Old Medical School: Joseph Bell and the Birth of Sherlock Holmes
Why is it significant?
Facing Teviot Place is a long, palatial building in the manner of an Italian Renaissance palazzo, with a tall arched gateway leading into quadrangles beyond.
Key Facts
| Place | Old Medical School: Joseph Bell and the Birth of Sherlock Holmes |
|---|---|
| Address | Teviot Place, Edinburgh EH8 9AG, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.94500, -3.19040 |
| Part of Walk | Surgeons, Skeletons and Dolly the Sheep: Edinburgh's Southside of Medicine and Science |
| Generated | Generated |
Facing Teviot Place is a long, palatial building in the manner of an Italian Renaissance palazzo, with a tall arched gateway leading into quadrangles beyond. It was built in the 1880s, to designs by Robert Rowand Anderson, as the university's new medical school, at a time when Edinburgh was one of the places in the world to study medicine.
Among the university's medical students in those years was a tall young man from a struggling Edinburgh family: Arthur Conan Doyle, who studied medicine here from 1876 to 1881, as the new school was rising. He helped pay his way by working as a ship's surgeon, once on a whaler bound for the Arctic. And he fell under the spell of one teacher above all, the surgeon Joseph Bell.
Bell could look at a stranger and tell him his trade, where he had travelled and what was wrong with him, from the cut of his clothes, the calluses on his hands and the way he walked. Doyle worked as his clerk at the Royal Infirmary and watched him do it again and again. When he began writing detective stories, he built his hero on that very method of observation and deduction. Sherlock Holmes appeared in A Study in Scarlet in 1887, and Doyle later wrote to Bell that it was most certainly to him that he owed Holmes.
Bell was not the only teacher who walked into fiction. The physiologist William Rutherford, with his booming voice and enormous beard, is said to have given Doyle the model for the irascible Professor Challenger of The Lost World. Edinburgh's lecture halls, in other words, handed literature two of its most memorable characters.
Inside this building, the university's Anatomical Museum still keeps the skeleton of William Burke, the murderer whose victims ended up on the dissecting tables of this city. Now walk west along Teviot Place and Lauriston Place for a few minutes, to a long Victorian hospital with turrets and a clock tower, now turned into homes.