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

by Arthur Conan Doyle, Roger Luckhurst (Editor)

Overview

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 Universityin 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781399519182
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	07/18/2023
Series:	The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	908,029
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (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 Introduction; Acknowledgements; Chronology of the Life of Arthur Conan Doyle; Introduction; Genesis and Composition; Publication History; Reception; Context: Biographical; Context: Medical; Round the Red Lamp; The Preface; Behind the Times; His First Operation; A Straggler of ’15; The Third Generation; A False Start; The Curse of Eve; Sweethearts; A Physiologist’s Wife; The Case of Lady Sannox; A Question of Diplomacy; A Medical Document; Lot No. 249; The Los Amigos Fiasco; The Doctors of Hoyland; The Surgeon Talks; Essay 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); Apparatus; Abbreviations; Emendations and Variations; Explanatory Notes.