Edinburgh & Lothians



Joseph Bell (1837-1911)

One of Bell's medical students was Arthur Conan Doyle, who was so impressed by Bell’s extraordinary powers of deduction in diagnosing patients’ ailments that he used him as the basis for his famous fictional detective – Sherlock Holmes. Joseph Bell became the first surgeon to the newly created Department of Surgery in the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in 1887, and was also the first surgeon to give systematic instruction to the nurses. He was editor of the Edinburgh Medical Journal from 1873 to 1896, and President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh from 1887 -

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