The Inspiration For Sherlock Holmes
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: True Crime, History, Inspiration, Science, Books

The Inspiration For Sherlock Holmes

How Joseph Bell’s observational skills gave Arthur Conan Doyle a premise for his famous character

Joseph Bell, from J.M.E. Saxby, Public Domain

Who was Joseph Bell?

Sherlock Holmes is one of the most famous fictional characters of all time, a private detective with a proficiency in observation, forensics, reasoning, and seemingly, well, everything. He was also incredibly unclean and had a cocaine habit.

However, what few know is that Sherlock Holmes was inspired by the life of a real person that author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a British doctor and writer, knew.

When Arthur Conan Doyle was a student, his professor was a man named Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell would be the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.

Bell impressed Doyle through his ability to learn so much from his patients simply by observing them. Bell was born in 1837 to a family of surgeons. In his childhood, he would often pick a stranger, observe him, and deduce his occupation and what he’d done recently — which would lead him to be a leader in forensic pathology. During Bell’s lifetime, science wasn’t widely used in criminal investigations, but Bell would receive his MD in 1859 at the Edinburgh Medical School, the same year Arthur Conan Doyle was born.

“There he was taught how to observe patients very closely; and it was this attention to detail that he practised throughout his life,” wrote Suzanne Harrington at the Irish Times.

Later, Bell would become a member of the Royal Medical Society. Bell would then become a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (RSCEd) and become the president of the RSCEd in 1887.

When Doyle met Bell

Doyle would only actually meet Bell in 1877, when Doyle was Bell’s clerk in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. While Bell would eventually teach at the Edinburgh Medical School, Doyle sought him as an inspiration, in Harrington’s words, Doyle saw Bell as “unforgettable”.

Simply put, Bell had a “method” that was composed of observation and deduction. Bell told his students to always know about the little details in their patients, and focus on the “little differences” that differentiated them.

“As he would often tell his students, ‘Use your eyes, use your eyes,’” Harrington wrote.

On one occasion, simply by picking up on the way a patient spoke and his accent, Bell was able to tell a lot about the patient. He observed his hands and calluses that could only be caused by ropes. On Saturday, he asked the patient if he could come back the next day, to which the patient said he could not, but could come back on Monday.

Bell quickly knew and told his students, correctly, that the man was a beadle from Northumbria, England, that was a beadle that rang the bells of a church.

The Sherlock Holmes books

Holmes and Watson in a Sidney Paget illustration for “The Adventure of Silver Blaze” — Strand Magazine, Public Domain

In 1888, Bell would be asked by the Edinburgh police to help solve crimes, and most famously, the Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police, asked him to help hunt for Jack the Ripper. He tried to deduce Jack the Ripper’s identity through his handwriting, but Jack the Ripper’s name was never made public.

Doyle had already made his first novel that had Sherlocks Holmes in it: A Study in Scarlet. It had many of Bell’s observational and deductive skills, and Doyle would say that Bell would serve as a large part of the inspiration:

“I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, and his eerie trick of spotting details.”

It’s clear then that Sherlock Holmes possessed the same, if not greater (due to being a fictional character) deduction and observational skills as Bell. Doyle would send bell all the copies of the Sherlock Holmes books, but Bell warded off credit for the inspiration, instead calling Doyle a “born storyteller” and that Doyle was able to “make a great deal out of very little.”

In 1892, Doyle wrote to Bell thanking him for his inspiration:

“It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes … round the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man”

Legacy

Bell would die on October 4, 1911, and throughout his life constantly shirked credit for Sherlock Holmes. Although they had similar investigative skills, Bell was a very different person from Sherlock Holmes — he was never the unclean person that Sherlock Holmes was. He didn’t keep tobacco in his slippers and cigars in his coal-scuttle, and he was not addicted to cocaine. He did not play the violin, and he didn’t free pistols indoors.

The press would give Bell the nickname of Sherlock Holmes, and Bell, again, tried to distance himself from it. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, he had a huge sense of humor and wasn’t as callous.

“I hope folk that know me see another and better side to me than what Doyle saw!” he said.

Bell would later turn the tables on Doyle, and tell him that “You are yourself Sherlock Holmes and well you know it,” as an ode to the man’s storytelling abilities.

“This said, it is scarcely believable that without Dr. Joseph Bell, Sherlock Holmes would ever have been born, let alone about to be resurrected,” Harrington concluded.

All I know is that I never knew that Sherlock Holmes was based on anyone, but I wouldn’t mind being the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes if someone saw that in me. That being said, I would try to distance myself from keeping cigarettes in my slippers and having an untidy reputation if I were the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.