Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters. Daniel Stashower

to all friends. I am very busy & can hardly find time to write this scrawl. I can only lay my hands on £4/10 at the present moment but send them with all my heart in lieu of a Xmas card. I only wish it were double the amount. I shall sift the Budd evidence very carefully before deciding either way. Goodbye, my darling, and all the compliments of the season to you. These hearty Aston people get sick at all times and places so we are very hard worked.

      to Mary Doyle BIRMINGHAM, JANUARY 1881

      The reason that I have not written has been that I have been worked right off my legs since Xmas. I have hardly opened a medical book or sat down save when I have been so fagged as to be unable to do anything. We have had a most confounded hard time of it—I have been at 3 confinements in one day, with a long list of patients to see, and 60 bottles of Physic to make—and then been up all night after it.

      I see the force of what you say about holding on here as long as possible, and I like the work, but anything like systematic reading is simply ludicrous. I have made good use of my time, so far, when I had any, but now there is simply none. Find out exactly when the final begins and when the certificate must be in. If I stay here until about the third week of March I will be running it very close. It is risky to go up for such an exam on six weeks real reading—We must manage to save up the fees by hook or by crook.

      Whatever you may say against the Budds there is one thing I can aver and that is that of all my family & relatives & friends & the whole gang of them, I only got two letters on New Years Day, one was from Budd and the other was from a servant girl and I value them both. I sent 9 letters off myself but got no return from any of them.

       Aboard the Eira, with Conan Doyle between the ship’s master, Leigh Smith (left with top hat) and Captain Gray of the Hope (right of Conan Doyle)

       Crabbe took his degree a year before I did, and went down to a large port in England with the intention of setting up there. A brilliant career seemed to lie before him, for besides his deep knowledge of medicine, acquired in the most practical school in the world, he had that indescribable manner which gains a patient’s confidence at once. I was acting as assistant to a medical man in Manchester, and heard little from my former friend, save that he had set up in considerable style, and was making a bid for a high-class practice at once.

      —‘Crabbe’s Practice’

      to Mary Doyle BIRMINGHAM, JANUARY OR FEBRUARY 1881

      Just a line to let you know that I am still in the fore. I read both the articles with much interest and profit to myself. My work is going on better, though nothing to what I could do if I were free. I’ll know my theoretical work well enough, I fancy, but they will spin me in their clinical forms and scientific case taking and that sort of thing.

      The new assistant is to come about the middle of March and I will have to see him duly installed and instructed before I leave. I hope however it won’t be much more than a month before we see each other. I wish I had my qual and was away on blue water in the Iberia.

      Your last letter was very kind, dear, and very sensible. You are not a fool like most mothers. I have not got into any amatory trouble which I can’t see my way out of, and that had nothing to do with my recent blues.

      to Mary Doyle BIRMINGHAM, FEBRUARY 27, 1881

      I am more delighted than I can tell you at the prospect of seeing you so soon. How you will enjoy yourself, I don’t know, but you will make me very happy by coming. The Boss says I ‘beamed all over’ when I heard of it. We are anxiously awaiting your note to know if you can come by the 7^th. You will find us a very disorderly but very jolly household, with a dear couple at our head, and 2 very spoilt children, who however are in a great state about Dodo’s squirrel. They are nice children enough if they were only licked a little more. The bustle and life of a doctor’s house in a busy thoroughfare in Birmingham will be a queer change to you after your own dear little home. You will be able to appreciate my difficulties in working when you see our work.

      You will like Mrs Hoare awfully, I think, and the Boss too. Write soon & tell us when to expect you. The sooner the better. Excuse this vile scrawl as I write it by the fire on my knee.

      Conan Doyle was clearly itching to be finished with his studies, and to take the qualifying exams for his Bachelor of Medicine & Master of Surgery (MB CM) degree. While it was not a fully—fledged M.D.—that would come later, upon completion of a thesis—it would entitle him to practise medicine at last. His turbulent medical school friend George Budd, whom Conan Doyle was quick to defend against his mother’s clear dislike, had already passed his exams, and was now practising in Bristol with great success, he claimed. Budd’s was a siren call growing stronger as Conan Doyle approached the end of his studies. His MB CM exams finally came in June 1881, and his letter to Dr Hoare expresses his glee, despite the malicious Dr Spence, the one examiner who gave him a hard time:

      to Dr Reginald Ratcliff Hoare 15 LONSDALE TERRACE, EDINBURGH, JUNE 1881

      The writtens were good fair papers, no choice of questions. Surgery was (1) Surgical anatomy of the lochisrectal fossa (2) Causes & treatment of Stillicidium Lachrymarum (3) Give step by step the operation of excision of the knee, with aftertreatment. Midwifery was decidedly easy (1) Anatomy and functions of placenta (2) Modes of bringing on premature labour—give all the causes which would induce you (3) Describe three forms of Speculum contrasting them—when is their use contraindicated—I smiled all over when I saw that paper. Medicine I took honours in, the paper was hard, but suited my reading. (1) Define hyperpyrexia. Give its pathology and treatment (2) What is the exact anatomical lesion in Bulbar Paralysis. How does it kill? Clinical symptoms? (3) Give as many forms of Dipthitheritic paralysis as you can—what is there peculiar about this paralysis—which forms are fatal—give local & general treatment (4) describe a case of Acute General Peritonitis—its causes—its treatment. The medical Ia was beneath contempt.

      In Midwifery I took honours in my oral—he took me on deformities of the pelvis & on face cases. I got a fearful raking over in Medicine, a regular honours exam. He began on the pathology of Osteoarthritis. What exact appearance would I see on section of the bone? What was the joint like? I was drivelling away about this when he let rip at me with ‘What are the differences, sir, between the actions of the voltaic & Faradic currents on normal and diseased muscle.’ I happened to know this so the malignant little scarecrow asked for a more delicate test for albumen than heat or acid. He had me there, clean—I had to confess I was nonplussed. (It seems that some idiot in Crimean Tartary or some other hole has remarked in his unpublished memoir that metaphosphoric acid throws down albumen.) What causes albumen apart from Bright—symptoms of renal calailus. Put up the apparatus for the German yeast test for sugar—How do you explain chemically the action of Fehling—Just here the bell rang so I picked his pocket of some small change and shoved for home.

      Surgery oral was a beastly exam. Spence behaved like a pig. He told me to lay out the instruments for lithotomy from a tray—I did it—He came prancing towards me with his hat bashed over his left eye, and a face like three kicks in a mud wall. ‘Wouldn’t I need an artery forceps? Well, why didn’t you put one out—D’ye call that Surgery.’ I remarked ‘I didn’t lay it out, sir, because you forgot to put one in the tray’—I had him there.

      ‘I was one of the ruck,’ Conan Doyle claimed, ‘a 60 per cent man at examinations,’ but Dr Spence alone (the same surgeon who mocked Lister’s germ theory in the middle of operations) gave him a less than satisfactory grade.

      …one of the school which considers such an ordeal in the light of a trial of strength between their pupils and themselves. In his eyes the candidate was endeavouring to pass, and his duty was to endeavour to prevent him, a result which in a large proportion of cases he successfully accomplished.

      —The