*But if he wrote some letters home from Feldkirch in French, they have not survived.
*A bursary was a stipend or scholarship won by competitive examination, and, because of the family’s limited financial means, of great importance to Conan Doyle when he reached medical school at Edinburgh University.
*‘Baa’, actual name unknown, is clearly, from this reference and others, a servant. While money was short in the Doyle household, labour was also cheap, and the Doyles, even in their straitened circumstances, often had domestic help. They were gentlefolk, even if poor.
2 The Medical Student (1876-1882)
THE MEDICAL LOVE SONG
My heart at each systole swelling Still murmurs its passion for you— The Venous side, dear, is thy dwelling, A temple untainted and true And there by the fossa ovalis Where the mitral your chamber shall screen There ’mid reduced hæmoglobin Oh that is your palace, my queen
—A. CONAN DOYLE, MB CM
Conan Doyle was ‘wild, full-blooded, and a trifle reckless’ when he entered Edinburgh University in October 1876. Edinburgh was famous for literature as well as medicine, and also there at the time were friends of later years, like Robert Louis Stevenson and James Barrie. ‘Strange to think that I probably brushed elbows with them,’
Conan Doyle mused later on; but he found medical school one ‘long weary grind at botany, chemistry, anatomy, physiology, and a whole list of compulsory subjects, many of which have a very indirect bearing upon the art of curing.’
Attending Edinburgh University meant living at home for him—an economy that meant no letters to his mother about the experience. Nor have letters to others about his medical school life been found.
He did look back at Edinburgh in his novel The Firm of Girdlestone, written in the 1880s. She ‘may call herself with grim jocoseness the “alma mater” of her students,’ its narrator muses, but she
conceals her maternal affection with remarkable success… There is symbolism in the very look of her, square and massive, grim and grey, with never a pillar or carving to break the dead monotony of the great stone walls. She is learned, she is practical, and she is useful. There is little sentiment or romance in her composition, however.
A lad coming up to an English University finds himself in an enlarged and enlightened public school… [H]is University takes a keen interest in him. She pats him on the back if he succeeds. Prizes and scholarships, and fine fat fellowships are thrown plentifully in his way if he will gird up his loins and aspire to them.
There is nothing of this in a Scotch University… [Edinburgh] is a great unsympathetic machine, taking in a stream of raw-boned cartilaginous youths at one end, and turning them out at the other as learned divines, astute lawyers, and skilful medical men. Of every thousand of the raw material about six hundred emerge at the other side. The remainder are broken in the process.
In later years, after giving up medicine for literature, he took a more measured view of the experience, and of the value he felt he had derived from it. ‘There are few phases of medical life, from the sixpenny dispensary to the two-guinea prescription, of which I have not had personal experience,’ he told the students at St Mary’s Hospital, London, in a 1910 talk entitled The Romance of Medicine, assuring them that medicine
tinges the whole philosophy of life and furnishes the whole basis of thought. The healthy skepticism which medical training induces, the desire to prove every fact, and only to reason from such proved facts—these are the finest foundations for all thought. And then the moral training to keep a confidence inviolate, to act promptly on a sudden call, to keep your head in critical moments, to be kind and yet strong—where can you, outside medicine, get such a training as that?…And then there is another way in which it acts. It sets a very high standard of strenuous work. You may not consider this altogether an advantage while you do it, but it remains a precious heritage for life. To the man who has mastered Grey’s Anatomy, life holds no further terrors… All work seems easy after the work of a medical education.
What exists in letters are the interstices of his medical studies, from his attempt to win the bursary, through assistantships to several doctors, one of whom became a second father to him, to taking the plunge finally into medical practice of his own, as junior partner to someone he had known at Edinburgh—Dr George Budd, whose methods of practising medicine were controversial, and whose personality was volcanically paranoid. Conan Doyle not only entered Edinburgh at age seventeen, but, in the custom of the day, started studying medicine without further academic ado. During the two months at home after returning from Feldkirch, though, while his mother was away on a visit, he prepared himself to compete for the bursary whose £40 would mean much to him and his family.
to Mary Doyle 2 ARGYLE PARK TERRACE, EDINBURGH, SEPTEMBER 1876
It seems very strange and quite an inversion of our usual states that I should be writing from home, and you the absentee. We are all jogging along very comfortably; you need not be afraid of my feeling lonely, for I am closeted in my room nearly the whole day, and would be if you were here, so it comes to the same in the end. My chief relaxation is sometimes at evening when I go out into the kitchen and read ‘Midshipman Easy’ to Baa and Lottie; but I am beginning to consider it cruel to do it, as I am every evening in expectation of Baa’s breaking a blood vessel with laughing.
I went to Mr Walker on the Monday. His terms are 2 guineas a month but he lends me plenty of books. I was compelled to get 2 books from Livingstone, one second hand a Greek dictionary, the other new (a very small book) Blackie’s Greek conversations. Mr Walker has dispirited me awfully. He says that very often as many as 50 candidates go in for it, and that the high school curriculum leads, as it were, up to the bursary, and they generally secure it. Mr Walker is a young man and helps me very much; he did not get this identical bursary but one of £20.
Baby is pretty good considering, Innes behaves wonderfully well. Lottie is, as she always is, a brick. Baa is cooking very well, and seems to enjoy acting as keeper of the house. Arthur is behaving so so. Papa is very quiet and nice; I don’t know about the Graphics money. I gave him your letter to read this morning, and when he came to that part I think he looked uncomfortable. However he is all that could be desired. Much as we all desire you back, pray make the best of the chance, and get a good mouthful of English air which is better than this stuff here.
You must thank the Dr heartily for his kindness in giving [me] the flute. I don’t deserve it unless I win this bursary, in spite of all high schools and bugbears.
to Dr Bryan Charles Waller 2 ARGYLE PARK TERRACE, SEPTEMBER 9, 1876
Many thanks for your kind letter, which went far towards restoring my equanimity, which was rather shaken by Mr Walkers statements. I had no idea there would be so many competitions, but I suppose three quarters of them go in without a vestige of a chance. Mr Walker is a very jolly fellow; he is very good at mathematics, though I don’t think his classical knowledge is very brilliant, and we are continually having long arguments over some disputed sense or word.* I do a Latin & Greek exercise every