Sleuth-Hound (featuring Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris)

Daniel and Kelly interview Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris about her new book, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 3:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Before there was Sherlock Holmes, there was Dr. Joseph Bell. Bell was Arthur Conan Doyle's mentor in medical school, and he left a mark. Bell could determine a patient's profession, where they had lived recently, their diagnosis, and so much more, just by making simple observations about their appearance and their behavior. As he would tell his students, the method was quite elementary. On today's show, we're interviewing Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris, whose new book, Sleuth Hound, is all about Dr. Joseph Bell and forensic science in the 19th century. Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Elementary Universe.

• 4:43Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I think the universe is the biggest murder mystery of all.

• 4:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, hi, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study parasites and space, but I am getting more and more interested in medical history. But, okay, what is the universe, the greatest murder mystery of all, just because so many people have died over the course of the existence? Yeah, okay, fair enough.

• 5:02Daniel Whiteson?

  The universe is responsible for basically every death in history.

• 5:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  But what is the mystery there? Like, we all know it's coming.

• 5:11Daniel Whiteson?

  No, I just think of scientists as detectives, essentially, you know, trying to figure out what happened. How does it all work? How does it all come together? You know, we are sifting through the clues and trying to understand what happened.

• 5:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, absolutely. I like, it's so easy to like, look around and get frustrated by what we don't know already, but what we do know is incredible and vast, and there's so many things that we couldn't see that we figured out sort of indirectly. And that's part of why I love history of science, is just the journey that we went on to get here is so amazing.

• 5:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Like, you know your dog did something gross because now you can smell it.

• 5:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yep, no, that example hits real close to home. My dog just snuck into my office and I need to take care of that in a minute.

• 6:00Daniel Whiteson?

  But when I was a kid, I was not just like, interested in the nature of the universe. I gobbled up the Sherlock Holmes books because it was so fascinating to me to see somebody use that process, you know, like, think clearly, make observations, try to stitch it together. In the end, it's the data that tells you the truth, right? Doesn't matter if you're solving a murder mystery, if you're trying to understand what's inside a neutron star, it's the same process, right? Follow the data.

• 6:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  And what I love about Sherlock Holmes is not only that he was based on a real-life physician, but also that, so cool, but also that Arthur Conan Doyle during his life did a little medical sleuthing of his own. Like, for example, Robert Koch thought that he had a treatment for tuberculosis, which was killing loads of people back then. He called it tuberculosis. And Arthur Conan Doyle went to Germany to try to like, learn about this, and he ended up being totally skeptical, and there's like, books on this topic. But anyway, so yeah, like, Arthur Conan Doyle was involved in some detective work in his own life.

• 6:58Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 6:59Kelly Weinersmith?

  And Lindsey Fitzharris's book has some amazing stories where Conan Doyle is working with other people trying to solve mysteries, and this book is a real page turner.

• 7:08Daniel Whiteson?

  In the end, we're all just trying to solve mysteries.

• 7:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right. And the mystery of where you can get your hands on Sleuth Hound is one that's easy to solve. You can get it just about anywhere. But instead of hearing Daniel and I talk about the book, let's go ahead and bring Lindsay Fitzharris on the show to talk all about her new book, Sleuth Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes. Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris is a truly epic medical historian. In 2021, she hosted the Smithsonian Channel series, The Curious Life and Death of, which was about mysterious deaths throughout history. But I'm most excited about her amazing books. She wrote The Butchering Art about Victorian surgery, which I referenced a million times during our episode about the history of anesthesia. She also wrote The Face Maker about the origins of cosmetic surgery to improve the lives of soldiers that were disfigured during World War II.

• 7:54Kelly Weinersmith?

  And today, we're talking about her most recent book, Sleuth Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes. Welcome to the show. I am so excited to be here. And I was saying before we went on live that I was a little bit nervous, because you guys cover big topics, like the origins of life and do aliens exist? And I'm a medical historian, I'm always looking to the past, you guys are always looking to the future, so I'm a little bit, little bit nervous about the conversation. Hopefully, I can keep up here. You're amazing, and I think you need to like, to understand how we're doing science now, you need to understand how we did it in the past and have an appreciation for that. And also, I feel like history helps you really appreciate how far we've come, like, especially the stories about surgery without anesthesia. Holy cow. Oh, my gosh, yeah.

• 8:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, if you like that, I got a book coming your way, because after Sleuth Hound, I'm writing a book called Ether Wars, which is about that moment when ether is discovered. But here's the crazy bit about the story. It's showcased by a dentist named Morton, and some people out there might know this story. And right after that, he tries to patent it, and four other people step forward and try to claim ownership of this discovery. And so it's really this kind of instance of medical capitalism in America, and it ruins all these men's lives. And it's about what we do when something changes the world. Who gets ownership of it? And, you know, I think that can resonate with today, with AI, and those kinds of fights that are breaking out. Who gets to control it? Who gets to own it? And so I'm really looking forward to it.

• 9:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  It's going to be my first American medical history story. Of course, I will be still talking about the impact in Britain and the discovery of chloroform that happened shortly after. But yeah, I'm going to take you back to the very early Victorian operating theaters when there was no anesthesia. And let me tell you, it was pretty brutal. I can't wait.

• 9:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, I love these stories because they showcase the human side of science and of medicine. You know, so much of it is driven by ambition and sometimes greed and pettiness. But that just tells you, not that science is flawed, but that it's a human endeavor. And, you know, there's like, no way that scientists across the globe are like colluding to do anything. They're, if anything, working to undermine each other at all costs.

• 10:05Speaker 07

  Oh, my gosh. Preach, Danielle. I mean, honestly, and this is such an interesting point, because with my first book, The Butchering Art, which was about the father of antiseptic surgery, Joseph Lister, it's interesting, at the end of his life, he actually asked that his personal correspondence, anything that didn't have to do with his science and his discoveries, be destroyed. Now, thankfully, that didn't happen, because what I learned about Lister was that he was very much a product of his Quaker upbringing. He was raised by an amateur scientist. His father had a microscope, which was an unusual instrument in medicine in the 19th century. And so he brings the microscope to medical school, and it's kind of like his lightsaber moment. You know, this is what's going to help him

• 10:46Speaker 07

  solve this, this moment, this mystery in medicine. And all of that is because of his upbringing. And his father really encourages him to stay in medicine. He has a mental health breakdown at one point and leaves medical school. His father encourages him to go in. And so you're absolutely right that science and medicine isn't created in a vacuum. And it's also why we know that there aren't any global conspiracies, because everybody is very competitive, especially doctors. They all want to be the first. And I very much doubt that they're colluding on anything.

• 11:15Daniel Whiteson?

  Something else I'm excited to hear your thoughts on are about how the process has changed. You know, sometimes people imagine science as like, a way to do things. And we went from not doing science to doing science. But, you know, it's evolving. It's a method that's changing. And it's important not just to remember like, what people didn't know 200 years ago, or 100 years ago, but how they were trying to figure things out, and how that process has evolved. Because as Kelly says, it helps us understand how it can evolve in the future, and how like, aliens might do it differently, for example.

• 11:48Speaker 07

  Oh, here we are. We're already five minutes in, and we got, we got to the aliens. This is what I was waiting for. But yeah, no, I absolutely, you know, one of the things, it was interesting during the COVID pandemic, because a lot of people were saying, well, look, these experts keep changing their opinions. And, and that was unsettling to the public. But actually, to me, as a medical historian, that was comforting. Because of course, as scientists and doctors are studying the virus, they're learning more, they're changing their advice. And that's exactly what you want to see. My husband, who is an illustrator, he's a caricaturist, and I wrote a children's book called Dead Ends, which is all about failure in medicine, and the need to fail. Because failure teaches us sometimes more

• 12:30Speaker 07

  than the success. And one of my favorite stories involves the clockwork saw. It was this circular saw. I actually have a prototype in my office, my weird office. And it was a massive failure. It was, it was invented in the 19th century, when doctors and surgeons wanted to be faster in the operating theater. And it wound up, and you would release it, and it would spin continuously. And WHB Winchester, who invented it, brought it into the operating theater, and he accidentally took off his assistant's finger. And it was just a complete failure. And so he learned that too much speed was actually a bad thing. And so I love the clockwork saw, because I don't think we talk enough about failure in science and medicine to the public. And I think the COVID pandemic was this sort of opportunity to

• 13:13Speaker 07

  communicate that process. And maybe doctors didn't do that as well as they should have. And maybe that's where we need to kind of improve, that education with the public about how these vaccines are created, and how you learn about viruses, and how a lot of what we learned about COVID was built on what we already knew about other similar viruses. So I, it was, it was an interesting experience to live through. I also have to say that, as a medical historian, I completely was in denial about where we were heading in 2020, which is really shameful. I don't know how you guys dealt with it. But I, I remember specifically, I was shooting the Smithsonian series, and my manager said something about the schedule. And I said, I don't think this is going to become a thing. But then I said,

• 13:55Speaker 07

  well, you know, as medical historians, we're taught that a pandemic goes through certain psychological phases, and the first is denial. And then we kind of laughed nervously. And then I thought, oh, my gosh, is this where we're heading? And, and the second phase is blaming others, you know, that you can't catch it, that it's, you know, like with, with HIV, it's a gay disease, you know, that we went through all that. And so you go through these different psychological processes until you sort of accept that this is happening. And so I also went through that, because there was a moment where I should have known better, but I thought, no way we're gonna end up in this kind of global pandemic. And here, here we were. So.

• 14:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  I am so with you. I remember it was my daughter's birthday party, and they canceled school right before the Saturday where we were gonna have her birthday party. And they're like, we don't know when we're gonna come back. And I was like, that's weird. And then I was like, I shouldn't think that's weird. It does, the things have been scaling up. But I was like, but we'll be back on Monday, probably. And then we, you know, we weren't back for a year. And I just.

• 14:52Speaker 07

  It's like years later.

• 14:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I did not see it coming. I, I didn't. I should have, but it blew my mind.

• 14:58Speaker 07

  We just completely lost, you know, that time. I, it's weird when I think back on it, because sometimes it's still, like, you think about 2020, and you think, that was only like, a year ago. It just feels like, like, time has moved fast and slow at the same time. And, but, you know, my grandmother was alive at that time. And she kept, I would call her, and she kept saying, have you ever heard of anything like this? And I thought, of course I have. You know, I was working on a book about World War I, and we went through a pandemic at the very end of that. And, you know, it's just one of those things. It's kind, it's weirdly comforting to know, again, not a global conspiracy, this is what happens in human history. And we, we often bungle it as well, which is, which is a very human trait. You know, we don't want to believe it's happening, and we, we kind of shut

• 15:42Speaker 07

  down. And it's scary. But yeah, I think that failure in medicine is something that we don't talk about enough. And of course, there's a lot of failure in, in my books, too. And Joseph Lister fails in certain ways. And Harold Gillies, who was rebuilding soldiers' faces, failure was his constant companion on those wards. And so it is an important thing to acknowledge in medical history.

• 16:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 16:03Daniel Whiteson?

  And hey, the future is hard to predict, right? Which is why we have these processes to gather data, to change our minds when we get new data, right? You just got to follow the data. New data means new conclusions. That's just the way it works.

• 16:15Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 16:16Daniel Whiteson?

  So that's what I love about your book and these stories, is that it shows us how the process works, and why you can't perfectly predict the future.

• 16:23Speaker 07

  I mean, a lot of people look to me, by the way, I thought my moment had come in the pandemic. I was like, yes, medical historian, I'm finally relevant. Like, I can finally, you know, talk about something that people, you know, instead of useless cocktail party, you know, tips or whatever. But, but I did say that early in the pandemic. I said, look, I can't predict the future. And you're absolutely right. Even when going into a pandemic and looking at past pandemics, there's so many variables. And there's so many, you know, we, we control our fate ultimately. And I always say to people that today is the best day to be alive. That is my superpower, that I am one of the few people in 2026 who can make you feel good about living today. Today is the best day to be alive, and tomorrow will be even better. And having gone through breast cancer myself in 2022, I can say that,

• 17:07Speaker 07

  you know, it's every day, it's getting a bit better in terms of, you know, how we handle these viruses and these diseases. And so if anybody is out there and going through their own diagnoses, just hold on to that thought. You're not in the 19th century on that operating table without any anesthesia.

• 17:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, yeah, and we live in a time where we got, what, the COVID vaccine in a year or something like that? That is amazing to get a vaccine that quickly, and then get it like, scaled up and sent out to the population. Like, holy cow.

• 17:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. It was crazy. And actually, I got called up, I don't know how it worked in the US. So everybody listening, I have this Chicago accent, but I've lived in the UK now for 24 years. But we got called up on a, like, a lottery basis. And so I got called up. And the day I got my vaccine was the anniversary of the first ever vaccine by Edward Jenner for smallpox. And I thought that was just so nerdy and amazing. And I tried to, you know, tell people at the center, and they just didn't care, because they had more important things to do, which was to save people's lives. But I'm always filled with the useless knowledge as I walk into hospitals. But it was, it was pretty cool to get that on that anniversary. And for people who don't know, the smallpox vaccine,

• 18:15Speaker 07

  so there was, there was inoculation before Jenner came along. But inoculation and vaccine were different terms in the past. And so inoculation used the live smallpox virus, which was very deadly and very dangerous. You could become contagious through that process. Whereas Jenner took the cowpox virus and used it to create the vaccine. And in fact, the term vaccine, which he coined, comes from the Latin words, meaning from the cow. So that's, the first ever vaccine was the cowpox vaccine that Jenner created. But there was inoculation before that time.

• 18:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we eventually used the smallpox vaccine to wipe smallpox off the face of the planet in the 80s. Like, I mean, amazing.

• 18:53Speaker 07

  The only human virus to ever be eradicated. It is actually incredible.

• 18:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 18:58Speaker 07

  And it's one of those viruses, like, don't think too closely about, like, what would happen if that came back. Like, that's all I can just say. If that was ever used as a biological weapon or something, like, let's not, let's not go there. But that's where my, my, because like, I love, you know, obviously, medical history, but I love horror, I love Stephen King. So I'm always going to kind of like, the darkest, worst place. That's, that's often what I think about when I think about the virus. But, but there you go. But we have eradicated it. It's the first and only human virus we've eradicated, I believe.

• 19:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Well, so usually, I am not super optimistic about stuff. And so I'm glad that we had like, an optimistic, uplifting chat to start things off. But let's transition to talking about your amazing book. Because I would love to geek out about vaccines with you all day long. But you also wrote this great book.

• 19:40Speaker 07

  Well, I'll come back. I'll come back.

• 19:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, awesome. That sounds good. So I think a lot of people know that Arthur Conan Doyle is the guy who created Sherlock Holmes. But I think far fewer people know that he also had a bunch of medical training before that. So could you tell us a bit about his life and his medical training and how he ended up meeting the man who would inspire Sherlock Holmes?

• 19:59Speaker 07

  Yeah. So Sleuth Hound is about the origins of Sherlock Holmes. Most people think Sherlock Holmes began at 221B Baker Street, which is why I have the 221B door behind me right there. I know people can't see it on the podcast, but I had my husband create the door because my office wasn't silly enough. But yeah, most people think he began at 221B Baker Street, you know, with the hat and the pipe and the cocaine. But he actually began somewhere far more obscure. He began on a hospital ward in Edinburgh where a Scottish surgeon named Joseph Bell was teaching students how to read a human body like a crime scene. Bell had this incredible knack at being able to tell everything about a patient before they ever spoke a word, where they came from, what they did with their hands, a callus,

• 20:44Speaker 07

  a stain, a limp. All of these were clues to Bell if you only knew how to see them. And in 1878, Arthur Conan Doyle becomes one of his students. So one of the things that you might not know is that Conan Doyle actually qualified as a doctor, and he practiced as a doctor for quite some time while he started his writing career. And eventually, his writing took off and he just abandoned medicine because the writing paid a lot better. But he was a fully trained doctor, and it was Joe Bell who had this incredible characteristic, this method of scene that he then bestowed upon Sherlock Holmes and became kind of one of Sherlock Holmes' most famous traits.

• 21:26Daniel Whiteson?

  So if Bell is the inspiration for Holmes, is Conan Doyle himself the inspiration for Watson? Is Watson basically the stand-in?

• 21:34Speaker 07

  That's a good question. Yeah. Well, you know, it's funny, because at the very end of Sleuth Hound, there's a postscript. And it's a very strange postscript, but I thought, you know what, I'm gonna put this in, because there was a writer in the 1940s named Irving Wallace, and he wrote an essay on how Bell was the original Sherlock Holmes. And Adrian Conan Doyle, the youngest son of Conan Doyle, took great offense to this and said that his father was Sherlock Holmes. But this was such a strange argument to make because Conan Doyle literally says Joe Bell was the inspiration. I mean, there is a clip of Conan Doyle speaking, and this is incredible, because he was a man who was born in 1859, and we actually have a clip of him on film speaking. And in it, he talks about Bell

• 22:18Speaker 07

  and the influence he had on the creation of this character. But Adrian Conan Doyle just took great offense. So in the postscript, I talk about this weird fight that broke out in the 40s and 50s, because it allowed me to end the book on this incredible quote from Conan Doyle's youngest child, Jean. And she gave this quote in 1993. Now, remember, Conan Doyle, born in 1859, his daughter is alive in 1993. So you can do those math. Only men can do this, by the way. And she said, she said, "It was most certainly Joseph Bell who gave my father the idea for Holmes. He has said it in black and white. What further proof do you need?" And I thought, that's the perfect way to end this book. And so,

• 23:03Speaker 07

  so like I said, Conan Doyle, he didn't make it a secret. He outs Bell as the inspiration for this character in 1892, very shortly before he kills off the character. So it was really, there was a media frenzy in Bell's own time around him and about him being the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes.

• 23:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Some of the stories in the book about the deductions that Bell could make feel like, could that, is that really, could he really have done that? Like, how much do you think was like, overexaggeration, or like, the story growing over time? Or was he really this amazing? Like, you know, the kinds of deductions in the books?

• 23:38Speaker 07

  I think he was really that amazing. And actually, when you first read, so here's a really weird fact, a confession, so to speak. I had never read Sherlock Holmes at the time I had sold this book. I, of course, knew who Sherlock Holmes was. I'd never read the original Holmes story. And then when I sold the book, I decided that I wasn't going to read it right away, because I knew that the comparisons to Sherlock Holmes had dogged Bell at the end of his life. He found them rather reductive. And I wanted to tell the story of the real man behind the myth, and to give it that medical history lens that I felt he deserved as a doctor and somebody who also helped with forensic science. And, you know, this is like, kind of the first moment that medicine enters

• 24:18Speaker 07

  the courtroom. So I purposely put that off. But Bell, when you first read the book in the first couple of chapters, there's so many stories that feel so Sherlockian in it, almost to the point where I make the case that Conan Doyle probably transplanted a lot of these stories directly into the Sherlock Holmes tales. And I don't think that they were exaggerated, because everybody believed this about Bell. They, he was a wonder in Edinburgh. It was said that his students actually thought it was a magic trick, and they thought that perhaps he had gotten sight of the clerk's notes before he went into the consulting room. But this was always proven wrong when a last minute

• 24:58Speaker 07

  patient came in, and he would do this, this trick that he had. It was observational wizardry, and it was a phenomenal thing that he could do. And Conan Doyle never forgot it.

• 25:10Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, it's like magic in plain sight, though, right? It's like, there's no magic about it. The process is obvious. He tells you exactly how he did it. It's the best kind of mystery, because it's the kind where you're like, oh, I should have figured that out. I had all that same information. It's the incredible power of forensic research. I love that.

• 25:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, absolutely. And also, if you think about it, you know, when I talk to a lot of doctors, I say to them, are you surprised that the original detective was a doctor? Because, you know, they had, Bell had to cut through the petty deceits of his patients, you know? His patients weren't always giving him all the full information. For instance, there's a story of a woman walking into the consulting room, and he says, "Show me your Cuddy pipe." And she's very embarrassed. And then he says, "Show me the pipe," and she pulls the pipe out, and then she's ushered out of the room. And he tells the students, "I knew that she smoked a Cuddy pipe, because I could see the superficial burn on her cheek. I could see the cancerous ulcer on her lip, which you only get from a lifetime of smoking."

• 26:10Speaker 07

  And so, he was able to sort of cut through the noise and to get to the real diagnosis in that sense. And so, this was the method that he ended up teaching Arthur Conan Doyle. And at the time, policing in the 19th century was really in its infancy as well. And so you really did get this sense of the bumbling Bobby, you know, the Jack the Ripper crimes couldn't be solved, and there was all these kind of mishaps and mistakes. And so, when Sherlock Holmes comes into existence in fiction, there was this idea, if we can only apply that kind of scientific method to policing, how would it change everything in the way we capture criminals?

• 26:49Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. Well, I am desperate to learn about how we did policing before we used observation and forensic science. But first, let's take a break.

• 27:07Speaker 04

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• 29:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  The biggest game of the season, right here, right now.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  Starts Saturday strong. It's Big Noon Saturday on Fox. And here we go. It all starts at 10 Eastern with Big Noon Kickoff, live with an epic pregame. The crowd, the atmosphere, this is what makes it special. Then, it's America's number one game. What a hit. The best pregame, the best announcers, the biggest games. Down the sideline, touchdown. It's Big Noon Saturday, noon Eastern on Fox.

• 29:37Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Halloween has a funny way of making you buy things you'd never normally buy. A 10-foot skeleton? Sure. A full-size fog machine? Why not? Three bags of candy that somehow become six bags of candy? It happens. Which brings me to the Chase Freedom Flex card, the savvy decision that will earn you more cash back on the everyday purchases, plus the extraordinary Halloween tricks and treats. With Freedom Flex, you earn even more Treats on your Halloween and everyday needs. You get 5% cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories, 3% on dining and drugstores, and 1% on all other purchases. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded.

• 30:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's no tricks, all treats. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. So sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex Card. Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank, N A member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard. But then we found out she had agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult. So we asked her doctor for more help.

• 31:02Speaker 04

  Seeing symptoms like these in a loved one? It could be time to ask their doctor about Rexulti, Rexiprazole 2mg. The first FDA-approved treatment for this condition. Rexulti is proven to reduce agitation symptoms. Rexulti should not be used as an as-needed treatment. Elderly people with dementia-related psychosis have increased risk of death or stroke. Report fever, stiff muscles, and confusion, which can be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent. High blood sugar can lead to coma or death. Weight gain, increased cholesterol, unusual urges, dizziness on standing, falls, seizures, trouble swallowing, or sleepiness may occur. Learn more about these and other side effects at rexulti.com. Tap ad for P I.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  I'm glad I asked for help.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  Ask your loved one's doctor about Rexulti.

• 31:54Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, we're back. And we are talking to Lindsay Fitz Harris about the incredible story of the true inspiration of Sherlock Holmes, a man who actually had incredible observational powers. And before we went to break, we heard that the police picked up these techniques. And I was wondering, what did they do before they used forensic science? Was it all just random guessing? I mean, it's hard to put yourself in the minds of those folks.

• 32:17Speaker 07

  It was a strange time, you know? In fact, there was this thing that was called trial by beer, the beer that the body lays on. So B I E R. And so what would happen is you would bring somebody, you would bring somebody close to the body. And if the body spontaneously began to bleed, then it was a sign that they had murdered this person. It's really unscientific, right? And people, people were sometimes executed on the basis of this quote evidence. I share a few stories of this in Sleuthound. So yeah, there wasn't a science. And you can imagine a lot of innocent people were convicted in earlier periods. You start to get a professional police force in sort of the 1830s.

• 33:00Speaker 07

  You get the Bow Street Runners in London, eventually replaced by the Met. And so you start to get a professional police force. But again, it was a lot of, you know, trial and error. And so this book is as much about the story of Joe Bell, but it's also about his relationship with this man, Henry Duncan Littlejohn, who was a police surgeon in Edinburgh. He was brilliant forensic scientist. And it's about how they partnered up and solved some of the biggest crimes in the 19th century. But in between that story is the story of forensics and the story of the expert witness. And this is when Madison first enters the courtroom. And so what Littlejohn is teaching his students in Edinburgh is how to be that expert witness,

• 33:42Speaker 07

  you know, how to do the autopsies, how to look at the evidence, how to convey that to a jury. And he's involved in some of the highest profile cases. And he brings his friend Joe Bell on unofficially, much like Sherlock Holmes, to work on several of these cases. So I always like to tell a small story and a big story, you know? It's a story about Bell, but it's also a story about the development of forensics at this time. And there were a lot of competing theories. For instance, there was phrenology, which we know was based in racist beliefs. But you know, here's the thing about phrenology. A lot of people call it a pseudoscience, but I don't think you should call it a pseudoscience because it was a science that did harm in the 19th century.

• 34:23Speaker 07

  It was taken seriously by scientists and doctors, and so it was used. I think calling it a pseudoscience outright, like how we would understand it today, minimizes its impact that it had in the 19th century. I think that needs to be acknowledged. But you had things like phrenology. You had something called optography, which was this idea that the eyeball acted like a lens of a camera and that you might be able to extract the last image a person saw before they died off the lens of their eyeball. So you might be able to catch the murderer, you know? And, and you know, whenever I put this on social media, people always inevitably ask, well, did it work? Because it kind of sounds like it could, you know? It sounds like it has that plausibility. It could be in BaFest, right, Kelly?

• 35:06Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's right.

• 35:07Speaker 07

  Yeah. It sounds like a plausible absurd kind of thing. And so they even discussed this in relation to the Ripper crimes. And so you have all of these trial and errors. You have, you know, some things that caused harm, some things that just outright didn't work. And then the pulse of it is you have the development of the expert witness in people like Joe Bell and Henry Duncan Littlejohn. And so that is also part of the story. It's not just about Sherlock Holmes. It is about expert medicine in the courtroom.

• 35:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Help me understand why this development came so late. I mean, we've had like experimental science since Galileo and Francis Bacon. You know, why are people still relying on, you know, mysticism and stories and superstition?

• 35:48Speaker 07

  You know, some of it had to do with the way doctors were taught in the 19th century. And so one of the things I discuss in Sleuthound is how forensic science was much more progressive in Edinburgh. And there was a good reason for that. They, they start teaching it at the end of the 18th century, whereas you don't get a professorship in England until I think the 1830s. So they're quite far behind in England compared to Scotland by the time, you know, forensic science starts developing. In Scotland, they were just more scientifically minded for various reasons.

• 36:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Was it the haggis? I bet it's the haggis.

• 36:23Speaker 07

  It was, it was the haggis. It was in the, the blood sausage and it really fueled the brain. But if you think about it too, Edinburgh is a much smaller city. So when you were training as a doctor like Arthur Conan Doyle was, you had one university, you had one hospital. Whereas in London, there were multiple hospitals and multiple universities. And so your training wasn't standardized across the board. And actually, this was one of the issues that Lister faced when he was invited to come back to London to teach. He was up in Glasgow and up in Edinburgh. And he worried about that because he felt that there had to be some kind of standardized antiseptic method adopted across England.

• 37:01Speaker 07

  So Edinburgh is just this incredibly progressive city in science and medicine at the time. They have the famous Burke and Hare crimes, which I don't know if you guys know this story.

• 37:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Tell us.

• 37:14Speaker 07

  Oh, yes. I love telling people when they don't know this story. So Burke and Hare. And so in, in the early 19th century, doctors needed a lot of bodies. And the only legal bodies you could dissect were those of murderers who had been executed. And there weren't that many.

• 37:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Sorry, why did doctors need a lot of bodies? Just to like figure out what's inside them?

• 37:33Speaker 07

  They needed a lot of bodies to learn anatomy.

• 37:35Daniel Whiteson?

  Okay.

• 37:35Speaker 07

  Yeah. So this became part of the medical experience. This is part of how the training started to change. And it was a lot more focused on the actual science of the body and anatomy. And so they needed a lot of bodies to teach medical students. And of course, there weren't that many legal bodies to dissect. And so you get this kind of economy that grows around this and you get the body snatchers or the resurrection men. And these guys would go out into the graveyards and they would steal bodies. They were, they were very good at it. They would only open the grave at the top of the grave. You know, you, you would think that they'd open the whole thing, but they only dig down from the head of the grave. They would use instruments to break the coffin lid and then they would use chains to pull the body out. They could do this very quickly.

• 38:18Speaker 07

  They could steal as many as, you know, 10 or 12 bodies in a single night.

• 38:22Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 38:22Speaker 07

  And this was really important to what medicine becomes. Well, Burke and Hare decide, this is, this is a good gig, right? Like selling bodies to the anatomists could be very lucrative, but they didn't want to go out into the graveyards in the middle of the night. And so they decided to just skip that part and start killing people and selling those fresh bodies to the anatomists in Edinburgh.

• 38:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Early disruptors. These are the tech bros of the 1800s, right?

• 38:48Speaker 07

  They were thinking outside of the box, guys. And, and they do eventually get caught because the bodies were suspiciously fresh and recognizable. And the way that they were killing these people became known as Birking. So what they would do is they would put their full body weight onto the victim. They would get the victim drunk. They would put their full body weight onto the victim and hold the nose, pinch the nose, hold the mouth shut, and they would suffocate them. And so that became a term in the 19th century, Birking. A lot of people called Burke and Hare body snatchers. They were never body snatchers. They were just full-out murderers. They were caught. Hare turns king's evidence. He gets to walk away from all of this, but William Burke ends up swinging for the crime.

• 39:30Speaker 07

  And because it's in Scotland and they want to do an additional punishment, they end up publicly dissecting Burke. And they take his skin and they make various trinkets out of it, including a book, a pocketbook bound in human skin, which you can now see at Surgeons Hall in Edinburgh. If you ever go visit, I've held it.

• 39:48Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh.

• 39:49Speaker 07

  Yeah. I have held it. It feels just like leather, unsurprisingly.

• 39:54Daniel Whiteson?

  It is leather.

• 39:54Speaker 07

  And they have DNA tested some of these, these, yeah, exactly. It is leather. And they have DNA tested some, there were, it actually was so, I don't want to say it was so common, but it was common enough that it had a term, anthropodermic bibliopic binding books in human skin. It was a thing in the 19th century. And yeah, so they, they were really, I mean, you, you guys think we're bad with our true crime addiction now, like the 19th century was, was a wild ride. So Burke and Hare were very much a part of that dark underworld of medicine in Edinburgh. And Robert Christensen, who was one of the first toxicologists, actually helped convict Burke. And he ends up teaching Henry Duncan Littlejohn is also, he also teaches Joe Bell.

• 40:39Speaker 07

  And so Bell is very much, you know, a coming up in that tradition of early forensics in the 19th century.

• 40:45Daniel Whiteson?

  And did they feel differently from a moral point of view towards dead bodies? I mean, I know different cultures have different attitudes about it and different people have different attitudes about it. How big a deal was it to steal somebody's body? Is it as big a deal as it is today? I mean, it sounds like a big deal.

• 41:02Speaker 07

  I feel like, yeah, today, you definitely would end up with like your own Netflix series if you were just like out there digging up bodies.

• 41:08Daniel Whiteson?

  That's not a career tip, everybody.

• 41:10Speaker 07

  Not a suggestion, guys, as a quick way to fame, but you know, I think there's a series called like The Mortician, where something like that is going on. But yeah, it was, you know, it's, everybody had a different opinion about it, but the public were really fearful of this. There was a view of a physical resurrection, and so you wanted your body to be intact. And of course, you just didn't want your body of your grandmother to end up, you know, in the dissection room chopped up into little pieces.

• 41:38Daniel Whiteson?

  Let me push on that for a minute. Why not? Like, why does somebody object to having their grandmother be dissected?

• 41:44Speaker 07

  Because of the physical resurrection.

• 41:46Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh.

• 41:47Speaker 07

  And but also remember that the only legal bodies to dissect at this time were those of executed criminals. So there was that kind of, you know, shame around that, that it was somehow seen as like a punishment.

• 41:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Because, for example, I'd be very happy to have my body be like used for science or med students or, you know, taxidermy, or whatever.

• 42:07Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 42:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't care, whatever.

• 42:11Speaker 07

  Daniel's there for the human skin book. Like, yeah, he's, he's, he's fine with that.

• 42:16Daniel Whiteson?

  Special edition of my book, Bound in Me. There you go.

• 42:19Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 42:20Daniel Whiteson?

  One copy only.

• 42:21Speaker 07

  Only one available. Yeah, no, I mean, but, but here's the difference, consent, right? And, and so these people obviously weren't giving consent. And, and a lot of, you know, anatomical collections that we see in the US and in the UK are comprised of, of people who never gave consent. These bodies were stolen and these body parts were put into jars to study. They are important, and it's important to acknowledge that medicine became what it became because they had access to these bodies and they had access to these collections. But yeah, there was this real fear around the resurrection men in the 19th century. There was a story about how one time, this one graveyard in this village, they found out that a body had been stolen, and the people in the village went to the graveyard

• 43:06Speaker 07

  and dug up their relatives and dragged the coffins back to their house until the graveyard could be made secure. And they would make it secure with things like cemetery guns and watchmen. And they also had coffin collars so that they would put around the corpse, so you couldn't drag it out by a rope. So there were ways to protect the body, but of course, that cost money. And so a lot of the bodies that end up being stolen, you know, come from the poorer graves. And so a lot of medicine was built on, on the backs of the poor.

• 43:35Daniel Whiteson?

  All right, I've gotten us way off track by asking all these stories about bodies. Take us back to Sleuth Hounds and Dr. Bell.

• 43:43Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, so I, one of the parts of the book that I was just like so drawn into that I had to like cancel the rest of the stuff that I had going on that day so that I could keep reading, was about how we got to the point where we could identify people more than once. So like, if you're a repeat criminal offender, how do we know that in an era where like you don't have fingerprints or, you know, photos on social media yet? Like, yeah, can you walk us through that history? Because that was amazing.

• 44:07Speaker 07

  You know, I feel like this, of course, you would ask this question, because to me, this was like one of the most, Alphonse Bertillon, who is the French police officer who creates this, this method for measuring, he has 11 measurements, and how to measure a perpetrator. It, it's a very complicated system, but let me take you back. So you're absolutely right that in the early part of the 19th century, if you ended up being prosecuted, and later you were released, and then you were caught again, you could just use an alias, like nothing was stopping you from doing that. And so it was really difficult to identify repeat offenders. And there was a real concern about this, especially in Britain, because in the middle of the 19th century, the colonies in Australia stopped, you know, accepting criminals from Britain.

• 44:52Speaker 07

  And so Britain is suddenly worried about, you know, all these repeat offenders that might be walking around in Britain. And so there's this, this concern about this. And there's a French police officer named Alphonse Bertillon, and he starts putting his mind to this. And he creates these 11 different measurements. So like, one of them is from the tip of the finger to the crook of the elbow, and a measurement of the foot. And all of it was highly choreographed so that it was standardized, and there was no way to do it incorrectly. And then after he created that system, he also created abbreviations for all of this. So you could basically put all of it on an index card, and it would include a photo, the front of the person and the side of the person.

• 45:36Speaker 07

  So that's kind of the, the mugshot that we have today. And this was supposed to help identify repeat offenders. Now, when I was writing this section, it was so, I felt like it was really complicated. And I remember my husband, remember, artist? So we're both like artistic, we're not scientific. And I remember showing him the abbreviation, because I give an example of somebody who has a scar on his left arm, and yada, yada, yada, and the eye color. And then I show what that would have looked like in Bertillon's system. And it's absolutely, it looks like a, like a, a science equation. And my husband said, oh, that bastard. You know, it seems so, so complicated and so crazy.

• 46:17Speaker 07

  But actually, it was more simple than what they had before, you know? So, so Bertillon, he becomes very famous, he almost becomes as famous as Sherlock Holmes. But that is quickly replaced with fingerprinting within 10 to 15 years, which is obviously more effective and a simpler process. But we still have the mugshot. And so, yeah, there was all of these, these problems that had to be solved in the 19th century. How do we, you know, identify repeat offenders? And also, it's not even just, you know, repeat offenders. There's a story in Sleuth Hound where I talk about a shipwreck, and this, this sailor who died, and the mother believed that maybe he had survived. And then low and behold, a few years later, a man in Australia steps forward and claims to be him.

• 47:02Speaker 07

  And he doesn't look anything like him. He's like 300 pounds, and apparently the other guy was very slim. He doesn't have the tattoo that her son had, allegedly. There were so many things, but she just wanted to believe it, and she ends up giving him money each year. And she ends up dying thinking that was her son. And then later, he's brought up on fraud, and of course, it wasn't him at all. So there were all kinds of reasons why, you know, being able to identify somebody correctly was important back in the 19th century. So all of that kind of taps into forensics. And I talk about, you know, the first ballistic fingerprint, the first time that we match a bullet to a gun. All of this is, you know, background to the world that Bell grew up in.

• 47:42Daniel Whiteson?

  But it still seems to me like practically impossible. Like, you get somebody in your police station, you're trying to figure out if they're the same as somebody else. You have to like, match them against all of your records.

• 47:54Speaker 07

  Right.

• 47:55Daniel Whiteson?

  It reminds me of when I was a kid, and you'd use a credit card, and then they have like a book with all the credit card numbers that had been stolen, and they had to like sift through it. And at least those are in order, right?

• 48:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:06Daniel Whiteson?

  But, you know, if somebody's real name is, you know, Albert Alphonse, and they come in with an alias, you know, Zeus Zanzabar or something, you have no idea where to look. You have to look through your whole catalog to see if it's a match. It seems terribly impractical.

• 48:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, and also, of course, like, people change. They age, you know, they gain weight, they lose weight, they, they change. And so it definitely wasn't, you know, maybe the science that Bertillon hoped it would be. Like I said, thankfully, fingerprinting sort of replaces that pretty shortly within that period. But yeah, when you think about, how did they catch anybody in the 19th century? It's incredible. It also kind of tells us why they never caught Jack the Ripper. You know, it was sort of the golden era of being a murderer, because it was difficult. You know, and now we have DNA, and, you know, you, you, do you watch true crime, and you think, have they ever seen a true crime episode? Like, they're never gonna get away with that, but they still try it. But the 19th century definitely was, was the time to get away with, with murder, because

• 49:02Speaker 07

  it was a lot more difficult to trace those kinds of crimes.

• 49:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we are back to, it is way better now, which I love. And so.

• 49:10Speaker 07

  So what I was gonna say is, um, a lot of what the early forensics is built on the brutalized bodies of women who never got justice in the past. So something we can kind of like talk about a little bit, about, you know, the victims who fed the science that, you know, is featured in Sleuth Hound.

• 49:26Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, let's take a break, and when we come back, we're gonna talk about just that.

• 49:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers, producer, songwriter, guitarist, and co-founder of the group Chic. A great song has a way of defining a moment, a moment of joy, heartbreak, or anything in between. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, dropping in on some of the coolest, most fascinating artists working today. We'll go deep into their lives and careers and hear what it was like before the moment that made them. From hitmakers like Miguel.

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• 50:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story. It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Jonas Knox from Two Pros and a Cup of Joe. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota Ford Ability, and it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their

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• 51:35Speaker 04

  The biggest game of the season, right here, right now. Starts Saturday strong. It's Big Noon Saturday on Fox. And here we go. It all starts at 10 Eastern with Big Noon Kickoff, live with an epic pregame. The crowd, the atmosphere, this is what makes it special. Then it's America's number one game. What a hit. The best pregame, the best announcers, the biggest games. Down the sideline, touchdown. It's Big Noon Saturday, noon Eastern on Fox.

• 52:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Halloween has a funny way of making you buy things you'd never normally buy. A 10-foot skeleton? Sure. A full-size fog machine? Why not? Three bags of candy that somehow become six bags of candy? It happens. Which brings me to the Chase Freedom Flex Card, the savvy decision that will earn you more cash back on the everyday purchases, plus the extraordinary Halloween tricks and treats. With Freedom Flex, you earn even more treats on your Halloween and everyday needs. You get 5% cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories, 3% on dining and drugstores, and 1% on all other purchases. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. That's no tricks, all treats.

• 52:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. So sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex Card. Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, N.A. Member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard, but then we found out she had agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult. So we asked her doctor for more help.

• 53:29Speaker 04

  Seeing symptoms like these in a loved one? It could be time to ask their doctor about Rexulti, Rexiprazole 2mg, the first FDA-approved treatment for this condition. Rexulti is proven to reduce agitation symptoms. Rexulti should not be used as an as-needed treatment. Elderly people with dementia-related psychosis have increased risk of death or stroke. Report fever, stiff muscles, and confusion, which can be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent. High blood sugar can lead to coma or death. Weight gain, increased cholesterol, unusual urges, dizziness on standing, falls, seizures, trouble swallowing, or sleepiness may occur. Learn more about these and other side effects at rexulti.com. Tap ad for PI.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  I'm glad I asked for help.

• 54:06Speaker 04

  Ask your loved one's doctor about Rexulti.

• 54:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, we're back. And so let's talk about this sad topic, which is that a lot of what we learned was from the bodies of victims, and a lot of those victims' bodies were women.

• 54:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, and this also kind of holds true today. You watch a lot of true crime, and you see a lot of the victims are women. But certainly, this struck me when I was writing Sleuth Hound, because it is a fun book about Sherlock Holmes and about Joe Bell and Arthur Conan Doyle and all of that. But it is a story about a lot of women who were murdered by their husbands and never received any justice at all.

• 54:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, man.

• 54:52Speaker 07

  And I do make the point that a lot of the forensic advances in the 19th century were born out of these brutalized bodies. And so one of them was a woman named Jane Kelly, who in 1888, the same year that Ripper started killing, was murdered by her husband. And Bell and Little John perform the autopsy. They find out that there's more than 50 injuries on her body. But at the trial, he is not convicted of murder. He is convicted of culpable homicide, a lesser offense, because she was drunk during the time of her murder. And between, I think it was something like, yeah, it was between 1850 and 1900, no man

• 55:32Speaker 07

  in Scotland was convicted of murdering his wife when the wife was seen to be drunk or to be nagging.

• 55:39Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 55:39Speaker 07

  So she was partially responsible for her own death. And so, time and again.

• 55:45Daniel Whiteson?

  We had positive points for Scotland earlier, but now, oof.

• 55:49Speaker 07

  Not so good, not so good. Yeah, so it was sobering, you know? And then from there, I kind of move on to the Ripper crimes, because talk about the most famous five female victims who never received any justice at all. And Joe Bell and Little John do work on that case. I won't give too much away, but they claimed to have solved it. They exchanged envelopes with the name of Ripper, and it had the same name on it. And then later, Little John works on a case of a man named William Berry, who was in Whitechapel during the murders, and he had the opportunity, he fits the profile. And then he goes up to Dundee in Scotland, and one day, this is what he claims, he wakes up and his wife is dead.

• 56:33Speaker 07

  And he was just, he had this compulsion to chop her up and put her in a box. I mean, we've all been there, right? You wake up, your spouse is dead, you're like, oh, I'm gonna cut him up, I'm gonna put him in a box. It was just like this weird story. So he goes and he confesses it, and he says that he's worried that he'll be seen as Jack the Ripper. And then, of course, the media picks up on it, and people do believe he's Jack the Ripper. And so that story is also fascinating. And the man who ended up hanging William Berry said that Berry confessed to being Jack the Ripper. But I do think that it's such a weird story, like he thought that the police would believe him, that he just, that she just died, this sort of natural death, and that, you know, he just ended up cutting her up and putting her in the box, and he has no idea why he did that. So, you know.

• 57:16Daniel Whiteson?

  As one does.

• 57:17Speaker 07

  As one does. There was a lot of alcohol in the 19th century. I mean, it was a wild time. But, so Ripper appears in Sleuth Hound, and also, you know, Ripper not being caught and the hysteria around Jack the Ripper explains a lot about why Sherlock Holmes became such a famous character. You know, there was this real increase in literacy at the time. People were consuming true crime through the newspapers, and here you come with Sherlock Holmes, and it's just fascinating, and really puts to shame the bumbling Bobby. And here in Sherlock Holmes, he can solve all these crimes. But here's something that you might not know, because I didn't know this going into the book, but Conan Doyle absolutely hated Sherlock Holmes. Like, he just could not stand the character.

• 58:02Speaker 07

  He couldn't wait to kill him off. And he was shocked when he did kill him off.

• 58:08Daniel Whiteson?

  But he admired Bell.

• 58:09Speaker 07

  He admired Bell, but I think that the issue with Sherlock Holmes was he wanted to be seen as a more serious writer. And he felt like these detective stories were not very serious. He couldn't understand why people enjoyed them so much. And so eventually, he kills off Sherlock Holmes around the time that he also outs Joe Bell as the inspiration. And so it's very much like Sherlock Holmes is dead, long live Sherlock Holmes. And there is this media frenzy around Bell. And by the way, he doesn't just out Bell, but he puts Bell's address in the dedication.

• 58:43Daniel Whiteson?

  He doxes him? Wow.

• 58:45Speaker 07

  He doxes him. Why would he put his address in there? It was so funny. So there's this real media frenzy, and at that same time, in Sleuth Hound, as you will see, there is this high-profile murder case that happens in Scotland. It involves a country mansion, a murder dressed up like an accident, and it's just this brilliant case. And it even has a ballistics expert named Dr. Watson, I swear to God. And I read a letter from Bell that said, "My dear Watson," and I thought, you know, it doesn't get any better as a nonfiction writer than this.

• 59:18Kelly Weinersmith?

  So how did Bell feel when he got outed and his address was shared? Like, was Bell excited to now be famous? Or, yeah, what did he think?

• 59:26Speaker 07

  So in 1892, Conan Doyle does an interview. This is before he kills off Sherlock Holmes. And the journalist says something to the effect of, "This is amazing. It all has come from your imagination." And he says, "Well, you know, I had this professor who was really the inspiration for it." He does not name Bell at that point, but Bell reads the interview, and he writes to Conan Doyle, and he says, "Am I the professor you're talking about?" And by the way, Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he also knew Bell. And when he read Sherlock Holmes, he wrote to Conan Doyle and said, "But one thing bothers me, could this be our old friend Joe Bell?" So people who knew Bell recognized him in the character. So Bell writes to his old student, his student writes back, "I've seen the letter.

• 1:00:09Speaker 07

  It says, yes, it's to you, surely that I owe Sherlock Holmes." And they begin corresponding, and Conan Doyle asks permission to give his name to the journalist. But he does warn Bell that if he is outed as Sherlock Holmes, he will start getting letters from people who want him to solve crimes and all this kind of crazy. I mean, people really thought that Sherlock Holmes was a real person.

• 1:00:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Sure.

• 1:00:30Speaker 07

  And so Bell gives that permission. I think he's flattered at first, but later, he became sort of, you know, dogged by the comparisons. He found them reductive. Of course, Bell wasn't Sherlock Holmes in a lot of ways. He was a very empathetic person. He was a family man. He had three children. So for me, I really wanted to flesh out the man behind the myth. It wasn't just about him as a footnote to Sherlock Holmes, but it was him as a fascinating doctor. He helped reform nursing up in Scotland. He was a good friend of Florence Nightingale. He was a proponent of women in medicine. He was fascinating beyond those kinds of stories about Sherlock Holmes. But of course, there is that great thread about him working with Little John on these high-profile murder

• 1:01:14Speaker 07

  cases, which I really enjoyed bringing to life.

• 1:01:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you really do bring these stories to life, and you have a lot of details about the cases and about the people. How hard is it to research a topic like this, you know, like, what, 100, 150 years after it happened? Like, where do you get the information from? Is it in museums?

• 1:01:32Daniel Whiteson?

  Tell us your secrets.

• 1:01:33Speaker 07

  It's the worst. You know what? It's like, you know, it takes me four years to write these books usually. And my dad is like, you gotta write them faster. And I'm like, I can't. You know, this is just, it's a process, you know? It's just one of those things. I mean, luckily, in 2026, like, a lot of stuff is digitalized, so that's wonderful. Actually, when I began this book, and because I had just gone through breast, or I was still going through breast cancer, I sent my research assistant, Dr. Kate So, up to Scotland. She actually also transcribed Bell's diary for me because he had terrible handwriting. I mean, illegible, really. And she has this superpower where she can read this 19th century handwriting. She did a brilliant job.

• 1:02:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 1:02:13Speaker 07

  But she went up there to pull some documents for me. And at one point, she accidentally pulled a human specimen. And there was a little bit of panic in the room because they didn't know if she had qualifications to handle these objects. And I said, I don't need the human specimens. I just need the transcripts of the trials, et cetera. Just take photos of that. But the point is that a lot of what Henry Duncan Littlejohn worked on as a police surgeon, he actually kept, you know, the murder weapons. He kept the ropes that hang to the murderers. He kept the specimens. And so all of that is up in Edinburgh, which is fascinating. So they have a rich forensic collection up there. But there's letters, there's Bell's diary. Bell's diary had been in private collection

• 1:02:58Speaker 07

  in the Bell family for over 100 years. They, I don't know why they didn't let anybody have access to it beforehand. I guess they probably wanted enough time to pass between his passing and maybe the diary being used for a project. But I was really lucky to get access to that and to really, you know, dig into the man behind the myth. But it's not easy putting all of this together. And one of the things that really helped me was his partnership with Littlejohn, who I feel like is just as much a character in this book as Bell is. And I almost called it sleuth hounds. But it really, you know, Bell gives Conan Doyle the method, Littlejohn gives him the world, because Littlejohn also taught

• 1:03:38Speaker 07

  Conan Doyle. And Conan Doyle doesn't out Littlejohn as an inspiration. I also wonder if that's because he was the police surgeon, had this official role, and maybe he felt like this would be a little bit too much for his old professors. So, yeah, it's always a process, though, writing these books. It's never easy, but that's what I do as a historian. But I do, my dad thinks I spend way too much time in archives and-

• 1:04:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  But that's the fun.

• 1:04:04Daniel Whiteson?

  You're talking to the wrong person.

• 1:04:05Speaker 07

  He wants the books faster.

• 1:04:07Daniel Whiteson?

  Is the queen of over-research.

• 1:04:08Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:04:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, that's what makes me special.

• 1:04:12Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, you gotta be comfortable when you come out with it finally, right? You know, you gotta make sure that, you know, everything you're saying. I say a lot of times, you know, with the rise of AI, of course, which is a big threat to writers now, you know, I talk about how what historians do, we still work with handwritten material that hasn't been scraped. And so, for instance, with The Face Maker, which is about Harold Gilly's, it opens with this soldier who has his face blown off during the Battle of the Somme, and I came across his diary. And if you asked AI to create an outline of a book about Harold Gilly's before my book existed, they would have completely left him out. Now, of course, they would tell you about him because my book has been scraped by AI.

• 1:04:55Speaker 07

  But, so, this is the problem with that technology, especially when you're creating something. But historians still very much work with handwritten material. And what we do is analyze, you know, and contextualize. And the other thing is, actually, you guys might find this interesting. Medical historians aren't really interested typically in retrospective diagnosis. So, for instance, you might say Abraham Lincoln perhaps had Marfan's. You know, a lot of people have said that about him because of his height and his weight and that kind of gaunt look.

• 1:05:25Daniel Whiteson?

  Sorry, what's Marfan's?

• 1:05:26Speaker 07

  Marfan, you know, it's like a connective tissue disorder. Howard Stern has it. So people tend to be really tall and kind of gaunt. And there was a discussion about whether maybe Abraham Lincoln had it, or Henry VIII having diabetes, for instance. And that's all interesting. But here's the point that medical historians make, which is that what we know today isn't what we're going to know tomorrow. Okay? And we're always changing our views. And so there is no such thing as a pure science, like a pure fact, right? We're always reassessing how we understand the world. So for medical historians, what interests us most is how people contextualize and understood their experience of illness

• 1:06:07Speaker 07

  in the past, not what we might in 2026 think that they were suffering from, that they had no clue they were suffering from that. Because if we bring that lens, that 2026 lens, onto the past, what will happen in 100 years if that lens changes again? Does it really tell us a truth about the past? I mean, the best we can say is how people understood that experience themselves. So when Joseph Lister comes along and says, you need to wash your hands, and we can't understand why people were resistant to that, well, you have to also understand that they didn't understand germs existed.

• 1:06:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Speaker 07

  And, you know, washing your hands didn't make sense if they were going to get dirty with the next patient. Why would you wash your hands? So you have to get into that mindset. And that's why, you know, we should never laugh at the past, even though, I mean, I do laugh at the past. You know, there's plenty of weird stories, like Robert Liston, the fastest knife in the West End, who accidentally removed somebody's testicle. And, you know, there's definitely like some odd moments, you know, in medical history. But the point is that they were doing the best with the information that was available at the time as we are. And so I always ask audiences, what will we think is absurd in 100 years about today?

• 1:07:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:19Speaker 07

  And, you know, what's going to get a limit? Like, I always point to chemo. Like, I hope that we move to a place very soon where chemo is not sort of the dominant way of treating cancer.

• 1:07:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Speaker 07

  There's all kinds of therapies that are on the horizon. We're going to look back at it like it was barbaric, like the days of pre-anesthetic surgery. That's my hope at least. So, you know, we're always evolving. What we know today isn't what we know tomorrow. And that's why scientists and doctors should study the history of science and medicine, because that is a very powerful message, I think.

• 1:07:49Daniel Whiteson?

  That was amazing.

• 1:07:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  I feel like we should end there, because that was perfect.

• 1:07:52Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Kelly Weinersmith?

  That was awesome. Okay.

• 1:07:54Speaker 07

  All right.

• 1:07:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  This has been so much fun for me. Lindsay, I hope we have you on the show again. I absolutely loved your book.

• 1:08:02Speaker 07

  Oh, please do.

• 1:08:02Kelly Weinersmith?

  I highly recommend it to everybody. Thanks so much for coming to chat with us.

• 1:08:05Speaker 07

  Thank you so much for having me on.

• 1:08:13Daniel Whiteson?

  Thanks, everybody, for listening. Please go and do us a favor and rate the show on whatever podcast app you're using. It really helps people find us.

• 1:08:21Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is edited by the amazing Matt Kesselman.

• 1:08:26Daniel Whiteson?

  He really is a wizard. You can also find us online on Blue Sky, Instagram, and X, DNK Universe. Come engage with us.

• 1:08:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  You can email us at [email protected]. We really do want to hear from you.

• 1:08:42Daniel Whiteson?

  And you can find our website, www.danielandkelly.org, where you'll also find an invitation to join our Discord, where everybody comes and talks about the amazing universe.

• 1:08:53Kelly Weinersmith?

  And we also have the most amazing moderators. This is an iHeart Podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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