Round the Red Lamp: Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life

by Arthur Conan Doyle

Overview

[Being an extract from a long and animated correspondence with a friend in America.] I quite recognise the force of your objection that an invalid or a woman in weak health would get no good from stories which attempt to treat some features of medical life with a certain amount of realism. If you deal with this life at all, however, and if you are anxious to make your doctors something more than marionettes, it is quite essential that you should paint the darker side, since it is that which is principally presented to the surgeon or physician.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781512211634
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	05/14/2015
Pages:	110
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.23(d)

About the Author

Roger Luckhurst is Geoffrey Tillotson Professor of Nineteenth Century Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of many books on science fiction, the Gothic and specialises in the late nineteenth century. He has edited for Oxford World’s Classics works by Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and H. G. Wells, and, for the British Library Press, a selection of the ghost stories of M. R. James.

Date of Birth:

May 22, 1859

Date of Death:

July 7, 1930

Place of Birth:

Edinburgh, Scotland

Place of Death:

Crowborough, Sussex, England

Education:

Edinburgh University, B.M., 1881; M.D., 1885

Table of Contents

General Editor’s IntroductionAcknowledgementsChronology of the Life of Arthur Conan DoyleIntroductionGenesis and CompositionPublication HistoryReceptionContext: BiographicalContext: Medical

Round the Red LampThe PrefaceBehind the TimesHis First OperationA Straggler of ’15The Third GenerationA False StartThe Curse of EveSweetheartsA Physiologist’s WifeThe Case of Lady SannoxA Question of DiplomacyA Medical DocumentLot No. 249The Los Amigos FiascoThe Doctors of HoylandThe Surgeon TalksEssay on the Text

Appendices

1. Additional Stories added to Crowborough edition‘Crabbe’s Practice’ (1884)‘My Friend the Murderer’ (1882)
2. Author’s Edition preface to Round the Red Lamp (1903)
3. One-Act play adaptations‘Foreign Policy’ (1893)‘Waterloo’ (1894)
4. Early Medical Essays of Conan Doyle

‘Gelseminum as a Poison’, British Medical Journal (20 Sept 1879)‘Notes on a Case of Leucocythaemia’, The Lancet (25 March 1882)‘Life and Death in the Blood’, Good Words (March 1883)‘The Contagious Diseases Act’, The Medical Times (16 June 1883)‘American Medical Diplomas’ The Evening News, Portsmouth (23 Sept 1884)‘The Remote Effects of Gout’, The Lancet (29 November 1884)‘Compulsory Vaccination’, The Evening Mail, Portsmouth (15 July 1887)‘Compulsory Vaccination’, The Hampshire County Times (27 July 1887)‘The Consumption Cure’, Daily Telegraph (20 Nov 1890)‘Dr Koch and His Cure’, Review of Reviews 2 (Dec 1890)

ApparatusAbbreviationsEmendations and VariationsExplanatory Notes

Editorial Reviews

Luckhurst has produced a scholarly yet accessible edition of a pivotal collection of medical short stories, which should be essential reading for students of nineteenth-century literature and medicine. Beyond relating a fascinating publication and reception history, the introduction is a great starting point for anyone wishing to understand how medical practitioners were represented in Victorian fiction.

Megan Coyer