NPR’s Morning Edition had an interesting article this morning on Arthur Conan Doyle before Holmes.  In his early years as a third-year medical student he served as the ship;s surgeon on an Arctic whaler and he kept a diary which has just been republished.  As an added bonus we get a few passages from the diary read by Alexander McCall Smith.

[url-http://www.npr.org/2012/10/25/163392051/from-ship-to-sherlock-doyles-arctic-diary]

Yes, he had a medical practice for years here in my town, Southsea (a district of Portsmouth) and was instrumental in setting up Portsmouth Football Club (or its predecessor). His house is long gone now, destroyed in the pasting the city took from the Germans in WWII. There’s a block of flats there now with a plaque affixed. It was here that he wrote the first two Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet and Sign of Four.