Around 1885, a young general practitioner sat in his clinic in Southsea near Portsmouth and was bored. He was not without patients, but unfortunately there were far between them. The quiet moments he spend writing short stories"aimed for a popular readership not the arty intelligentsia" (Fido, p. 64), which were published in various cheap magazines. One of the stories was about"a man who eats his own ears because he is hungry" (Boström, p. 17). Unfortunately, all these stories - around 25 pieces - were published anonymously so no one knew he was the author. The way forward to recognition had to be an independent publication under one's own name, he thought. Consequently, he began writing a novel about a detective and his assistant, whom he called respectively Sherrinford Holmes and Ormond Sacker. The doctor could hear for himself that the names did not sound quite right? But then he thought back to his boarding school days ...
Arthur Conan Doyle, as the doctor was called, was born on 22 May 1859 in Edinburgh as the seventh child out of a large group of children. His father, Charles, was an unambitious civil servant who, after being fired, ended up an epileptic alcoholic. The last 10 years of his life he was hospitalized. The father's unfortunate fate is reflected in Doyle's writing, where he describes the scourge of alcohol in several stories. His mother, Mary, meant a great deal to him, and even when he had become a world-famous writer, he valued her advice. Thus, it was she who encouraged him not to put Holmes on the shelf, when he had published 2 novels and 11 short stories about him, just as she also ensured that he agreed, albeit reluctantly, to be ennobled in 1902.
After a few years in primary school, in 1870 Doyle was admitted to the Jesuit boarding school Stonyhurst, where he attended until 1875. The Catholic Jesuits practiced a solid pedagogy, which Doyle did not necessarily care for, but it was especially their strict view of Christianity that he took distance from. Were alle non-Catholics really repratriated to Hell? From 1875 to 1876 he stayed at a boarding school in Austria, allegedly to learn German. It didn't amount to much with the Germanic, but instead he learned to play football on stilts.
From 1876 to 1881 he studied medicine at Edinburgh University. It was not his dream study, but it was the safe choice (Coren, p. 20):"Philosophy and literature were all very well but bread and butter and a full stomach were even better. That was the family's view and Conan Doyle, ever the realist in such matters, concurred.” On behalf of literature, one should be happy with his choice of study. Two of his charismatic teachers, Joseph Bell and John Rutherford, became his sources of inspiration, when he created respectively the characters Sherlock Holmes and Challenger. Bell was a true master at closely reading the outward appearance of his patients and from there inferring a lot about their past, occupation, illness, personality etc. With his own words (Smith, p. 82):"From close observation and deduction you can make a correct diagnosis of any and every case. However never neglect to ratify your deduction".
While Doyle was still a student, as a ship's doctor he undertook a seven month voyage withHope to the Arctic regions in search of whales and seals. He actually managed to harpoon 4 whales! The sailors were impressed by his boxing skills, and he learned a lot of their straightforward way of telling stories. After he graduated, his second three-month trip as a ship's doctor went withMayumba to West Africa, where he, among other things, shot a snake and swam in sharkinfested waters, as the steamer was gradually filled with exotic trade goods such as palmnuts and ivory. He felt repulsed by the primitive and superstitious Africans (D.53):"The natives were all absolute savages, offering up human sacrifices to sharks and crocodiles." After the two expeditions, it was clear to him, that his"wandering years" were over, that the time had now come to create a career on land. He was, however, aware at the same time that the trips to the icy North and the tropical South had matured him as a person (D.47):"I went on board the whaler a big, straggling youth, I came off it a powerful, well-grown man".
After returning from Africa, Doyle set up as a general practitioner for half a year in Portsmouth and then from the summer of 1882 in Plymouth. And it was here that he began to write about the detective, who would become one of the world's most famous fictional characters. As a boy Doyle had attended Stonyhurst at the same time as Patrick Holmes, Watson and Moriarty. Both the protocols, in which they inscribed their names, and the school desks, in which th
