Round the Red Lamp

An often overlooked collection in Arthur Conan Doyle's career, these tales actually track the vital moment in his life when he decided to shift careers from provincial medic to celebrated London author

Detailed introduction, notes and scholarly apparatus
Appendixes that collect extra medical tales, Conan Doyle's early contributions to the medical press and the two one-act plays that he produced from two of the stories, including one of his greatest successes for the stage, Waterloo
Introduction provides the medical context to help understand its place in Conan Doyle's career

This is a scholarly edition of Arthur Conan Doyle's controversial collection of medical tales, first published in 1894 in the first flush of his fame. Conan Doyle had trained in medicine at Edinburgh University in the 1870s, and then spent eight years as a General Practitioner in Southsea, before deciding to become a professional author in 1890. The stories he collected in Round the Red Lamp are gathered from his medical training and incidents in his life as a provincial GP. Some of the stories are daring dealing explicitly with child birth, sexually transmitted diseases and malpractice. Some are sentimental or comic vignettes. Some are Gothic horrors. On publication the shades of dark and light bewildered some of his readers and the medical realism outraged others. Round the Red Lamp is a vital collection in understanding Conan Doyle's shift of profession from medic to author.