What the 19th Century Teaches Us About Medicine Right Now with Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris

Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris is back and she brought her best book yet. Sleuth Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes, out October 20th, which tells the story of Joseph Bell, the Edinburgh surgeon who was the actual inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.

We cover optography (the Victorian belief that eyeballs record the last thing a person sees before death, which murderers took seriously enough to destroy their victims' eyeballs), Bell's diagnostic party tricks (dipping his middle finger in a flask and tasting his index finger while students drank whatever was in it), how the Chantereau poisoning case connects to Robert Louis Stevenson and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, why much of 19th century forensics was built on the brutalized bodies of women killed by their husbands, and the extraordinary case where Bell and Conan Doyle defended a man they personally believed was guilty because the body had been embalmed before autopsy and the physical evidence was compromised, which Lindsey correctly identifies as the "if the glove doesn't fit" moment of the 1890s.

Takeaways:

• Joseph Bell worked as an actual consulting detective
• Victorian forensics advanced largely on the bodies of women killed by their husbands
• Optography was a real and widely believed forensic theory
• Bell and Conan Doyle once defended a man they believed was guilty
• The death of the physical exam has a 150-year precedent

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