The Sunday Gentleman (68 page)

Throughout his life. Dr. Bell continued to amaze his circle with the observation game. “When the family traveled in a train,” his surviving daughter, Mrs. Cecil Stisted, recalls, “he would tell us where all the other passengers in the carriage were from, where they were going to, and something of their occupations and their habits. All this without having spoken to them. When he verified his observations, we thought him a magician.”

His students also thought him a magician. Years after Dr. Bell’s death, A. Conan Doyle told an interviewer, “Dr. Bell would sit in his receiving room, with a face like a red Indian, and diagnose people as they came in, before they even opened their mouths. He would tell them their symptoms, and even give them details of their past life, and hardly ever would he make a mistake.”

Inside the spired Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, in the packed lecture amphitheater beneath the flickering gaslights. Dr. Bell daily tried to prove to his pupils that observation was not a form of magic but a science. According to one former pupil, Dr. Harold Emery Jones, writing in
Collier’s
in 1904, Dr. Bell’s standard demonstration of this, its running commentary given in a voice full of dry humor before each new group of medical students, involved taking up a tumbler filled with an amber-colored liquid. “This, gentlemen, contains a very potent drug,” Dr. Bell would explain. “To the taste it is intensely bitter. Now I want to see how many of you gentlemen have educated your powers of perception. Of course, we might easily analyze this chemically, but I want you to test it by smell and taste; and, as I don’t ask anything of my students which I wouldn’t be willing to do myself, I will taste it before passing it around.”

Dr. Bell would then dip his finger into the liquid, put the finger to his mouth, suck it, and grimace. He would then pass the tumbler around. Each student would dip his finger into the vile concoction, suck it, and promptly make a sour face. When the tumbler had made the rounds, Dr. Bell would gaze at the assembly and begin laughing. “Gentlemen,” he would say, “I am deeply grieved to find that not one of you has developed this power of perception, which I so often speak about, for, if you had watched me closely, you would have found that, while I placed my forefinger in the bitter medicine, it was the middle finger which found its way into my mouth!”

In the Royal Infirmary wards, in the dispensaries, especially in the out-patient department where ailing citizens were brought forward by student clerks. Dr. Bell practiced what he preached. Glancing at a newcomer. Dr. Bell remarked, “A cobbler, I see.” He explained to his students that “the inside of the knee of the man’s trousers was worn; that was where the man had rested the lapstone, a peculiarity only found in cobblers.” Another time, when a laborer appeared with a spinal complaint, Dr. Bell said to him, “Your back must ache badly, but carrying a heavy hod of bricks won’t improve it,” The laborer was astounded, and cannily inquired, “I’m no’ saying ye’re wrang, but what tell’t ye I was a bricklayer to trade?” Dr. Bell replied by pointing to the laborer’s peculiarly rough homy hands. On yet another occasion, Dr. Bell studied his visitor a moment, then announced to his students, “Gentlemen, I am not quite sure whether this man is a cork-cutter or a slater. I observe a slight callus, or hardening, on one side of his forefinger, and a little thickening on the outside of his thumb, and that is a sure sign he is either one or the other.”

Once, when a tall weather-beaten patient entered the ward. Dr. Bell looked at him and said to his students, “Gentlemen, a fisherman. It is a very hot summer’s day, yet the patient is wearing top-boots. No one but a sailor would wear them in this season. The shade of his tan shows him to be a coast sailor. A knife scabbard beneath his coat, the kind used by fishermen. And to prove the correctness of these deductions, I notice several minute fishscales adhering to his clothes and hands.”

Students of Dr. Bell’s would remember, for years after, some of the master’s deductive feats. Dr. Harold Emery Jones recalled that Dr. Bell would summon his charges up front to try their own hand at observing. “What is the matter with this man, sir?” Dr. Bell once asked of a quaking student. “No, you mustn’t touch him. Use your eyes, sir. Use your ears, use your brain, your bump of perception, and use your powers of deduction.” At sea, the confused student blurted, “Hip-joint disease, sir.” Dr. Bell scowled, shook his head. “Hip-nothing! The man’s limp is not from his hip, but from his foot. Were you to observe closely, you would see that there are slits, cut by a knife, in those parts of the shoes where the pressure of the shoe is greatest against the foot. The man is a sufferer from corns, gentlemen, and has no hip trouble at all. But he has not come here to be treated for corns, gentlemen. His trouble is of a much more serious nature. This is a case of chronic alcoholism, gentlemen. The rubicund nose, the puffed, bloated face, the bloodshot eyes, the tremulous hands and twitching face muscles, with the quick, pulsating temporal arteries, all show this. These deductions, gentlemen, must however be confirmed by absolute and concrete evidence. In this instance, my diagnosis is confirmed by the fact of my seeing the neck of a whiskey-bottle protruding from the patient’s right-hand coat pocket…never neglect to ratify your deductions.”

At one time, when young Doyle was Dr. Bell’s student assistant, a patient entered and sat down. “Did you like your walk over the golf links today, as you came in from the south side of town?” inquired Dr. Bell. The patient replied, “Why yes, did your honor see me?” Dr. Bell had not seen him. “Conan Doyle could not understand how I knew,” Dr. Bell related later, “but on a showery day such as that had been, the reddish clay at bare parts of the golf links adheres to the boot, and a tiny part is bound to remain. There is no such clay anywhere else.” Years later, writing “The Five Orange Pips,” A. Conan Doyle had Sherlock Holmes say to a visitor, “You have come up from the southwest, I see.” The visitor replied, “Yes, from Horsham.” And Holmes explained, “That clay and chalk mixture which I see upon your toe caps is quite distinctive.”

But the most famous example of Dr. Bell’s skill was the one A. Conan Doyle told in his autobiography. A civilian outpatient, a total stranger to Dr. Bell, came into his ward. In silence, Dr. Bell studied the visitor, then spoke:

“Well, my man, you’ve served in the army.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Not long discharged?”

“No, sir.”

“A Highland regiment?”

“Aye, sir.”

“A non-com officer?”

“Aye, sir.”

“Stationed at Barbados?”

“Aye, sir.”

Dr. Bell turned to his students. “You see, gentlemen, the man was a respectful man, but he did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.”

Years after, A. Conan Doyle was still sufficiently impressed by this incident (“very miraculous until it was explained,” he admitted) to reproduce it closely in his Sherlock Holmes story, “The Greek Interpreter.”

A. Conan Doyle, after five years as a struggling medical student, graduated from Edinburgh University in 1881. He nailed up his oculist shingle and waited for patients. Six years later, he was still waiting. Lacking a practice, desperate for any kind of income, Doyle turned to writing. After one false start, and under the influence of Gaboriau and Poe, he decided to try a detective story. And for it he wanted a new kind of detective. “I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie tricks of spotting details,” Doyle recollected in his autobiography. “If he were a detective, he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer to an exact science…It was surely possible in real life, so why should I not make it plausible in fiction? It is all very well to say that a man is clever, but the reader wants to see examples of it—such examples as Bell gave us every day in the wards. The idea amused me. What should I call the fellow?”

He called him Sherlock Holmes after an English cricketer named Sherlock and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

In describing the detective, Doyle again remembered his old instructor. Dr. Bell had been forty-four when Doyle last saw him. “He was thin, wiry, dark, with a high-nosed acute face, penetrating grey eyes, angular shoulders, and a jerky way of walking. His voice was high and discordant.” With this as Doyle’s model, Sherlock Holmes became the familiar tall, stooped, hawk-faced, intense, and inscrutable human bloodhound. His first appearance, in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, with “A Study in Scarlet” in 1887, was inauspicious. But as a result, an American editor, three years later, ordered more Sherlock Holmes stories and the detective was on his way to literary immortality.

Sherlock Holmes’s deductive tricks thrilled readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Each Holmes stunt was discussed and admired by fans everywhere. In “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” when a frantic young man burst into the rooms on Baker Street and announced himself as John McFarlane, Sherlock Holmes lazily replied, “You mentioned your name, as if I should recognize it, but I assure you that, beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a Freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.”

In “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,” after studying an unknown’s seedy, hard felt hat. Holmes concluded, “That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him…He has, however, retained some degree of self-respect. He is a man who leads a sedentary life, goes out little, is out of training entirely, is middle-aged, has grizzled hair which he has had cut within the last few days and which he anoints with lime-cream.”

This fictional witchcraft, made so plausible by Doyle’s deft pen, became an international fad. But very often an Edinburgh graduate would recognize from whom Doyle had derived this genius. In 1893, the year before his death, Robert Louis Stevenson, after meeting the “ingenious and very interesting” Sherlock Holmes in print for the first time, asked A. Conan Doyle in a letter from Samoa, “Only one thing troubles me. Can this be my old friend, Joe Bell?” A. Conan Doyle was quick to tell Stevenson, the press, and the world that the prototype for Sherlock Holmes was, indeed, Dr. Bell. As Doyle wrote to Dr. Bell, “I fear that one effect of your identity being revealed will be that you will have ample opportunity for studying lunatic letters, and that part at least of the stream that pours upon me will be diverted to you. You will hear alas from the youth in the south of Portugal, from the American lady with the curved spine, from the Liverpool merchant who bums to know who Jack the Ripper is, from many folks who believe that their neighbors are starving maiden aunts to death in hermetically sealed attics.”

At first, Dr. Bell labeled pestering reporters “fiends” and pretended annoyance with A. Conan Doyle. But he was secretly pleased at being regarded as the original of Sherlock Holmes and at the wide publicity given his methods. Dr. Bell occasionally passed along suggestions for Holmes stories, some of which Doyle regarded as impractical. When Dr. Bell suggested in 1892 that Holmes joust with a germ murderer, Doyle replied, “I think that a fine thing might be done about a bacteriological criminal, but the only fear is lest you get beyond the average man, who won’t be interested unless he thoroughly understands.” However, Doyle was pleased with most of Dr. Bell’s other suggestions. Once, Dr. Bell passed along his anecdote about the bandsman in the Highland regiment, who insisted that he was a shoemaker to hide the fact that he was a deserter. Doyle gratefully accepted it, writing, “The deserter-cobbler is admirable, and I wish I had a dozen more such cases. All you tell me is most useful.” And in another letter to Dr. Bell, “Your sketch of the crime is capital. It wants some other red herring across the scent besides the ex-soldier, but there is the nucleus. I shall certainly, with your kind permission, avail myself of the idea.”

Even though, in speaking of his Edinburgh mentor, A. Conan Doyle pointed out that “it was toward the detection of disease rather than of crime that his remarkable talents were directed,” Dr. Bell could never resist dabbling in a first-class murder. This-was his primary extracurricular activity. The Crown welcomed Dr. Bell’s detecting genius. As an amateur detective, without official status, Dr. Bell worked hand in hand for twenty years with Sir Henry Littlejohn, professor of medical jurisprudence, and police surgeon to the city of Edinburgh. Dr. Bell’s greatest success, in the years before he became known as Sherlock Holmes, was the part he played in the sensational Chantrelle case.

Eugene Chantrelle, a onetime Paris medical student, was a powerful, handsome man with mutton-chop whiskers. He had come to Edinburgh in 1866, to teach languages, and within a year had seduced a fifteen-year-old pupil named Elizabeth Dyer and been forced to marry her. The marriage was a singularly unhappy one. In moments of enthusiasm, Chantrelle, cursing, would beat his wife black-and-blue, boast that he would yet poison her, and then leave her alone while he made the rounds of the city’s bordellos.

In October, 1877, fearing that his fragile wife might meet with an accident, Chantrelle thoughtfully insured her life for $5,000. Early one morning, about ten weeks later, the housemaid heard a moaning from one of the upstairs bedrooms. Rushing to Madame Chantrelle’s room, the maid found her unconscious. Beside her bed were a partially filled glass of lemonade, some orange slices, and a few leftover grapes. After calling Monsieur Chantrelle, the maid ran out for a doctor. Returning, the maid found Chantrelle hurriedly stepping away from the window. The lemonade glass was empty, the orange slices and grapes gone. When the doctor arrived, Chantrelle told him he thought his wife had been overcome by a gas leakage. At once, the doctor sent a note to Sir Henry Littlejohn: “If you would like to see a case of coal-gas poisoning, come up here at once.”