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	\|author=Joseph Bell		\|author=Joseph Bell
	\|topic=Detection		\|topic=Detection
			\|summary=This article praises Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories for transforming medical diagnostic method into detective fiction, arguing that Holmes's power lies in trained observation, disciplined reasoning, and attention to minute detail. It contends that the stories succeed not only through clever plots but through their lucid exposition of method and their economical, vigorous storytelling.
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	''The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes'' is an article written by Dr. [[Joseph Bell]] first published in [[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (UK) in december 1892.		''The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes'' is an article written by Dr. [[Joseph Bell]] first published in [[The Bookman (UK)\|The Bookman]] (UK) in december 1892.

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''The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes'' is an article written by Dr. [[Joseph Bell]] first published in [[The Bookman (UK)|The Bookman]] (UK) in december 1892.

In 1893, 1894 and 1896, the article was added to the book edition of [[A Study in Scarlet]] ([[Ward, Lock & Co.|Ward, Lock & Bowden, Ltd.]]) with two paragraphs omitted and re-titled ''"Mr. Sherlock Holmes"''. It was also reprinted in the 1903 [[Arthur Conan Doyle Author's Edition]] (volume 7).

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== Editions ==

* in ''[[The Bookman (UK)|The Bookman]]'' (december 1892 [UK]) as ''The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes''
* in ''[[A Study in Scarlet]]'' (1893-1896, [[Ward, Lock & Co.|Ward, Lock & Bowden, Ltd.]] [UK]) as ''Mr. Sherlock Holmes''
* in ''[[Arthur Conan Doyle Author's Edition]]'' (24 september 1903, [[John Murray]] [UK], [[D. Appleton & Co.]] [US]) as ''Mr. Sherlock Holmes''

== Mr. Sherlock Holmes (Ward, Lock & Bowden version) ==

It is not entirely a bad sign of this weary, worn-out century
that in this, its last decade, even the petty street-bred people
are beginning, as the nurses say, to take notice. An insatiable
and generally prurient curiosity as to the doings of the class
immediately above us is pandered to by the society journals, and
encouraged even by the daily newspapers. Such information
is valueless intellectually, and tends to moral degradation; it
exercises none of the senses, and pauperises the imagination.
Celebrities at home, illustrated interviews, society scandal on
all levels merely titillate the itching ear of the gossip, Memoirs,
recollections, anecdotes of the Bar or of the Academy are much
more interesting, and may be valuable as throwing sidelights on
history, but still only amuse and help to kill the time of which
we forget the value. But in the last few years there has been
a distinct demand for books which, to a certain poor extent,
encourage thought and stimulate observation. The whole
Gamekeeper at Home series and its imitations opened the eyes
of town dwellers, who had forgotten or never known White
of Selborne, to the delightful sights and sounds that were the
harvest of the open eye and ear. Something of the same interest
is given to the "crowded city's horrible street" by the suggestions
of crime and romance, of curiosity and its gratification, which
we find written with more or less cleverness in the enormous
mass of so-called detective literature under which the press
groans, Every bookstall has its shilling shocker, and every
magazine which aims at a circulation must have its mystery
of robbery or murder. Most of these are poor enough stuff;
complicated plots, which can be discounted in the first chapter,
extraordinary coincidences, preternaturally gifted detectives,
who make discoveries more or less useless by flashes of insight
which no one else can understand, become wearisome in their
sameness, and the interest, such as it is, centres only in the
results and not in the methods. We may admire Lecocq, but
we do not see ourselves in his shoes. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Dr. Conan Doyle]] has made
a well-deserved success for his detective stories, and made the
name of his hero beloved by the boys of this country by the
marvellous cleverness of his method. He shows how easy it is, if
only you can observe, to find out a great deal as to the works
and ways of your innocent and unconscious friends, and, by
an extension of the same method, to baffle the criminal and
lay bare the manner of his crime. There is nothing new under
the sun. Voltaire taught us the method of Zadig, and every
good teacher of medicine or surgery exemplifies every day
in his teaching and practice the method and its results. The
precise and intelligent recognition and appreciation of minor
differences is the real essential factor in all successful medical
diagnosis. Carried into ordinary life, granted the presence of an
insatiable curiosity and fairly acute senses, you have [[Sherlock
Holmes]] as he astonishes his somewhat dense friend Watson;
carried out in a specialised training, you have [[Sherlock Holmes]]
the skilled detective.

[[Arthur Conan Doyle|Dr. Conan Doyle]]'s education as a student of medicine
taught him how to observe, and his practice, both as a general
practitioner and a specialist, has been a splendid training for a
man such as he is, gifted with eyes, memory, and imagination.
Eyes and ears which can see and hear, memory to record at
once and to recall at pleasure the impressions of the senses,
and an imagination capable of weaving a theory or piecing
together a broken chain, or unravelling a tangled clue, such
are implements of his trade to a successful diagnostician. If in
addition the doctor is also a born story-teller, than it is a mere
matter of choice whether he writes detective stories or keeps his
strength for a great historical romance as is the White Company.
Syme, one of the greatest teachers of surgical diagnosis that
ever lived, had a favourite Illustration which, as a tradition of
his school, has made a mark on [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Dr. Conan Doyle]]'s method, "Try
to learn the features of a disease or injury as precisely as you
know the features, the gait, the tricks of manner of your most
intimate friend." Him, even in a crowd, you can recognize at
once; it may be a crowd of men dressed alike, and each having
his complement of eyes, nose, hair, and limbs; in every essential
they resemble each other, only in trifles do they differ; and
yet, by knowing these trifles well you make your diagnosis or
recognition with ease. So it is with disease of mind or body or
morals. Racial peculiarities, hereditary tricks of manner, accent,
occupation or the want of it, education, environment of all
kinds, by their little trivial impressions gradually mould or carve
the individual, and leave fingermarks or chisel scores which the
expert can recognize. The great broad characteristics which
at a glance can be recognized as indicative of heart disease or
consumption, chronic drunkenness or long-continued loss of
blood, are the common property of the veriest tyro in medicine,
while to masters of their art there are myriads of signs eloquent
and instructive, but which need the educated eye to detect.
A fair sized and valuable book has lately been written on the
one symptom, the pulse; to any one but a trained physician it
seems as much an absurdity as is [[Sherlock Holmes]]' immortal
treatise on the one hundred and fourteen varieties of tobacco
ash. The greatest stride that has been made of late years in
preventive and diagnostic medicine consists in the recognition
and differentiation by bacteriological research of those minute
organisms which disseminate cholera and fever, tubercle and
anthrax. The importance of the infinitely little is incalculable.
Poison a well at Mecca with the cholera bacillus, and the holy
water which the pilgrims carry off in their bottles will infect a
continent, and the rags of the victims of the plague will terrify
every seaport in Christendom.

Trained as he has been to notice and appreciate minute detail,
[[Arthur Conan Doyle|Dr. Doyle]] saw how he could interest his intelligent, readers by
taking them into his confidence, and showing his mode of
working. He created a shrewd, quick-sighted inquisitive man,
half doctor, half virtuoso, with plenty of spare time, a retentive
memory, and perhaps with the best gift of all — the power of
unloading the mind of all the burden of trying to remember
unnecessary details. Holmes tells Watson: "A man should keep
his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that that he is
likely to use, as the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of
his library, where he can get it if he wants it." But to him the petty
results of environment, the sign-manuals of labour, the stains of
trade, the incidents of travel, have living interest, as they tend
to satisfy an insatiable, almost inhuman, because impersonal
curiosity. He puts the man in the position of an amateur, and
therefore irresponsible, detective, who is consulted in all sorts
of cases, and then he lets us see how he works. He makes him
explain to the good Watson the trivial, or apparently trivial,
links in his chain of evidence. These are at once so obvious,
when explained, and so easy, once you know them, that the
ingenuous reader at once feels, and says to himself, I also could
do this; life is not so dull after all; I will keep my eyes open, and
find out things. The gold watch, with its scratched keyhole and
pawnbrokers' marks, told such an easy tale about Watson's
brother. The dusty old billy-cock hat revealed that its master
had taken to drinking some years ago, and had got his hair cut
yesterday. The tiny thorn-prick and fearsome footmark of the
thing that was neither a child nor a monkey enabled Holmes to
identify and capture the Andaman Islander. Yet, after all, you
say there is nothing wonderful; we could all do the same.

The experienced physician and the trained surgeon every
day, in their examinations of the humblest patient, have to go
through a similar process of reasoning, quick or slow according
to the personal equations of each, almost automatic in the
experienced man, laboured and often erratic in the tyro, yet
requiring just the same simple requisites, senses to notice facts,
and education and intelligence to apply them. Mere acuteness
of the senses is not enough. Your Indian tracker will tell you that
the footprint on the leaves was not a redskin's, but a paleface's,
because it marked a shoe-print, but it needs an expert in
shoe-leather to tell where that shoe was made. A sharp-eyed
detective may notice the thumb-mark of a grimy or bloody
hand on the velvet or the mirror, but it needs all the scientific
knowledge of a Galton to render the ridges and furrows of
the stain visible and permanent, and then to identify by their
sign-manual the suspected thief or murderer. [[Sherlock Holmes]]
has acute senses, and the special education and information
that make these valuable; and he can afford to let us into
the secrets of his method. But in addition to the creation of
his hero, [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Dr. Conan Doyle]] in this remarkable series of stories
has proved himself a born story-teller. He has had the wit to
devise excellent plots, interesting complications; he tells them
in honest Saxon-English with directness and pith; and, above
all his other merits, his stories are absolutely free from padding.
He knows how delicious brevity is, how everything tends to
be too long, and he has given us stories that we can read at a
sitting between dinner and coffee, and we have not a chance
to forget the beginning before we reach the end. The ordinary
detective story, from Gaboriau or Boisgobey down to the latest
shocker, really needs an effort of memory quite misplaced to
keep the circumstances of the crimes and all the wrong scents
of the various meddlers before the wearied reader. [[Arthur Conan Doyle|Dr. Doyle]]
never gives you a chance to forget an incident or miss a point.

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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (article 1892) - Revision history

TCDE-Team at 21:43, 17 February 2026

TCDE-Team at 00:10, 17 February 2026

TCDE-Team at 09:46, 23 February 2024