Arthur Conan Doyle

How a Real Scottish Surgeon Helped Inspire Sherlock Holmes

Lindsey Fitzharris’s new book, *Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes*, revisits the medical and literary currents that helped shape one of fiction’s most enduring detectives. In an interview with Ars, she argues that the character’s roots lie not only in Victorian imagination but also in the life and methods of a real Scottish surgeon whose clinical eye anticipated Holmes’s famous powers of deduction.