Arthur Conan Doyle and Medical London: Reading the Topography of Round the Red Lamp

Abstract

This essay explores the short period of time that Arthur Conan Doyle spent between March and June 1891 when he moved his family into rooms in Bloomsbury and took a consulting room near Harley Street in an attempt to set up as an eye specialist. This last attempt to move up the professional hierarchy from general practitioner to specialist tends to be seen as a final impulsive move before Conan Doyle decided to become a full-time writer in June 1891. The essay aims to elaborate a little on the medical contexts for Conan Doyle’s brief spell in London, and particularly to track the medical topography in which he placed himself, situated between the radical, reformist Bloomsbury medical institutions and the fame and riches of the society doctors of Harley Street. These ambivalences are tracked in the medical fiction he published in Round the Red Lamp, his peculiar collection of medical tales and doctoring in 1894.