Canon Jessopp and Sir Conan Doyle on Medicine
Canon Jessopp and Sir Conan Doyle on Medicine is an article published in the The British Medical Journal on 15 october 1904.
On 5 october 1904, Arthur Conan Doyle attended and spoke at the annual dinner of the Norwich Medico-Chirurgical Society.
Canon Jessopp and Sir Conan Doyle on Medicine
The opening of the Norwich Medico-Chirurgical Society was celebrated last week by the usual dinner. Dr. D. G. Thomson, the President for the year, took the chair, and besides the members, there were many guests. Among them were the Reverend Canon Jessopp and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose presence lent the occasion additional interest. The former made an excellent speech, in which the element of humour was supplied by his account of his experiences as an amateur doctor in early life. He was, it appears, at the age of 23 forced to take charge of a large parish, in which he found himself responsible not only for the spiritual but also for the physical well-being of his people. He recounted some of his experiences, and said that in the light of since acquired knowledge, he looked back with horror upon his performances, and was thankful to have escaped a charge of manslaughter. A part of his speech which possessed more serious interest was the detailed comparison which he made between Medicine and the Church. The former as a profession was going up by leaps and bounds, while the trend of the latter, viewed equally as a profession, was steadily downwards. When he remembered the long course of profound study through which young men had to pass before they received recognition as medical men, he was filled with admiration, and he viewed with some shame and certainly much regret the width of the portal leading to the Church. The weakness of his own profession was that men entirely unfit for their positions might yet continue to occupy them, and that all alike were afraid to reform their beliefs; yet he hoped that in time better conditions would prevail, and in the interval there was much in which members of the two professions could help one another. Dr. Cooper Pattin, in proposing the toast of "Literature," said that only those writings could be classed as literature which possessed the power of stimulating thought in the reader, and with thought, feeling. After a sketch of the unbroken association of medicine and literature from the days of Nebsecht — self-styled "The Lord of Healing" — who flourished full 4,000 years ago, and noting particularly the glory reflected by the profession upon Norwich through Sir Thomas Browne. Dr. Pattin credited Sir Conan Doyle with having performed the most marvellous of post-mortem operations in resurrecting Sherlock Holmes. Sir Conan Doyle, in responding, said there was no pleasure so great to him as that of meeting his fellow medical men. He always, when he met them, had a feeling that he was a deserter who had been brought back to his old regiment. In his short and chequered career as a doctor he served as a ship's surgeon and as an army doctor; he had practised in the country and in the slums of a great city. And at one time he had even attained the dignity of a waiting-room in Wimpole Street. Who did most waiting there he would rather not say. But one conviction had always remained with him, and that was that whatever line of life a man went into, as long as he had to use his brain, the medical training was actually the best a man could undergo. There was a time when a young man who was going to do anything in the world was passed mechanically through the Bar. He believed the time would come when similar young men would be passed through medicine, because he knew no other means by which a young man could get to the fundamental and absolute facts of life. If our young army officers had five years' study in the same sense that our young medical men had five years' study we should become the terror of Europe.
