About The Book
Edinburgh, 1878. A medical student squeezes into the Royal Infirmary’s packed operating theatre, eager to catch a glimpse of his celebrated professor―a man whose uncanny powers of observation blur the line between diagnosis and detective work.
That man was Joseph Bell. With a flair for the theatrical and an eye for clues hidden in the tiniest details, Bell astonished his students with lightning-fast deductions about his patients’ lives. Though he considered his methods to be quite ‘elementary’, they captured the imagination of his audience – including his prized student, a young Arthur Conan Doyle, who would eventually abandon his medical career in order to create the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.
In Sleuth-hound, award-winning historian Lindsey Fitzharris guides us through the smog-choked alleys and crowded slums of Victorian Edinburgh to recount the untold story of the man who inspired literature’s most iconic sleuth. Bell’s talent was so formidable that he was called upon to investigate criminal cases and, alongside Edinburgh’s chief police surgeon, worked on some of the highest profile murders of the century, including Jack the Ripper. Together, the two men pioneered a new era of forensic science to crack crimes.
By scrutinizing a scratch on a desk, a trace of cigar ash, or the slightest peculiarity of a man’s gait, Bell could turn the smallest clues into revelations. The result, as Sleuth-Hound grippingly shows, changed medicine, literature – and detection – forever.
About the Author
Lindsey Fitzharris is a New York Times bestselling author and medical historian who brings the grisly, surprising, and deeply human history of medicine to life. She is the author of The Butchering Art―winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing and shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize and the Wolfson History Prize―and The Facemaker. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and appears regularly on CNN, BBC, C-SPAN, and NPR.
