His tombstone reads: “STEEL TRUE. BLADE STRAIGHT. KNIGHT, PATRIOT, PHYSICIAN & MAN OF LETTERS.”
Although he is best known as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle was also a physician. From 1876 to 1881, he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, including a period working in the town of Aston (now a district of Birmingham) and in Sheffield. While studying, he also began writing short stories; his first published story appeared in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal before he was 20. Following his term at university, he served as a ship’s doctor on a voyage to the West African coast. He completed his doctorate on the subject of tabes dorsalis in 1885.
In 1882, Conan Doyle joined former classmate George Budd as his partner at a medical practice in Plymouth, but their relationship proved difficult, and Conan Doyle soon left to set up an independent practice. Arriving in Portsmouth in June of that year with less than £10 to his name, he set up a medical practice at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea. The practice was initially not very successful; while waiting for patients, he again began writing stories. His first significant work was A Study in Scarlet, which appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual for 1887 and featured the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes, who was partially modelled after his former university professor Joseph Bell.
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