Is there a doctor in the house?

On this day in 1859 Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born. He came from an artistic family (at least on his fathers side) where his dad and uncles were noted artists of the day. Richard Doyle was a quite famous illustrator frequently appearing in Punch magazine. Arthur didn't show a leaning towards art so he went to college and became a doctor and by 1882 founded a practice with a school chum. This went sour pretty quick so he left a formed his own practice.

Business was slow for a new doctor in the town of Southsea so he started writing stories to fill the time. In 1887, A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlocke Holmes short story came out in Beeton's Christmas Annual.

A few years later he became an eye doctor and moved to London in 1891. He set up shop and sat and waited but no patients came. Ever. His apparent lack of marketing skills in his medical practices was the book worlds gift. He wrote more and more Sherlocke Holmes stories.

But Doyle longed for a reputation as a serious author and to spend more time on his historical writing. He killed his hero off, then brought him back, but his heart was already elsewhere.

He had many sides, but a common outlet was his writing. For example his passionate defence of England in The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct and The Great Boer War, his craving for justice in The Crime of the Congo.

After the death of his first wife in 1906, and up to the end of WWI, Doyle suffered through the deaths of many people close to him. His son, brother and 2 nephews died in a short span following the war. He soon turned to spiritualism and became an advocate of the pseudoscience of its proof of life beyond the grave. In 1921 he wrote The Coming of the Fairies about the Cottingley Fairies photographs.