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Lindsey Fitzharris chats with Ars about her new book, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes .

Ian Richardson played Dr. Joseph Bell—the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes— in the BBC series Murder Rooms

Credit:

BBC

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created one of the most beloved fictional detectives of all time in Sherlock Holmes, spawning countless novels, films, TV series, and so forth featuring the sleuth. Far fewer people know about the real-life inspiration for Holmes: a renowned surgeon at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh named Joseph Bell, who taught Doyle when the author was still a young medical student. Bell is the subject of a new, eminently readable biography, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes , by medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris.

A noted science communicator with a fondness for the medically macabre, Fitzharris published a biography of Scottish surgical pioneer Joseph Lister, The Butchering Art , in 2017—a great, if occasionally grisly, read.…