Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life Story 1 - Behind the Times

Arthur Conan Doyle (0:01)

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Round the Red Lamp by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Section 1 The Preface Being an Extract from a Long and Animated Correspondence with a Friend in America I quite recognize the force of your objection to that an invalid or a woman in weak health would get no good from stories which attempt to treat some features of medical life with a certain amount of realism.

If you deal with this life at all, however, and if you are anxious to make your doctor something more than marionettes, it is quite essential that you should paint the darker side, since it is that which is principally presented to the surgeon or physician. He sees many beautiful things, it is true, fortitude and heroism, love and self-sacrifice, but they are all called forth, as our nobler qualities are always called forth, by bitter sorrow and trial. One cannot write of medical life and be merry over it. Then why write of it, you may ask? If a subject is painful, why treat it at all? I answer that it is in the province of fiction to treat painful things as well as cheerful ones. The story which wiles away a weary hour fulfills an obviously good purpose, but not more so, I hold, than that which helps to emphasize the graver side of life. A tale which may startle the reader out of his usual grooves of thought, and shocks him into seriousness, plays the part of the alternative and tonic in medicine, bitter to the taste, but bracing in the result. There are a few stories in this little collection which might have such an effect, and I have so far shared in your feeling that I have reserved them from serial publication. In book form the reader can see that they are medical stories, and can, if he or she be so minded, avoid them. Yours, very truly, A. Conan Doyle. PS. You ask about the red lamp. It is the usual sign of the general practitioner in England.

Round the Red Lamp, Section 1, Behind the Times My first interview with Dr. James Winter was under dramatic circumstances. It occurred at two in the morning in the bedroom of an old country house.

I kicked him twice on the white waistcoat, and knocked off his gold spectacles, while he, with the aid of a female accomplice, stifled my angry cries in a flannel petticoat, and thrust me into a warm bath. I am told that one of my parents, who happened to be present, remarked in a whisper that there was nothing the matter with my lungs.

I cannot recall how Dr. Winter looked at the time, for I had other things to think of, but his description of my own appearance is far from flattering. A fluffy head, a body like a trussed goose, very bandy legs, and feet with the soles turned inwards, these are the main items which he can remember.

From this time onwards, the epochs of my life were the periodical assaults which Dr. Winter made upon me. He vaccinated me, he cut me for an abscess, he blistered me for mumps. It was a world of peace and he the one dark cloud that threatened. But at last there came a time of real illness, a time when I lay for months together inside my wickerwork basket bed, and then it was that I learned that a hard face could relax, that those country-made creaking boots could steal very gently to a bedside, and that that rough voice could thin into a whisper when it spoke to a sick child. And now the child himself is a medical man, and yet Dr. Winter is the same as ever. I can see no change since I first can remember him. Save that perhaps the brindled hair is a trifle whiter, and the huge shoulders a little more bowed. He is a very tall man, though he loses a couple of inches from his stoop. That big back of his has curved itself over sick beds until it has set in that shape. His face is of a walnut brown, and tells of long winter drives over bleak country roads, with the wind and the rain in his teeth. It looks smooth at a little distance, but as you approach him you see that it is shot with innumerable fine wrinkles, like last year's apple. They are hardly to be seen when he is in repose, but when he laughs his face breaks like a starred glass, and you realize then that though he looks old, he must be older than he looks.