Round the Red Lamp
Round the Red Lamp. Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life is a volume collecting 15 short stories written by Arthur Conan Doyle. These are medical and fantasy stories. The idea has been suggested to Conan Doyle by Jerome K. Jerome two years before when he was editor of The Idler. The red lamp was the usual sign of the general practitioner in England wrote Conan Doyle in the preface.
Stories
- Preface by A. Conan Doyle
- Behind the Times
- His First Operation
- A Straggler of '15
- The Third Generation
- A False Start
- The Curse of Eve
- Sweethearts
- A Physiologist's Wife
- The Case of Lady Sannox
- A Question of Diplomacy
- A Medical Document
- Lot No. 249
- The Los Amigos Fiasco
- The Doctors of Hoyland
- The Surgeon Talks
Added in the 1930 Crowborough edition:
Editions
- Round the Red Lamp (23 october 1894, Methuen & Co. [UK])
- Round the Red Lamp (october 1894, Methuen & Co. Colonial Library [UK])
- Round the Red Lamp (november 1894, D. Appleton & Co. Uniform edition [US])
- Round the Red Lamp (january 1895, Bernhard Tauchnitz No. 3040 [DE])
- Round the Red Lamp (1903, Methuen & Co. Sixpence No. 44 [UK])
- in The Stark Munro Letters and Round the Red Lamp (1903, D. Appleton & Co. Arthur Conan Doyle Author's Edition [US])
- in The Stark Munro Letters and Round the Red Lamp (24 september 1903, Smith, Elder & Co. Arthur Conan Doyle Author's Edition [UK])
- Mémoires d'un médecin (1906, Félix Juven [FR])
- Round the Red Lamp (may 1913, George Newnes Ltd. Newnes Sixpenny Copyright Novels No. 268 [UK])
- Round the Red Lamp (23 march 1915, Smith, Elder & Co. Uniform edition [UK])
- in The Stark Munro Letters and Round the Red Lamp (1917, John Murray Arthur Conan Doyle Author's Edition [UK])
- in The Crowborough Edition of the Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle vol. 21 (1930, Doubleday, Doran & Co. [US])
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Methuen & Co. (1894) 1st UK ed.
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Methuen & Co. (1894) 2nd UK ed.
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D. Appleton & Co. (1894) 1st US ed.
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Methuen & Co. (1903)
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George Newnes Ltd. (1913)
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Félix Juven (1906) 1st FR ed.
Preface
[Being an extract from a long and animated correspondence with a friend in America.]
I quite recognise the force of your objection that an invalid or a woman in weak health would get no good from stories which attempt to treat some features of medical life with a certain amount of realism. If you deal with this life at all, however, and if you are anxious to make your doctors something more than marionettes, it is quite essential that you should paint the darker side, since it is that which is principally presented to the surgeon or physician. He sees many beautiful things, it is true, fortitude and heroism, love and self-sacrifice; but they are all called forth (as our nobler qualities are always called forth) by bitter sorrow and trial. One cannot write of medical life and be merry over it.
Then why write of it, you may ask? If a subject is painful why treat it at all? I answer that it is the province of fiction to treat painful things as well as cheerful ones. The story which wiles away a weary hour fulfils an obviously good purpose, but not more so, I hold, than that which helps to emphasise the graver side of life. A tale which may startle the reader out of his usual grooves of thought, and shocks him into seriousness, plays the part of the alterative and tonic in medicine, bitter to the taste but bracing in the result. There are a few stories in this little collection which might have such an effect, and I have so far shared in your feeling that I have reserved them from serial publication. In book-form the reader can see that they are medical stories, and can, if he or she be so minded, avoid them. — Yours very truly,
- A. CONAN DOYLE.
P.S. - You ask about the Red Lamp. It is the usual sign of the general practitioner in England.
