Round the Red Lamp (1894) and other medical writings
Arthur Conan Doyle
Edited by Robert Darby
"In his informative introduction, Robert Darby argues that these texts are valuable as social history, capturing the practices of physicians at the cusp of modern medicine. To this end he contributes annotations, gathers medical stories by Doyle not found in earlier editions and includes Doyle's nonfiction medical writings. Round the Red Lamp should appeal to others besides historians and hypochondriacs, however. Some tales are ephemeral Victoriana, but others deal with issues that don't date: life, death, and the random workings of fate."
-- Times Literary Supplement, November 2007
"This book [...] contains the text of the 1894 Methuen first edition of Round the Red Lamp, Doyle's ill-received collection of medically themed short stories, as well as his nonfiction medical writing and three additional stories reprinted verbatim from the periodicals in which they first appeared. Editor Darby, author of the admirable A Surgical Temptation: The Demonization of the Foreskin and the Rise of Circumcision in Britain, contributes a fine introduction and some helpful but brief notes to the individual pieces....The best of the bunch is the highly disturbing 'The Case of Lady Sannox,' in which a sadistic husband goads the surgeon sleeping with his wife into mutilating her lower lip with a scalpel."
-- Library Journal, January 2008
When Round the Red Lamp appeared in 1894, readers and reviewers were appalled. Expecting tales in the style of Conan Doyle's popular Sherlock Holmes stories, readers were shocked to find instead harrowing medical stories involving childbirth, syphilis, and botched amputations.
The tales in Round the Red Lamp range in theme from the realistic to the bizarre in such stories as 'Lot No. 249', involving a reanimated mummy that stalks a young medical student, and 'The Los Amigos Fiasco', where a doctor's misconception about the effects of electricity brings about surprising results for a condemned prisoner. In addition to the fifteen stories in the original collection, this edition reprints three of Conan Doyle's other hard-to-find medical tales, including the chilling masterpiece 'The Retirement of Signor Lambert'.
In addition to being a prolific writer, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was a medical doctor and the author of a variety of nonfiction articles and essays on medical subjects. This edition includes a selection of Conan Doyle's scarce nonfiction medical writings, some of which have never been reprinted. As Robert Darby argues in the introduction to this edition, these stories and articles provide 'a rare glimpse into the world of a provincial GP at the moment when old-style medicine was dying and the modern medical profession was emerging'.
