The Bookshelf with Lindsey Fitzharris

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The Hard Shoulder with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman. On Newstalk with Kea.

Shane Coleman (0:48)

Now we are delighted to be joined by New York Times bestselling author and medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris to place her reads on The Hard Shoulder Bookshelf. Lindsey, great to have you with us. And before we get to your choices for The Bookshelf, congratulations on your new book, Sleuthound, The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes. A lot of us would be huge Sherlock Holmes fans, I think it's fair to say.

Tell us what this book is about. This is a non-fiction book, I think I'm right in saying, isn't it? And it's about, I suppose, the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle. Tell us more.

Lindsey Fitzharris (1:26)

Yeah, so most people think that Holmes began at 221 B Baker Street, you know, with the hat, the pipe, the cocaine.

But he actually began somewhere far more obscure, on a hospital ward in Edinburgh, where a Scottish surgeon named Joe Bell was teaching medical students how to read a human body like a crime scene. And in 1878, Arthur Conan Doyle became one of his medical students. And that really was the beginning of Sherlock Holmes.

Shane Coleman (1:52)

Wow. So was the character very much based on him, or was it just his kind of particular genius for looking at bodies and looking for clues?

Lindsey Fitzharris (2:05)

Yeah, it's an interesting question. You know, I came to this with a medical history lens, because I'm a medical historian. And I knew enough about Bell to know that the comparisons to Holmes became a little bit irritating to him at the end of his life.

Conan Doyle, by the way, made no secret of this. He actually outed Bell as the inspiration.

But if you pick up Sleuthhound, you will think that you're reading Sherlock Holmes, at least in the first three chapters, because his deductions were absolutely amazing. I'll give you an example. The book opens with a patient being brought before him, and he guesses that the man was in the army. And the man flatly denies this, which confuses Bell because he's almost always right. And so he has the patient stripped to the waist, and lo and behold, there is a D tattooed on his chest for deserter. So Joe Bell would be bested by no one, least at all, in an army deserter. So he just had this incredible way of cutting through the petty deceits of his patients.

Shane Coleman (2:58)

Elementary. You obviously, you are a historian, a medical historian. Your previous books you've written about the Scottish surgical pioneer, Joe Lister. You had a book as well, extraordinary book on the surgeon who tried to help disfigured soldiers in World War I.

They're difficult subject matters, but you don't shy away from them.

Lindsey Fitzharris (3:24)

No, I feel like, you know, if I'm not describing what the past was like, I'm not doing the patients the justice, you know, they endured a lot of pain and suffering. And I always say that my superpower is I can make you feel good about living in 2026

If you aren't so sure about that, I can tell you what that experience was like 100, 150, 200 years ago.

Shane Coleman (3:45)

Yeah, for people who despair about the world today, and there are plenty of those, have a read of some of your books and you might have a more optimistic viewpoint. Let's get to your reads for The Hard Shoulder Bookshelf. Your favourite book, Dead Wake by Eric Larsen.

This is, I love the sound. I remember it coming out a number of years ago. I never got to read it, but I really like the sound of it.

Lindsey Fitzharris (4:10)

You know, it's about the sinking of the Lusitania, which you might think that you know everything about, but it's the way he tells that story. You know, the passengers as they're getting on the ship, what they're carrying with them. There was a Shakespearean scholar who brought a lot of Shakespeare's folios and you know that they're going to go to the bottom of the sea.