Disease, detection and diagnosis: The medical short story and the struggle for literary success in the 1890s

Abstract

After the first death of Sherlock Holmes in 1893, both Arthur Conan Doyle and L. T. Meade turned to the medical short story in order to fill the gap in the popular market. While Meade’s series in The Strand (1893–96), in collaboration with Dr Clifford Halifax, were extremely popular and created a new, sub-genre of detective fiction, Doyle’s stories, published in Round the Red Lamp (1894) were not well-received. The irony in this comes from the fact that Meade managed to adapt the Sherlock Holmes formula to medical fiction, while Doyle did not learn from his own success.