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267 13 A Shocking Discovery! An Introduction to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Doctors of Hoyland” Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) is renowned as the creator of Sherlock Holmes; less well known is the fact that he was a qualified doctor. Lacking capital, he had a hard struggle to get established in the profession ; in The Stark Munro Letters (1895) he describes in an amusing way the difficulties of a young, impecunious physician, like himself, as he goes through a series of positions as an assistant in a large practice, as a resident caretaker to a lord’s insane son, as a ship’s surgeon, etc. Near the beginning of “The Doctors of Hoyland” mention is made of three successive doctors who had tried to set up practice in the town and had given up, thus underscoring the problems of getting established. Dr. Ripley, as we hear in the story’s opening sentence, has the immense advantage of having followed his father into the practice. In the long hours of waiting for patients, Conan Doyle began to write so as to supplement his income. With the publication of the first of the Sherlock Holmes stories, A Study in Scarlet (1887), he found that he could make a more lucrative and easier living with the pen than with the stethoscope. “The Doctors of Hoyland” is one of fifteen stories with medical themes collected in Round the Red Lamp (1894). A red lamp, hung outside a house, was used in late-nineteenth-century Britain to signal the presence of a doctor and to guide patients after dark and on foggy days. All the stories are short; most of them deal with encounters between 268 A Shocking Discovery! doctor and patient in a serious tone. Generally also they portray physicians in a favorable light, showing the alleviation of pain and the comfort they are able to bring, although in “The Third Generation” the lure of his research momentarily distracts the doctor from attention to a patient when he comes to see him as an example of an interesting, unusual syndrome. Conan Doyle is fully aware of the authority conferred by the new scientific instruments; in “A Question of Diplomacy,” “a doctor with his stethoscope and thermometer” is described as “a thing apart” with whom no one can argue (182). On the other hand, the practitioner in “Behind the Times” scorns even the stethoscope as “a new-fangled French toy” (4), yet “his patients do very well. He has the healing touch” so that “his mere presence leaves the patient with more hopefulness and vitality” (6). Conan Doyle shows here the older physician’s skepticism about new methods and instruments as well as patients’ preference for simpler, tried remedies, backed by the doctor’s charismatic personality. The story ends in a comical vein as the two young doctors, who had discoursed learnedly about mitral murmurs and bronchitic rales (sounds heard with a stethoscope), themselves call in the empathetic old practitioner when they are struck by a bad attack of influenza. On the other hand, “The Doctors of Hoyland” endorses the efficacy of innovative techniques and the value of research in the cures that Dr. Smith achieves. “The Doctors of Hoyland” stands out from the majority of the stories in Round the Red Lamp for its satirical edge and its ironical stingin -the-tail. It is the most jovial of a cluster of fictions that appeared in England between 1877 and the early 1890s about the controversial figure of the woman doctor, corresponding to the similar cluster in the United States: Charles Reade, A Woman-Hater (1877), G. G. Alexander, Dr. Victoria: A Picture from the Period (1881), the anonymously published Dr. Edith Romney (1883), and Mona Maclean: Medical Student (1891) by “Graham Travers,” the pseudonym of Margaret Georgiana Todd, who was Jex-Blake’s biographer. In Great Britain the struggle by women to gain access to medical schools and to become professional physicians took place along lines parallel to those in the United Sates, running up against the same type of objections. However, the actual sequence of events was somewhat different. A major landmark in the history of British medicine is the Medical Registration Act (1858) and the subsequent establishment of the Medical Register (1859), which forged the profession’s identity by welding practitioners into a body with rights and responsibilities. Though not directed specifically against women, the new law had the effect of [3.142.119.241...

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