![]() Doyle regretted that the Holmes stories had overshadowed his other writings, but it is not clear that posterity did him an injustice by ignoring most of his non-Holmesian work. As this discussion indicates, the authors are not entirely successful in their attempt to refocus attention from Sherlock Holmes to Conan Doyle's other interests. They doubt that Holmes's almost magical feats of deduction are as similar to the thought processes of diagnosticians as has sometimes been claimed, but they make it clear that had Doyle not been a doctor, Holmes would have been a rather different detective. (Sherlock Holmes, as many readers will remember, injects morphine or cocaine whenever boredom strikes.) More significantly, perhaps, they point out that the very conception of Holmes as a character owes something to Doyle's experience of diagnosis. Rodin and Key catalogue these references exhaustively and credit Doyle with enlightened attitudes towards the diseases (not usually recognized as such before the twentieth century) of alcoholism and drug addiction. Far more interesting are the many references to medicine, doctors, and disease in his fiction. ![]() ![]() Doyle continued to write occasional articles for medical journals until late in life, but it would be hard to argue that his contributions to medical science were very important. ![]() In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ฤก66 BOOK REVIEWS become more interesting to him than the practice of medicine, and Sherlock Holmes was already a lucrative property. ![]()
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