Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle) was a Scottish and English physician and writer.

Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, on May 22, 1859. His father was an artist.

In 1881, Conan Doyle graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Edinburgh and traveled to Africa as a ship's doctor.

Returning to his homeland, he began practicing medicine in one of the districts of London. He defended his dissertation and became a Doctor of Medicine. But gradually he began to write short stories and essays for local magazines.

Once he remembered an odd fellow, a certain Joseph Bell, who taught at the University of Edinburgh and periodically amazed his students with his extraordinary powers of observation and his ability to solve the most complex and confusing problems by means of the “deductive method.” Thus Joseph Bell appeared under the fictional name of the amateur detective Sherlock Holmes in one of the author’s novellas. True, that novella went unnoticed, but the next one, The Sign of Four (1890), brought him popularity. In the early 1890s, the story collections The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and The Return of Sherlock Holmes were published one after another. The “hallmarks” of Sherlock Holmes’s image were his intellect, irony, and spiritual aristocracy, which lend a special brilliance to the unraveling of intricate crimes.

Readers demanded ever new works about their favorite hero from the author, but Conan Doyle understood that his imagination was gradually fading, and he wrote several works with other main characters — Brigadier Gerard and Professor Challenger.

Doyle traveled extensively, sailed as a ship’s doctor to the Arctic on a whaling vessel, to Southern and Western Africa, and served as a field surgeon during the Anglo-Boer War.

In the last years of his life, Conan Doyle became interested in spiritualism and even published at his own expense a two-volume work, The History of Spiritualism (1926). Three volumes of his poetry were also published.

Conan Doyle died in 1930 at the age of 71. He wrote his own epitaph: