Mr. Doyle and Doctor Bell: A Victorian Mystery

Abrams Books

In the year 1879, I had not yet completed my medical studies at Edinburgh University. My time was occupied in staving off the tedium of botany, chemistry, anatomy, physiology and the rest of the attendant evils of the healing arts. I achieved this by burying myself in mastering them. It was a life punctuated by the striking of the twelve-o'clock bell from Tran church, the climbing of stairs to watch Sir William Turner remove a metacarpus or resect a carbuncle or two, and refreshed by the occasional glass of sherry at Rutherford's bar in Drummond Street to relive with a fellow sufferer the moments of a deathless lecture on the morphology and properties of the islets of Langerhans. To say that I was going sour on the prospect of becoming a country doctor is to understate the case. It had never been my idea in the first place. It was a matter of necessary expediency, in the light of my father's increasing inability to support his large family.

We came from aristocratic Norman French traditions. The name was originally spelled D'oyly, D'oel, D'Oil and other variations on the same theme. It finally settled on Doyle and Doyle it has remained. Both in France and later in Ireland, where a branch of the family put down roots, we were esteemed an ardent Catholic family. Most Irishmen take us for Leinster Doyles, but we are unrelated either to the M'Dowells of Ireland, of which Doyle is a variant, or the M'Dougalls of Scotland. When we had been forbidden the land under the harsh religious laws in practice then against Roman Catholics in Ireland, to everyone's surprise, we burgeoned out in the arts. My grandfather was a celebrated portrait painter and caricaturist, my uncles all were artists and illustrators. One designed the cover of Punch, another was director of the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. Only my father was a practical man of affairs, a clerk in the Edinburgh Board of Works.

These changes in the family fortunes put a scowl on the crowned stag in the family crest, but we were apparently supported by the motto Fortitudine vincit. While medicine was respected around the family hearth, it was not a traditional profession among us.

In spite of this I continued to struggle with Materia Medica and Therapeutics, only grousing about it at Rutherford's to Stevenson, who was a good listener with a dram in his hand. Stevenson was my senior by nearly ten years, but we had fallen in together when he was having difficulties similar to my own, first with engineering, where he was expected to perform up to the traditional standards of his forebears, who had made the designing and construction of lighthouses a family mystery, and then with the law, which he liked no better. He had had his initial call to the bar, but proclaimed that Rutherford's was to be his chosen bar from then on. Our taste in books was miles apart, but we were both inveterate devourers of literature of all kinds and fought about our favourites by the hour. Our own small literary successes were known to one another, but seldom mentioned. To be frank, Louis was restless in Edinburgh and had plans to sail off to America in pursuit of someone named Fanny. He was just returned from France, so there was much to discuss.

"Why don't you chuck it all, Doyle, old chap? Cut loose, raise your sail and be off!" We were seated at a corner of the saloon bar, facing one another above the mahogany counter: I with a satchel of notebooks at my feet and Stevenson with his long legs bunched up, making tenuous his purchase on the stool he was perched upon. Dressed in his accustomed bohemian déshabillé, a black shirt with a knotted artist's tie under a velvet jacket, he looked sallow and gaunt. He resembled nothing so much as a corpse animated by the desire to complete what he had set out to accomplish before surrendering himself to the sexton at Greyfriars. His appearance was not improved by strong drink, of which he had already liberally partaken.

With his usual happy perspicuity, Louis had read my mood. I had been taken to task roundly for an assignment which had not pleased my teacher. The event had coloured the rest of the afternoon and was now casting a shadow on the evening as well. Caught out in this way, and attempting to mislead my friend, I tried to imagine that there was a bright side to my situation.

"I'm beginning to see, Stevenson, that I'm not without advantages. If directed properly, they could lead to great success," I said.

"Hacking off limbs, prescribing 'the mixture,' 'the gargle,' 'the tablets,' 'the expectorant'?" Stevenson set down his glass hard on the counter, misjudging its location by two inches.

"It's all very well for you to pooh-pooh my plight, Stevenson: you've a rich father who dotes on you. I'm wearing darned socks that make Lord Nelson's pair at Greenwich look brand new. If I don't play the juggins, if I don't ship out on an Arctic whaler looking for Franklin's bones, if I put in ten years of solid work smelling faeces and measuring urine, I might with luck step into an honorary surgeonship, stifling my dreams of writing stories with an occasional piece sent to The Lancet. Now, I ask you, my dear chap, is that the stuff that dreams are made on?"

"Put like that, old fellow, you have won a drop of sympathy. But, I suspect that it has nothing whatever to do with medicine. You've been imbibing the surrounding Calvinism, that's all. This city is built on the bones of Covenanters. It creeps into our souls while we sleep. We're always looking at the dark side of the moon. As a proper Papist, you should know that. Didn't the Jesuits teach you anything?"

"It has nothing to do with religion, or even with the gloom of this place." Louis and I had long ago spoken of our religious doubts. It only remained to discover which of us was the most absolute agnostic. We had each of us shocked our doting families with unnecessary declarations of our loss of faith. When I think now of the pain we caused our parents, I weep. The unalloyed honesty to which youth is addicted when it finally abandons the hopeless practice of telling lies is no great improvement.

For a moment my friend was distracted as he watched the bar wench refill his glass. She was an attractive lass and not unknown to my friend, who impeded her progress with one familiarity after another. It was with astonishing grace that she moved her slender form from his embrace. Before leaving, and in the same balletic movement, she planted a tender kiss on Stevenson's forehead. Stevenson murmured the name Kate as he caught her to him again. Over his shoulder she gave me a smile that was both wise and weary.

When he'd taken a sip, he turned to examine me again. I cannot imagine what he saw besides my rather outsize form, a purple mouse under my right eye — the result of a recent bout of boxing — my experimental moustache and the glow of much needed conviviality.

"Is there no hope for this patient?" Stevenson demanded, perhaps more loudly than he had intended. "Is he condemned to the birthing stool and the leech jar forever? Are suppuration and decay to be his reward?"

"That's up to Joe Bell."

"Ah! How old Joe?"

"Forty-one or -two, I should think."

"I meant to say how is old Joe?"

"Oh, he'll do. With Professor Fraser, he's the most interesting of all my teachers. He picks up your hand and tells you that you just arrived on a clipper from Van Diemen's Land, then explains that only there do such blisters exist. You know he asked me to run his out-patients' clinic for him. You were away in France when that was settled. I've been doing it since last spring."

"A singular mark of distinction, sir. My congratulations, Dr Doyle!"

"Yes, I was surprised he wanted me. It is a bit like going with him on general rounds, only better."

From Rutherford's bar Stevenson and I found a bite of supper in a crowded cellar near the Castle and, after another bottle of wine, he insisted he wanted to walk to Arthur's Seat to look out over the city. He wanted to show me the New Gaol. From there during daylight, you could catch a glimpse of the female prisoners at exercise, looking, he said, like strings of nuns at play. I put him off with a stroll through the streets, shiny with rain. On the way past St Giles's, which was shrouded by hoardings while restoration work was being prosecuted, he performed a mischief near the supposed grave of John Knox in Parliament Square, explaining it was in penance for anything he might have said at Rutherford's that showed disrespect for my religion. As he refastened his buttons, I explained to him:

"The religion of my fathers, old chap, as I have told you many times before, and which you would remember if your head were less befuddled, isn't what I practise."

"Indeed? Then what do you practise?"

"At the moment, nothing. And it suits me very well. I have difficulty believing that all the soldiers slaughtered at Waterloo and Balaclava have simply ceased to be, but I have no credo that will explain it. In the meanwhile, I have suspended all belief. I recommend it."

"You've become a Nihilist or perhaps a follower of that German chap, Nietzsche. Fellow in search of the superman." Stevenson looked at me with his head tilted quizzically. For a moment he concentrated upon correcting an error in buttoning. At last he looked back at the plaque in the wall of the church. "When I think of the gallons of blood spilled in the name of religion where we are standing, I am inclined to agree with you and other pessimists. So, I take back the name Papist I gave you. But, what you told me comes under the heading of a private fact. Here in Auld Reekie facts come in two kinds, public and private. The truths confessed in confidence over a glass of sherry at night will be hotly denied in daylight. It is the conventional hypocrisy that allows Edinburgh to function even as badly as it does."

"Now it's my turn to put to you the charge of Calvinist pessimism."

"Oh, Dr Doyle. The times are out of joint. Either they are or we are. I leave for America in a week. The times may be out of joint there as well, but there will be the novelty of new times and new joints. And there'll be Fanny!"

When we tired of watching Princes Street, black with traffic even at that hour, I helped him home through the tall, dark streets to Heriot Row. Beyond the reach of the street lamps and the occasional glim burning behind closed curtains where some tormented soul perhaps could not find sleep, the inky night held us fast. Louis was rather far gone with drink and kept calling on two females of his acquaintance, the aforementioned Fanny and someone named Modestine. He invoked them both to carry him off to a happier land.

The following morning I was early in calling upon Dr Bell at the Infirmary. He greeted me curtly with a shake of his head. "My dear boy, 'That quaffing and drinking will undo you.'"

"Sir?"

"Don't feign ignorance with me, Mr Doyle. Stand up for yourself. Or study to assume the manner of offended dignity with more assurance. Very useful. You may have noticed that I do not wear the blue ribbon of the total abstainer myself. You must not blunder into Crum Brown's presence though. And Professor Maclagan would turn you out. The stain on your tie smells of sherry. Rutherford's, I expect. And then you went to a cellar for supper. The sawdust on your shoes gives that away. But, I'm not here to teach a moral lesson. Fetch the book and see who is waiting outside."

Dr Joseph Bell was the current Bell at the Edinburgh School of Medicine. There had been generations of them before him, some distinguished enough to have their names printed in the annals of the university. Their painted likenesses stared down at one from staircases and along the dark corridors. Dr Joe brought the requisite amount of distinction with him, but had shunned the professorial devices, such as aloofness and mordant sarcasm, that marred the behaviour of many of his contemporaries at the university. Many professors allowed the pales and forts of frosty aloofness to melt by the time students had penetrated as far as their fourth year under their tutelage. Some of them had even mastered a few of our names by that time. But Joseph Bell knew us all by name in our first year. He did not ape his fellows by ridiculing the giver of a foolish answer. A stupid or thoughtless reply raised a question in Bell that meant, here is a problem to be looked into. To say that he was loved does not overstate the case. But he was loved as an actor upon a stage is loved in a favourite part. We enjoyed his eyes that seemed to see everything. We imitated his approach in arriving at a diagnosis, carefully peeling away the layers of irrelevancy until the heart of the problem stood revealed for all to see.

Physically, Dr Bell was not at all prepossessing. True, he was tall, easily six feet in height, but since he lacked a military carriage, and tended to stoop and loll in his chair, he appeared to be a much shorter man. His head was dolichocephalic, that is to say long rather than broad, with a sharp, hawklike nose that kept asunder two penetrating grey eyes. His mouth showed sensitivity, his clothes, conservative in origin, were made comfortable by neglect. His long bony fingers would seem to have done honour to a virtuoso of the pianoforte or violin until they were seen in the operating theatre with dozens of pairs of eyes staring down at the pure music of his lancet. Few of us, not even newcomers, fainted at his operations, for he explained the art of drawing imaginary sheets across the body, so that only the exposed portion needed to be kept in focus. His technique was almost musical, like a great violinist on an Amati.

After quizzing the men and women in the waiting-room, I brought the book back into the surgery and handed it to him. "Try to remember, Doyle, that we are dealing with people here, not gall bladders and prolapsed uteri. We treat the whole patient, not merely the diseased organs."

I ushered in the first of the patients, a man in a new suit, wearing a brushed beaver hat tilted at a jaunty angle. I moved him towards a chair in the middle of the consulting-room. By now, of course, the room was full of second-, third- and fourth-year students standing by with their notebooks held as though to catch the last words of some expiring monarch. Dr Bell approached the patient amiably. "Well, my friend, I see that you've done your duty by the Queen. Served in the army, have you?"

"Aye, sir," said the patient, removing his hat and placing it on the floor beside him.

"You haven't been discharged very long."

"No, sir."

"You were in a Highland regiment, I expect?" "Aye, sir."

"Perhaps a non-commissioned officer?"

"Aye, sir." The man's mouth had slowly been dropping open as though the muscles operating the mandible had been severed.

"How did you get on with the weather where you were stationed in Barbados? It was Barbados, wasn't it?"

"Aye, sir."

Dr Bell turned away from the patient to look around the room. He placed a friendly hand on the man's shoulder. "You see, gentlemen," he said to all of us in the crowded room, "the man was respectful, but he did not remove his hat upon entering. They do not uncover in the army. Had he been out of uniform for a long time, he would have learned our ways. So, his discharge is of recent date. He has the air of authority, and he is obviously a Scot. As to Barbados, I see from the book that his complaint is elephantiasis, which is a complaint of the West Indies." We all looked at one another in awe at the miracle that had just unfolded. With his explanation, he had turned the miraculous into a simple parlour trick which even the dullest of us could master with a few days' practice. But this was a trick in itself. The true artist brings off his most difficult feat in making the impossible appear to be child's play.

After the first patient had been examined and his disease made the excuse for a short lecture on the symptoms, cause and treatment of the cumbersome and painful infirmity, I brought in the next patient. He provided the excuse for a homily on the care of the prostate gland. "In youth it is smooth, gentlemen, but as the body ages, it develops irregularities. Palpating it in the usual way will tell you about seventy per cent of its secrets. The remaining thirty per cent are turned away from your enquiring finger. Happily, when a cancer develops, I have found that in most cases, it presents itself within reach of your digits."

As the morning advanced, I ushered in the rest of the patients, one after another, until the waiting-room was quite empty. In almost every case, Bell's eyes had seen what ours had missed. The rounded soles of boots, the stickpins in neckties, the stains on fingernails, the shine of wear on a pair of trousers, all told tales for those of us who could read them, he taught us. And most of us remembered these demonstrations of the amazing Dr Bell at least until we took our degrees in medicine. Some of us will never forget.