Lindsey Fitzharris

He was Edinburgh surgeon Joseph Bell.

And he is the subject of New York Times bestselling author and medical historian Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris' brand new book, Sleuth Hound, The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes.

Welcome, Lindsay.

Oh, I'm so excited to be here.

And I won't tell you if they were successful, but it is a fun little case.

Lindsay, it's been amazing to chat with you about this.

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris' brand new book, The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, is available now via Penguin Books.

And that's it for Buried Evidence this week.

And I think that's a thing.

If you ask people, sometimes they say yes, like Lindsay, right?

Yes, yes.

I remember that was my very first episode with you guys.

So that was kind of a trial by fire with the butchering art of Victorian surgery.

So one of my niche topic knowledge now, thanks to that particular episode.

Yes, The Butchering Art, Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grizzly World of Victorian Medicine by Lindsay Fitzharris, which I still recommend everybody read.

It's a really, really good book.

Shortly after Arthur Conan Doyle invented the Baker Street Brainiac, he revealed that he had based Holmes on a teacher he had in medical school, a master of deduction by the name of Joseph Bell.

Bell is best known as the inspiration for Holmes, but there's far more to his story, and today we're going to hear all about it from best-selling author and medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris.

Her new book, Sleuth Hound, shines a light on the fascinating life of Joseph Bell.

As Lindsay reveals, Bell had more in common with the fictional detective than a razor-sharp eye and a relentlessly logical mind.

This is The Art of Crime, and I'm your host, Gavin Whitehead.

Welcome to another episode of Beach Reads, Sleuth Hound.

It is my pleasure to introduce the one, the only, Lindsey Fitzharris.

Lindsay, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

He was based on a real person, Dr. Joseph Bell, a physician that the author became acquainted with during his own medical training.

In Sleuth Hound, The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, New York Times bestselling author and historian of medicine Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris shines a light on the man behind the icon.

and in so doing, transports readers to a thrilling time in medicine and forensic science.

In his role as pathologist, Bell had an unparalleled ability to look beyond the patient, to see the person as a whole, allowing for feats of diagnosis that, to observers, looked more like magic than medicine.

They'll get an insider's perspective on how Conan Doyle's homage to Belle changed the man's life in complex ways.

And they'll be on the edge of their seats waiting to see how Belle's insight helped to carry out justice.

Erin and I have long been mega fans of Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris.

Her earlier books, The Butchering Art and The Facemaker, are some of our favorite works on the history of medicine.

Doyle modeled Holmes not after a real detective, but after a surgeon he admired, Joseph Bell.

In her new book, Sleuth Hound, The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, New York Times bestselling author Lindsey Fitzharris tells me about the cases that Bell solved.

So you were telling me offline that this is your first sort of historical crime.

What have you been doing that's not historical

It's all so horrible, you might be wondering why anyone would wanna talk about this stuff, let alone get a PhD in it.

Well, allow me to introduce you to Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris, a medical historian from Oxford University who specializes in the dark and brutal history of healthcare.

She's also the author of a new book called Sleuth Hound.

It's the true story of a man named Dr. Joseph Bell, whose student named Arthur Conan Doyle used as direct inspiration for a little character named Sherlock Holmes.

And and so this material kind of gets out and people put it up on the Internet for the shock value.

But I always like to remind people these were real men.

They had no concept that, you know, Lindsey Fitzharris and all her sequins was going to come and write The Facemaker.

And by the way, when I go and talk about The Facemaker, I'm usually a little bit more toned down.

also know that it was, I just read a book on like, Oh, I have to look up the name, but it was, um, Relevance is coming.

So the concept is like the birth of the surgeon as we know them, the butchering art by Lindsay Fitzharris.

But it's it's about like how the surgeon came to prominence because at first it's like you want to go to a doctor, but the doctors are not going to get dirty.

They're not going to actually go in and do any of the work because that's that's blue collar as far as they're concerned.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and this week I'm joined by the medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris, whose new book is Sleuth Hound, The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes.

Lindsay, welcome.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me on the podcast.