Summary:

The famed surgeon Douglas Stone flaunts his notorious affair with Lady Sannox, although his professional reputation begins to suffer. One night a mysterious Turk asks him to attend his wife, who has cut her lip on a poisoned dagger. The Turk insists that amputation offers the only hope of recovery. Anxious to pocket the proffered gold, and impatient to get to his mistress, Stone dismisses his professional misgivings. He excises the lower lip of the veiled, drugged woman--only to find that he was tricked into disfiguring Lady Sannox herself. Lord Sannox (disguised as the "Turk") thus gains his revenge, with his wife morally chastised (and forever after in seclusion), and Stone’s "great brain [thenceforth] about as valuable as a cap full of porridge."

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Summary:

Dr. Aloysius Lana, a "Black Doctor" of Spanish ancestry, settled in a Lancashire town and courted Miss Frances Morton, a young woman of the local gentry. After he unexpectedly broke off their engagement, he was found dead, and Frances's brother was arrested. At the trial, Dr. Lana himself appeared: the corpse was instead his dissipated twin brother Ernest, dead of a heart attack. Ernest's secret arrival had forced Aloysius to dissolve his engagement, not wishing scandal; Ernest's death allowed Aloysius to create a new identity abroad, his future shattered. But, hearing that the death had been misdiagnosed as murder, Aloysius explained the situation, and he and the Mortons were reunited.

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Summary:

This collection contains all the stories in Arthur Conan Doyle's Round the Red Lamp, six additional medical tales (three of which are from the Sherlock Holmes oeuvre), and the published version of "The Romance of Medicine" (1910), an awards ceremony address to the medical students at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School.

Round the Red Lamp (see annotation in this database) received almost universally negative reviews when it was published in 1894. They deplored the fact that Conan Doyle wrote about such "nauseating" and "ghastly" topics. All but one of the stories deal with doctors, disease, or medical practice. (The exception is a gothic tale that has a medical student as its hero.)

For example, "Behind the Times" contrasts the behavior of old fashioned humanistic physicians with that of modern scientifically-oriented physicians; "The Doctors of Hoyland" conveys a very positive image of women physicians; "His First Operation" depicts a first-year medical student fainting in the operating room; and "A False Start" presents a humorous account of Conan Doyle's difficulties in starting his own medical practice.

The three Sherlock Holmes stories are "The Dying Detective" (1913), "The Creeping Man," (1923) and "The Blanched Soldier" (1926). "The Romance of Medicine" is an inspirational essay on professionalism and medical history, somewhat similar in tone to, and contemporaneous with, the essays of William Osler.

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Summary:

The book is a collection of 17 short stories, all of which center on physicians. "His First Operation" is about a student’s first view of surgery. He promptly faints. "A False Start" is about a doctor trying to establish a practice. He only succeeds by giving up the opportunity to treat the richest man in town, as he is the patient of another doctor. He and the doctor he thus honors become partners.

"The Doctors of Hoyland" deals with the issue of female doctors. Dr. Ripley has an established practice in Hoyland and when a famous doctor moves into the neighborhood he is secure enough to go visit him and offer him welcome. "He" turns out to be a woman, Dr. Smith.

Dr. Ripley is outraged; he thinks female doctors are a biological impossibility. Any woman who becomes a doctor must be unwomanly, otherwise how could she stand the sight of blood or inflict necessary pain? The woman doctor is courteous, but shows him the flaws in his thinking. The two are only reconciled when she is forced to treat his broken leg. He discovers how graceful, womanly, and skilled she is and asks for her hand, but she turns him down.

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