled.

5:47 We are.

5:47 Yeah, we are so thrilled to talk with you about your latest book, Sleuth Hound, which tells the fascinating story of Dr. Joseph Bell, the doctor who's diagnostic superpowers really inspired the character of Sherlock Holmes. From the opening pages, I mean, I was absolutely hooked. I was like, I want to be there, transport me there. And I was amazed at how little I knew about the real life Sherlock Holmes. And so just to start us off, could you tell us a little bit about Bell's story and when you first learned about him?

6:18 Well, you know, what's interesting is that When I talk to scientists and doctors, I always say, are you surprised that the original Sherlock Holmes was a doctor, right? Because you are detectives. Doctors are detectives. They have to cut through the petty deceits of their patients who don't necessarily divulge all of the information that they're meant to. And certainly Bell was doing that in the 19th century. To start it off, if you don't know anything about Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle, which would be hard to believe because he's one of the biggest fictional characters of all time, most people think he began at 221B Baker Street, you know, with the pipe and the hat and the cocaine. But actually,

6:56 he began somewhere far more obscure on a hospital ward in Edinburgh, where a Scottish surgeon named Joe Bell was teaching students how to read a human body like a crime scene. He had this incredible knack at being able to tell everything about a patient before they ever opened their mouths, where they came from, what they did with their hands.

7:15 A callus, a stain, a limp.

7:17 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. And a lot of people don't realize that this very famous author first started out as a doctor.

7:30 Yeah.

7:30 The only reason I think I knew that is because of tuberculosis. And I was like, wait a second. Conan Doyle was involved in medicine?

7:38 Yeah.

7:39 Why?

7:39 I had no idea. I have literally like all of this.

7:42 I mean, I knew Sherlock Holmes, but literally that's the only thing I knew. And the rest of this was all brand new to me.

7:49 I love that because you know what? It was brand new to me. I, at the point, this is like sort of a dark confession I'm going to make, but, and I don't know how people are going to take this, but I felt like this is an interesting thing to share because at the point that I had sold Sleuth Hound, I had never read the original Sherlock Holmes tales.

8:06 Yeah.

8:06 And then when I sold it, I decided not to read them right away because I knew enough about Bell to know that the comparisons at the end of his life became very reductive and kind of irritating. And so I wanted to bring this lens of medical history to his story so that he wasn't just the footnote to Sherlock Holmes. He wasn't just this parlor trick in a consulting room. So I really delayed that. I mean, of course, I knew who Holmes was and Conan Doyle, but I knew very little about that world. And so for me, this was a delight. And by the way, if anybody's listening and they're huge fans of Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, this is not a book about Conan Doyle. He is in it as much as his story intersects with Bell.

8:45 And I always say that, like, I'm not trying to, you know, be an expert in this. And, you know, there's so many books on Conan Doyle out there. This is not what that is. This is a book about his professor.

8:55 Kind of along those lines, like you were saying how you didn't dive too deep into the Sherlock Holmes, you know, part of the story before you started. You are so incredible as a storyteller, especially in this world of like transporting us back to a time and place that like I can never actually imagine. But your descriptions and the way that you just like take the reader and transport us to this time Like we really get to know the characters between Belle and Little John and Conan Doyle and so many others. I'm curious what the process of like constructing a story looks like for you.

9:34 Yeah, that's such a great question because I have a PhD in the history of science and medicine, but I call myself a storyteller these days. I'm like a recovering academic, right? I, you know, I have huge respect for academic historians. That's not what I do. I write narrative nonfiction stories. And when I'm deciding on the next book topic, I kind of live with the ghosts of several people. And I think about, you know, is there enough documentation? What would that be? What would that story be? And a lot of what I do is discarding material, right? You know, when I wrote The Facemaker about Harold Gillies and the birth of plastic surgery, a lot of it, I mean, he had hundreds of patients. A lot of it was

10:13 zoning in on the handful of disfigured soldiers whose stories were really powerful to me and I thought would connect with the reader. And the same with Bell. And one of the challenges with Bell was that, first of all, it was no secret that he was the inspiration. Conan Doyle literally outs him in his own life. He does an interview. which I talk about in the book. And he says, my professor was the inspiration. There's also a single surviving clip of Conan Doyle on film. This is incredible because he was born in 1859. You can hear his voice. And it's one of those accents that just like doesn't exist anymore. He says something like the root, you know, he like trills his R's and it's just such a delightful little interview. So there's one clip of

10:56 him speaking and in it, he points to Bell. And I just started thinking about, you know, Here he is pointing to not Watson, not Holmes. He's pointing to Joe Bell, this unassuming surgeon who never really asked for the spotlight. And until I came along, had never really been the subject of a major commercial book. Obviously, people know about Bell and he's been written on in some extent in academic and niche circles. So I felt like that was a crime that needed to be solved. But the problem with Bell is that he wasn't just the inspiration for Holmes, he was doing what Holmes was doing, which was working unofficially with the police surgeon, Henry Duncan Littlejohn. And because he was working unofficially, it could be difficult to kind

11:35 of determine which cases his fingerprints were on. But thankfully, Little John, he's a huge character in the book. He's fascinating. He's a pioneer of fingerprinting and courtroom photography. So he really let me flesh this story out. And it's kind of like a buddy story. It's about these two guys solving some of the highest profile murders of the 19th century.

11:55 And then, of course, you know, all the Sherlock Holmes frenzy around Bell when he's outed as that character.

12:01 Let's take a quick break. And when we get back, there's still so much to discuss. Welcome back, everyone. We've been chatting with Dr. Lindsay Fitzharris about her book, Sleuth Hound, the case of the real Sherlock Holmes. Let's get back into things. It is such a fun story to see this kind of take shape, to see the inspiration behind Sherlock Holmes and like how Conan Doyle kind of picked apart these bits of personality traits. But like Bell himself, let's get to know Bell a little bit more. So he graduated from medical school and he began practicing medicine in the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh in 1859, which was a truly revolutionary time for science and medicine. Germ theory was about to change what we understood about health and disease.

13:03 Darwin's On the Origin of Species had just been published. Anesthesia and antiseptic technique would turn surgery from a death sentence to a science. But As is often the case, these scientific developments, they hadn't yet translated into improved survival or.

13:18 Quality of life.

13:20 And so I'm wondering how you think starting his career amidst these revolutionary ideas in this rapidly industrializing town, but where science still hadn't quite made that full impact, how do you think that influenced Bell and the development of his method?

13:37 It's such a great question because this is the time when everything's changing. And You know, I spent a lot of years in the trenches of World War I. It was really fun to go back to Edinburgh in the 19th century. My first book, The Butchering Art, is about Joseph Lister, and he is a colleague of Joe Bell's.

13:53 So he's in this world as well, which is fascinating. But as you say, you know, you have the dawn of anesthesia in 1846. It changes surgery. You know, no longer is the patient ill. you know, fighting the surgeon. And so in a weird way, surgery becomes more dangerous. And I talk about this in the butchering art because the surgeons were willing to pick up the knife, but he doesn't understand germ theory. So enter Joseph Lister. And I always say that, you know, Lister, he, he was a Quaker. He grew up around the microscope. The microscope is his lightsaber. You know, he brings it to medical school.

14:25 He is able to solve this mystery about germs. And so Bell is brought into this world of great change and, And he's very forward thinking. He's younger than Lister. So that also helps. Like the younger surgeons are always more open to those reforms. But let me give you an example. He really impacted nursing in Scotland at the time. And this was interesting to me. He was good friends with Florence Nightingale. And he said something to the effect of, you know, the patient could be saved by the knife and only to die on the ward. Because a lot of times these nurses were untrained. They were not medically literate.

15:01 And so he put his mind to really professionalizing nursing at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. And he made a huge impact there. And again, this is like part of his biography that really gets overshadowed by the Sherlock links. So I wanted to talk a bit about that. He's also a big champion of women in general in medicine.

15:19 And to compare to Lister, Lister never did believe that women belonged in the role of the doctor or the surgeon, whereas Bell is willing to teach the female students. He teaches them separately from the male students, but he still teaches them. It was said that he treated them exactly the same and held them to the same high standards.

15:38 So He's very progressive. He's very forward-thinking. He's one of the early adopters of antisepsis at a time when, you know, there was a surgeon at the Royal Infirmary who would slam the door and he would say, there, Mr. Lister's germs can't get in anymore. And so people, you know, the older guard really didn't take to antisepsis at first.

15:58 And I always say the discovery's hard, don't get me wrong, but changing minds and institutes is even harder, especially when that is wrapped in ego and authority. And so to have Bell there and to be so receptive of that early on in his career, I think speaks to that kind of modern mind. And then he would bring that logic and that cold logic and rationale to forensic science, which was also developing at this time.

16:23 Yeah, it seemed like it kind of prior to Bell or maybe even like some of his contemporaries, like the diagnosis or diagnostic techniques were much more art than science. But Bell really used such a huge range of observations. And to kind of read about some of the stories in your book of him in the amphitheater making these incredible diagnoses without even touching the patient with such little information, he really seems to have that kind of Holmesian ability to see so much further than other people likely do.

17:00 Not just this collection of symptoms, but like the person behind these stories. How do you feel like this might have influenced like the way that he saw his patients and the way that he kind of read people? How did this influence the way that he kind of pursued treatment thereafter?

17:15 Well, you know, what's funny is I think he'd be a terrible dinner guest. I mean, imagine you can hide anything from this guy. Like it would just be so and oh, God, Joe Bell's coming to dinner, you know. But he but he did have this Sherlockian quality. One of my favorite stories is there was this wealthy older woman in town and she claimed that she had lost her sight very suddenly and she was sort of prone to these exaggerated stories. And so he went and he sat at the bottom of her bed and he listened to her tell this sad tale that her sight had gone.

17:45 And at the end of it, he put his thumb on the end of his nose and he wiggled his fingers and And she said, how dare you? You know, and suddenly he knew she hadn't lost her sight. And and so he was very good at kind of cutting through, like I say, the petty deceits of his patients. And when you read Sleuth Hound, you will think, at least in the first two chapters, this is Sherlock Holmes. I mean, there's so many stories about him that abound that almost are translated directly into the Holmes tales. And I show that sort of, you know, in comparison to some of the Holmes passages. So he does feel very Sherlockian, but he is a more complex character than Holmes. I mean, he's more empathetic. He is a family man. In contrast,

18:29 he has a wife who dies in her 30s in childbirth, and then he raises his three children alone. And he has great love for children. And so there's a lot of things that are different about Bell. I always point out, and you guys know because you've had Adrian, my husband, on, he's a caricaturist. And he always says he can't caricature people he knows too well because it's about first impression.

18:53 So I think Conan Doyle only really knew Bell in this capacity as a professor. And he took the most obvious, flashy showmanship bit about Bell and then transposed it onto this character. And so I wonder, and I say this at the end of the book, whether Holmes would exist in the form he exists. if Conan Doyle had been better friends with Bell, if he had known him more intimately.

19:16 So that's always something to argue and ponder. And we'll never know, of course. But yeah, he does have this very Holmesian trick. And his students think it's a magic trick. They don't quite believe it. And they think that maybe he got sight of the outpatient clerk's notes before he came into the but then it would always be proven wrong when a last minute patient would come in and he would be able to do it just as well as the earlier patients. So he was fantastic and it wasn't magic. It was just cold logic. It was observation, but it was also taking visual clues and creating a narrative and a story. And that part was really important to solving the mystery of what the patient was suffering from.

19:58 And doctors still do this to some extent. There's still narratives about illness, and they'll go back into your childhood history, and they need to know a lot of stuff. And so he could do that and tell that very succinctly.

20:11 And, you know, mysteries of the human body were just one type of mystery that Bell explored. As you mentioned earlier, he was also a frequent unofficial consultant of the police force in Edinburgh, especially alongside the famous police surgeon Henry Duncan Littlejohn. Tell me more about Littlejohn, about the legacy he left behind, and about the relationship between Bell and Littlejohn.

20:37 So I actually wondered at one point when writing this book whether I would call it sleuth hounds, plural, because I do think that Little John has a huge influence on Conan Doyle as well. He also teaches Conan Doyle. I think it could be said that Bell gives Conan Doyle the method and Little John gives him the world because Little John is really one of the original expert witnesses.

21:01 This is the time, the evolution of the expert witness in the courtroom. And so he teaches forensics in Edinburgh. He's a very well-loved teacher. He had a collection. I mean, he would solve all these cases. He was the police surgeon. They called it police surgeon. So he actually took care of the health of the police as well. But then part of his job was investigating crimes and doing postmortems.

21:21 And he would collect everything from these cases, like the murder weapons and bits of the body would end up in jars in his collection. And some of that stuff is still up in Edinburgh. In fact, one of my friends who did some research for me, I... When I started this book, I had breast cancer, and so I wasn't as mobile. And so she went up to Scotland to collect a lot of the documents for me and take photos. And she accidentally called up some human remains.

21:46 And there was a little bit of a worry that maybe she didn't have the qualifications. Her name's Dr. Kate So, and she did a fantastic job transcribing Bell's diary because its handwriting is terrible. I think she's probably the only person in the world who can read the diary. So, so Kate went up there and she, she messaged me it very, you know, panic, like, oh no, this stuff that you want, some of it contains human remains. I said, I don't need to see the human remains. I just, I just want photographs of, of, of the documents at this point. Um, so a lot of little John kept all of this stuff and he almost like created his own, you know, Madame Tussauds museum of weird instruments and bits from the crime scenes. And that's what he used to

22:25 teach his students. And so he was a fantastic storyteller himself. And he taught Joe Bell, so he was a bit older than Joe Bell, and eventually recognized that Bell had this amazing analytical mind. And so he would unofficially consult with Bell on various cases when he needed a second pair of eyes or a second opinion. And together, they were this dynamic duo. They were this crime-fighting duo who were always generally right in their conclusions. They didn't always win.

22:56 I won't say too much about that, but they were always, I think, always right in general about who they were going after. So it was fascinating. And that was the part of the story that I really wanted to dig into, because that's the part about Belle's life that was a bit in the shadows before.

23:10 Yeah, it seems like at the same time that Belle was, you know, practicing all of this ability to turn these observations into these stories, like you said, the world of forensic medicine was also changing drastically with you know, analytical chemistry, ballistics. And I'm wondering, what are some of the most transformative developments that happened in forensic medicine during this time when Little John and Bell were working together? And how did that affect the way that the idea of proof or the idea of, you know, expert witnesses and things was perceived by the general public?

23:48 You know, you have this kind of birth of the expert for hire thing. So before this period, at least in British law, you could only testify, if you were a doctor, you could only testify if you had direct relationship to the case. So if you had performed a postmortem or whatever. But then after the mid-19th century, it becomes a thing where you can actually testify, like you can be consulted even if you for instance, didn't perform the post-mortem, you can consult the notes, you can weigh in.

24:19 So it did lead to this kind of idea of experts for hire, which we see in court cases all the time, for good and for bad, right? And so this is very much the evolution of the courtroom medicine. It's the first time that medicine enters that courtroom and testifies. And so there's all kinds of developments at this time.

24:36 I talk, you know, I always say that the book is a small story and it's a big story. The small story is about Bell and Little John and Doyle. And then the big story is all of these like amazing changes happening around them. Of course, forensics didn't always get it right. Just as medicine doesn't always get it right.

24:52 There are harmful practices like phrenology that spring up. There was something called optography, which is this idea that the eyeball acts like a lens and that you could capture the final image that somebody sees right before they die. And so there was real conversation about whether you can catch a murderer this way. And whenever I talk about this on social media, inevitably somebody says, but did it work?

25:15 Because it sounds kind of like it's rooted. It does sound like, oh, yeah, that kind of makes sense, right? And just FYI, it did not work. It is now considered a debunked pseudoscience. But you had all of this happening because there was this sort of desperate need to professionalize policing and crime fighting and forensics and doctors were professionalizing.

25:37 So all this is happening around Bell and Little John, and they are at the forefront of this too. And like I said, Little John, he uses courtroom photography, which is new at the time. And just always looking forward at how to make this better, how to make it more of a science.

25:54 Let's take a quick break here. We'll be back before you know it. Welcome back, everyone. We're here chatting with Dr. Lindsay Fitzharris about her book, Sleuth Hound, The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes. Let's get into some more questions. It's kind of amazing the way you paint these scenes of Belle and Little John acting as these expert witnesses, acting as these consultants. And then to also envision Belle in his other life as this medical performer in a way.

26:38 You know, he was very modest, as you described, but he also seemed to be a little bit of a showman. You know, he's holding these demonstrations at the Royal Infirmary. He would have this rapt audience. And he would teach them about like the vast importance of little distinctions is what I wrote specifically that I love the little distinctions.

26:55 Yes, I love that.

26:56 And I'm wondering, first, I was like, I really want to travel back in time and be a member of that audience. I would love to see that. First, how much would you love that? And second, what were some of these little distinctions? Like in one of these demonstrations, what would be some of the things that he would point out that would be, you know, all but concealed to members of the audience?

27:19 Well, now to the question of time traveling, my superpower in 2026 is I could make you feel really good about living today. It doesn't seem like there's a lot of good reasons to be alive in 2026, but I can tell you how bad that was 100, 200 years ago. So I always say if I traveled to the past, I'd have to be like the bubble boy. Like I wouldn't be like, Oh my God, can you like, I'd pick up smallpox or I would just have terrible luck. Right.

27:44 And it just, it would be a disaster and there'd be like no antibiotics. And so, um, so, but yeah, I mean, obviously I would love to meet somebody like bell and to kind of be a fly on the wall. Although I have to say, you know, having had access to his diary, um, and which was incredible and that gave real insight into the man behind the myth. And also of course, there's letters and there's court documents were really helpful with narrative nonfiction because you actually have dialogue that you can now put into the book because you have the exchanges between the prosecution and the defense and the various witnesses. So that was very helpful. So I can't travel back to the past, but I feel like I have had conversations with Bell. He would have been

28:25 quite a character. And I hope that his sort of sense of humor and his sense of whimsy, I think, comes through Because to go to some of the examples on the wards, one of my favorite stories opens Sleuth Hound and a patient comes in and he says that, you know, this patient was in the army and the patient instantly denies this. And Bell is confused because he's usually correct. And so he has the patient stripped to the waist. And lo and behold, there is a D on his chest for deserter. And so he was lying to Bell and Bell would be bested by no one, least of all an army deserter. So he just was so eagle-eyed. I mean, you couldn't get anything past him.

29:06 I mean, imagine being one of his children, right? Like, you would never get anything past him. It must have been quite annoying on some level. But although his daughter tells his story about how when they would go on train rides, he also would do this kind of trick where he would tell them everything about the passengers. And they wouldn't quite believe it. And then they would ask the passengers and the passengers would confirm that he was right.

29:27 So so he just he was kind of a joy in that sense. And I do think he was a showman. I think, um, you know, a lot of doctors had to be in, you know, in, in the Victorian period. I always kind of joke that I'm like the PT Barnum of medical history. Like, I'm not sure that Oxford is very amused at what I've become with all of my makeup and hair, my Dolly Parton, you know, way into, into medical history, but I've always been kind of weird.

29:54 And when I went and did my PhD, I, I, you know, suppressed that And so I feel like I've sort of become more myself. And so Sleuth Hounds, it's going to be really fun when I go on book tour with it, because I feel like I can really lean into that weird person I am and to share kind of my delight in Victorian science and medicine and really kind of get back to my roots. I mean, don't get me wrong, The Facemaker, I'm so proud of it, but it was like a really serious book. And, you know, a lot of the patients I was talking about, they have relatives that, you know, this is within reach of living memory. And it was just a very different kind of book. And I'm so happy I did it. I always say that I think at the end of my career,

30:35 The Facemaker will be my most important book, but probably not my most popular book. But it was great to get back to the 19th century and to Edinburgh and to a character like Joe Bell, because he just gave me so much gold to write about.

30:47 Yeah, he really does seem like such an interesting guy to get to hang around. And I love, there was a story about his daughter who, Having, like, saved or tried to save someone else's life when her friend fell off of a horse and she, like, used his tricks and things. And I just love the idea of him teaching his children as well as his, you know, medical children, as it were, and all of the students that he taught. But, like, teaching them to be little sleuth hounds as well as him.

31:17 It's just, like, such a cute.

31:18 Yeah, they were all of it. And by the way, that title, my, my husband actually came up. So titles are like, so hard. They either come to me, they either come fast or they come really slow. So with facemaker, it was like, I was at the end of the process. I still had no title. And then I read this letter that was addressed to Harold Gillies that said, dear facemaker.

31:37 And I was like, that's perfect. He's the facemaker. Um, but it took a very long time with sleuth hound. I actually sold it as sleuth hound. My husband and I did a big brainstorm. We came up with terrible titles as well as then sleuth hound. And I want to point out because I had a marketing meeting with Penguin recently and they didn't know this, but I said, well, sleuth hound also the S and the H, Sherlock Holmes.

31:58 And they were like, oh yeah, like of course. And I said, yeah, there's like all kinds of, you know, there's layers of it, but I love the sleuth hound. And also there's a poem that Conan Doyle writes that I include at the beginning of the book where he says, he uses that term sleuth hound. And he says, you know, the creator is not the created because People were always sort of mixing him up with Sherlock Holmes. And even I will catch myself, you know, saying, oh, no, I mean, Conan Doyle, you know. So he was just so associated with it. I want to also say, if you are listening and don't know anything about this, Conan Doyle absolutely hated the character Sherlock Holmes. He could not stand it.

32:34 Was that a surprise to you? I mean, it must have been because if you didn't know anything. Totally.

32:38 A total surprise.

32:39 It was so funny. And I was like, I can totally see that, too. There's a point when he's just like, I'm going to kill him off. I'm so sick of this guy.

32:45 I hate it.

32:46 After such a short period of time, I was like, wait, all of this was over like 18 months or something.

32:51 I was like, wait, what?

32:53 Yeah, he's like, he's out of here. Like, he just couldn't stay. And I include in the finished copies a caricature of Conan Doyle. And he's really big in the caricature. And there's this little Sherlock Holmes that's shackled to him. And he just hated the character. And he wanted to be seen as a more serious writer. And he couldn't understand why, you know, this of all the things he had written, this is what took off. And of course, he kills off Holmes. And but he brings Holmes back. Eventually, the public pressure is too much. But interestingly, he kills off Holmes around the time that he outs Bell. And he doesn't just out him. He dedicates the Sherlock Holmes tales to Bell and he like doxes him. He puts

33:33 like his address down. right there, you know, in the book. And so now everybody knows where Joe Bell lives. And I think at first Bell was was flattered and it became irritating, but it was very much like, you know, Sherlock Holmes is dead. Long live Sherlock Holmes. And so all of this media attention moves on to Bell. And at that time, this huge murder case drops into his lap.

33:54 And there is a real ballistics expert named, I kid you not, Dr. Watson, right? I held a letter that said, my dear Watson from Bell. And I'm like, what is this book writes itself? Like, I feel like I barely had to do anything here. Like this was, it was just such a joy to kind of bring this to life. And then you also have Robert Louis Stevenson's bumping along with Conan Doyle. So you have the real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in this. I mean, it's just, it's such a rich, if you love literature and maybe you're not like big into history, this is still, you know, a book that you can sink your teeth into because it tells all those kinds of origin stories of those characters.

34:34 Totally.

34:34 No, it's like I was Aaron and I were talking about this book and how much we loved it.

34:39 And I was like, how do all these people know each other? Were there like 15.

34:42 People living in Edinburgh at the time?

34:45 I don't understand. They're all going to the bar and they're all at the pub, you know, and I mean, literally like Robert Louis Stevenson. when he read Sherlock Holmes, he wrote a letter to Conan Doyle and he says, you know, oh, I loved, I love these stories. He said, but one thing bothers me. Can this be my old friend, Joe Bell? And it's just, it's such a great quote.

35:07 I end one of the chapters with it. And, you know, a lot of this book though, like I said, it was, you know, how do you bring this, this character who, you know, not a lot is, is known about his personal life. And he, and he kind of, he was very private and he kind of kept it that way, but, but the people around him, And their impressions of him really helped me fill that out as well. And then the diary and things like that, you know, were really helpful.

35:31 I want to go back to Conan Doyle for a second. So Conan Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes, but he seemed like the only one who did. The public loved Sherlock Holmes. I mean, something about this detective really captured the public's imagination. And I'm curious why you think that is. And, you know, these things like Penny Bloods, true crime, what was happening in the newspapers or, you know, in fiction to really get the public invested in a detective like this?

36:03 Yeah. And, you know, we think of like sometimes when I tell stories about, for instance, the Victorian operating theater, you could sometimes buy tickets and people think, oh, that's so weird. And I'm like, but you know what? The pit is really popular right now. And is that any different? You know, it's going, I mean, obviously it's fictionalized, but it's going into that kind of intimate world. We're endlessly curious.

36:24 And I hope we remain endlessly curious, you know, with the rise of AI and all the fake stuff out there, we have to like hold on to our humanity and our curiosity. So the Victorians were no different. They were just as morbid as we are, you know? And so to answer the long-winded answer to this question is, At this time, you have growing literacy rates in the Victorian period.

36:44 And so people are reading these Penny Bloods. They're consuming it through the newspapers. There's a lot of kind of sensational newspaper writing going on at this time. You have Jack the Ripper in 1888. And so there's a lot of, you know, true crime and information coming out and people are consuming this. And then you have Sherlock Holmes. And at the same time that Ripper isn't being caught and this idea of the bumbling Bobby kind of arises, you have this character who is this mastermind at catching criminals.

37:17 And there was a real attraction, I think, to that idea because the police at this time, and I go into that in Sleuth Hound, are also in the process of professionalizing. You know, the early 19th century, you have thief takers. You don't even have a professional police force. And then, you know, by the end of the 19th century, you have the Met in London. And so this is a time of great change. And, you know, you can't always blame the police in the 19th century. There wasn't there wasn't a lot at their disposal. It wasn't like they had DNA and, you know, fingerprinting was still relatively new.

37:45 And so they had a lot of challenges. But you did get this kind of backlash from the public that the police didn't know what they were doing, especially with Ripper. And so Sherlock Holmes, I think, was a very attractive character in that sense to them.

37:57 I mean, Little John and Belle, like their their duo is. bell's mind his observations the way it all worked i mean this this was clearly and conan doyle shouts out specifically says joe bell this is the guy this is this is the real life sherlock holmes and bell learns about this eventually after reading this interview with with conan doyle that made him go oh is that is that me in there i had okay interesting and And he writes to Conan Doyle.

38:28 I'm curious to.

38:29 Know how he felt about it, how we think Bell felt about this character, this famous character being based on him, and then how those feelings changed over the course of his life.

38:41 Well, I'm told, I just went on to a great podcast called Doings of Doyle, which is a real Sherlockian podcast. And I was told that a lot of actors who play Sherlock Holmes call it the curse because they get typecast as Sherlock Holmes. And so I imagine that the first curse was on Joe Bell because he certainly that was all people really remembered him for. Even when he died, his obituaries sort of always led with this. And when he testified in this huge trial after he was outed, it was like the real Sherlock Holmes is testifying. So there was just there was so much of that overshadowing who he was. I think at first he was flattered and he even exchanges letters. It's clear that he he suggests,

39:22 you know, plots to to Doyle that Doyle never used. But Doyle does say something to the effect of like. oh, keep sending me ideas. And so that's kind of an interesting thing as well. But I think he's flattered. But certainly later, I think he felt it was very reductive. There's a letter he writes to his friend Jesse Saxby.

39:42 He says, my old student must not have thought very highly of me to put this heap of rubbish on my head. So he could have been having a bad day. I don't think he always felt like that, but I think probably after he was doxxed and people were showing up to his house and stuff, it got rather annoying. The other thing is that we can say that Sherlock Holmes is a rather detached person and Bell really cared deeply.

40:07 He was kind of known as this very compassionate doctor. And I wonder if you know, being compared to this very detached, you know, sociopathic character. I don't know, people might get angry with me calling Holmes that, but there is this kind of like emotional detachment that he has. And I think that Bell got tired of those comparisons.

40:30 He probably also wondered at the end of his life, you know, what was he going to be remembered for? And he was right. He was remembered as the inspiration for this and not much more. Yeah.

40:38 Yeah.

40:39 Well, kind of speaking of that, you're right. You know, we all know Sherlock Holmes. I knew Sherlock Holmes. I had never heard of Joe Bell before this book. And I think for so many people, he has been largely forgotten or not remembered the way that he should have been given the many contributions that he made to the fields of medicine and forensic science and just like a new way of thinking and looking at problems. So for you, beyond Sherlock Holmes, what do you see as Bell's legacy and what do you wish that we would remember about him?

41:09 That is a great question. And one, I have not been asked. So well done guys. I love you guys are really good preparers. Let me tell all the listeners. They go into it like an exam. Like they send the questions and like we have, and I said to them before we got on, it's like, guys, I'm going to wing it. Like, I'm sorry, but I just, I'm, I'm a winger. We're going to see what comes out of my mouth. Also like the fear, by the way, is very real when you start a media tour, because it's, I finished this book well over a year ago. So a book spends a year in production. I've started a new book called Ether Wars, which is about the dawn of ether, which is going to be a really fun book.

41:46 It's going to be the first American medical history because ether is discovered in America by a dentist named Morton. But the bigger point was, I was like, am I going to remember all this stuff about sleuth hounds? So the thing that I would like Belle to be remembered for, I think, most is that he was a real reformer.

42:08 I mean, his impact on nursing was huge. And he was a proponent of women in medicine, which I think people might find surprising, especially with the Sherlock connection, because Sherlock has a very complicated relationship with women himself. But here's Bell, and he's a very different character. But I also think he should certainly be remembered as the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. There's a postscript to the book where Adrian Conan Doyle, who was the youngest son of Conan Doyle, takes great offense when Irving Wallace in the 1940s writes an essay about Bell. And it's a really strange fight that breaks out because Conan Doyle said this. He said it in his autobiography. He said it on film. He

42:50 said it in an interview. It wasn't a secret. But Adrian Conan Doyle completely dismissed the influence that Bell might have had on this character. And so this big fight breaks out. But the reason I included the postscript was because in 1993... Conan Doyle's youngest daughter named Jean. Now, remember, he was born in 1859. His daughter is alive. Only men can do this, guys. Only men can do this, right?

43:18 I was like, oh my God, she's alive in 1993. And she said in an interview, they asked her this, and 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, this is the perfect way to end the book. Like it is the final word on it.

43:39 And we can argue about how much Bell was Holmes, how much was Conan Doyle, but he certainly had some kind of influence. And I hope people will enjoy learning about that. Totally. No, that- I did. Absolutely.

43:51 That feud, I was like, wait, what? What horse do you have in this?

43:56 I don't understand.

43:57 Why are you picking a fight about this? I just have like one last question for you. And that is about the method. Have you found yourself in writing this book and researching this book? Have you found yourself trying to tap into that method, trying to learn from Bell and say, I'm looking around the people on the train, on the bus, the people I see in the grocery store?

44:17 What do I know about them? Or do you find yourself trying to kind of embrace that? I would be I feel like I would be really terrible at this. I'm not like I'm not that super observant. I always worry about that. Like if I was like a witness to a.

44:29 Crime, I would be really I really wouldn't want that pressure. But I do bring that kind of hopefully people agree. I do bring that thoroughness to my research. You know, I said this recently online and I pointed out that, you know, historians, we still really work with written evidence. records. And so a lot of what I do is, is discarding material. Like we talked at the beginning, but I always tell people the buck stops with me. I have to know what exists in order to discard it. Because if somebody comes to an audience and challenges it, I'll have to say, yes, I know that story. And this is the reason why I chose not to incorporate it.

45:07 It's not an academic book, whatever, you know, or sometimes there'll be hidden things in footnotes, um, you know, to cover my basis, to know like, yes, I I'm aware of these sources and, So it's one of those things. There's no shortcuts. And so I like to think that I bring Bell's method to that. I approach it with the eagle eyes. What am I seeing here? I'm friends with Eric Larson, and his books are brilliant. And if you don't know him, you're crazy. You're not reading enough books because he's amazing. He's always number one New York Times bestseller. And he says he loves to see how you know, how hard the pen was pushed into the letter, into the diary. It can tell you something sometimes about

45:46 the state of mind, you know, and so there's those kinds of clues when you're reading diaries, when you're reading this kind of stuff. And like I've talked about the transcription, which just makes things easier for me, but ultimately you still want to look at the the document itself. And, um, it, it tells a story. And so I bring it that, but if a witness to crime, forget it, I'm, I would be terrible. I'm so sorry. If you get murdered in front of me, I will be completely useless. And, uh, in every way possible, by the way, I wouldn't even occur to me to call the, I would just be screaming.

46:16 I am, I'm not good in emergency situations. So hopefully none of you guys are in that kind of situation when I'm around, but, but yeah. Yeah. Anyway, we have gotten off topic, which is I just love coming onto this podcast. And I thank you guys so much for always amplifying my work. I just feel like. I need to come to where you guys are, although you guys are in separate places, but we need to have drinks sometime and just chat about medical history. Oh my God.

46:43 I would love that.

46:43 That would be the best. I mean, Dr.

46:45 Fitzharris, Lindsay, you are like, we are friends and it is so, and I am a huge, huge.

46:52 Fan of you guys and everybody always mentions the podcast and you know, so I, I love it. And you know, thanks again for having me on the show.

47:00 Oh, thank you so much.

47:02 Thank you.

47:21 A big thank you again to Dr. Lindsay Fitzharris for taking the time to chat with us. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to learn more, check out our website, thispodcastwillkillyou.com, where we'll post a link to where you can find Sleuth Hound, The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, as well as a link to Dr. Fitzharris' website where you can find her other work like The Butchering Art and The Facemaker. And don't forget, you can check out our website for all sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to transcripts, quarantini recipes, show notes and references for all of our episodes, links to merch, our bookshop.org affiliate page, our Goodreads list, a first-hand account form,

48:01 and music by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which, thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes. Thank you to Liana Squilacci and Tom Breyfogle for our audio mixing.

48:14 And thanks to you listeners for listening.

48:16 We hope you liked this episode and are loving being part of the TPWKY Book Club. A special thank you, as always, to our fantastic patrons. We appreciate your support so very much. Well, until next time, keep washing those hands.