Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #5. Gary Lovisi

pound a week loan from Budd, to be repaid when practical. So, Doyle found himself in Southsea, starting up a practice with the aid of a generous patron. Sort of a long distance Blessington. Except, the true nature of George Budd was about to be displayed and he was anything but generous.

      Doyle rented lodgings and a place of business, bought the minimum he needed for both and set up for business, barely getting by financially. Now, Budd sprang his trap. He and his wife had been reading Mary Doyle’s unflattering letters, but they had given no indication of it to Doyle. Now, having assisted Doyle in becoming irrecoverably committed in Portsmouth and somewhat dependant upon that promised aid of one pound a week, Budd sent a letter to Doyle. In it, Budd accused his ex-partner of having been disloyal under his own roof and severed all ties with him, including not providing the promised loan.

      Considering the circumstances, Doyle, in The Stark Munro Letters, is rather charitable in his feelings of Budd. He did send a sharp note to Cullingworth saying that he had always defended the man against his mother’s comments, but now he had to admit that his mother had been right. This seems relatively restrained in the gravity of the situation. And he sums up Budd by saying “He was a remarkable man and narrowly escaped being a great one.” A reading of The Stark Munro Letters does provide a very entertaining look at a major character in Doyle’s life.

      Percy Trevelyan’s nascent medical career receives a significant boost when Blessington sets him up in practice. George Turnavine Budd took an unemployed Arthur Conan Doyle in as a partner and then offered to loan him funds to help his college mate start his own practice (albeit, with an ulterior motive). We can see the root of Blessington’s sponsoring of Trevelyan in Doyle’s own experiences with Budd.

      Doyle’s imagination produced Blessington, the criminal turned informer who was judged guilty by his fellow miscreants and murdered in his own rooms while doctor Trevelyan slept under the same roof, unaware of events. Happily, nothing of the like actually happened to Sir Arthur. But he did once have a resident patient and that experience certainly had a major impact on his life.

      Having gotten a fledgling medical practice underway in spite of Budd’s attempt to sabotage it, one of Doyle’s neighbors in Southsea was a fellow practitioner, Dr Pike (‘Porter’ in The Stark Munro Letters). One of Pike’s patients was a young man named James Hawkins, who was vacationing in Southsea with his mother and sister, Louise. Dr Pike asked Doyle if he would care to consult on the young man. Unfortunately, it was obvious to both men that Hawkins had cerebral meningitis, a fatal disease at the time. Feeling sympathy for the family, Doyle offered to have James stay with him and receive medical care; an offer which was accepted.

      Unfortunately, James died not long after coming under Doyle’s care. However, not all was lost. Doyle saw a great deal of the sister, Louise, nicknamed ‘Touie.’ Love blossomed and the two were wed less than five months after her brother died. Hmm..sounds like a case for Sherlock Holmes.

      In fact, Doyle relates in The Stark Munro Letters that the police had received an anonymous letter stating that there was something suspicious about the death. So, when Munro returned from the funeral, a detective was waiting to talk to him. Fortunately for Munro, Dr Porter had seen the patient the night before he died and this seemed to satisfy the detective and the matter was dropped. Doyle never gave any indication that this little episode really did occur after his real resident patient died.

      Percy Trevelyan began carving out his niche with work on the pathology of catalepsy. The Worthingdon Bank Gang used Trevelyan’s interest in catalepsy to help them distract him by having one of the members fake the illness on a visit. It is his specialty that is used to ‘get to him.’ Trevelyan is no general practitioner, like Watson or Doyle himself.

      Well, Doyle was a general practitioner through 1890. Then, on what must have seemed like a whim, he sold his practice and whisked off to Vienna to study. He had decided to become an eye specialist. Doyle stayed barely two months and later wrote that he could have learned as much in London. The whole thing seemed like a working vacation for a man wanting a breath of fresh air from his job and domestic life. But apparently he did learn enough to become a specialist in this emerging field.

      Settled back in London in the March of 1891, he was living in Montague Place, just around the corner from the British museum and the street of Sherlock Holmes before the detective took lodgings with Doctor Watson. He established an office near the prestigious Harley Street medical district and was acting as a specialist in matters ocular. Whether he actually ever had any patients is an open matter.

      Within a half year of setting up shop he had retired from medicine and was determined to make his living entirely as a writer. So, Doyle was a specialist for a very short time. But a few years later he drew on this experience when fleshing out the character of Percy Trevelyan. Interestingly, in The Stark Munro Letters Munro has one last meeting with Cullingworth. His outrageous friend is moving to South America to be, yes, an eye specialist.