The Incredible Life Of The Real Sherlock Holmes

Bell was born in 1837 and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland at a time when his strict religious upbringing would seem very normal. Thanks to his father's involvement with the Free Church, which had no ties to the state or government, Bell and his siblings were well-educated in all things Biblical. Bell's affinity for the church would continue throughout his life and later influence his charitable works.

As a young student, Bell was that kid who never got into trouble and always excelled in his studies. His studious nature is what allowed him to make it through the class of one James Gloag, a math teacher at Edinburgh Academy who had a penchant for beating his students with a type of leather whip known as a "tawse," according to The Real Life Sherlock Holmes: A Biography of Joseph Bell. It seems Bell was rarely a target of Gloag's.

Bell came out on the other side with a well-formed education, including several languages, and an extensive athletic resume that would turn into an intellectual love of boxing later on. Think Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock minus all the "ouch."

During the course of Bell's medical work, he would become a professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh. It was here, in 1876, according to National Galleries Scotland, that a certain student would walk through the doors expecting to graduate and live out his life as a surgeon, but that's not what fate had in mind. The student would instead meet Dr. Joseph Bell and have his future and the world of literature change forever. That student was Arthur Conan Doyle.

Bell was known for teaching observational methods as an important part of medical diagnosis, believing that using your senses could tell you as much, if not more than, asking questions. Also he was really, really good at it. Further, he'd teach the power of imagination as a way to weave observations into theories. He enjoyed using his deductive and reasoning skills to impress his students by giving them patient histories that he seemingly pulled out of a hat. It was these skills, and his reported cold and calculated demeanor toward patients, that would be the basis for Sherlock Holmes, according to Stanford University.

We've established that Joseph Bell was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, but we haven't discussed Dr. Watson at all. Dr. John Watson, Sherlock's fictional sidekick and scribe of his tales, was played by Arthur Conan Doyle, for a while at least.

In Doyle's second year of medical school, Bell hand-picked him to work as his medical assistant in Bell's ward, according to Conan Doyle Info, which gave Doyle more than ample opportunity to study Bell's personality and methods closely. Doyle would take Bell's belief that observation was the key to being a good physician and to coming up with an accurate theory or diagnosis, and stow it away for future use as a character we know and love. Just as Watson took notes on his boss, Sherlock Holmes, and later whipped the notes into grand adventures, so Doyle took notes on Joseph Bell. When he later turned these observations into the Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle essentially became Watson in real life.

We've established that Joseph Bell was a surgeon and a teacher, but we've talked very little about his detective work, mostly because it wasn't a big part of his life. Unlike the infamous Sherlock Holmes, whose investigative work was the mainstay of his identity, Bell's time as a detective was only a part-time gig. There weren't cameras on street corners or FBI databases full of DNA sequences in the 1800s, so the police in Edinburgh had to use old-fashioned deduction. And Joseph Bell was one of the best. According to Mount Sinai Journal, Bell rather enjoyed detective work and fancied himself an amateur investigator.

When Bell worked on crimes, they were usually major crimes and he was usually working alongside the police doctor Sir Henry Duncan Littlejohn. While working with Littlejohn, Bell had been involved with the case of Elizabeth Chantrelle's murder in 1877 and the Ardlamont mystery in 1893. Littlejohn and Bell found that Chantrelle, "thought to have died of gas inhalation, had in fact been poisoned by her husband," according to Scottish Field. In the Ardlamont case, Littlejohn and Bell discovered that a suspected suicide was actually a murder, but prosecutors couldn't secure a conviction against the suspect. Unless you're a serious Victorian history buff, you probably haven't heard of these cases, but don't worry — he also worked on the Jack the Ripper case.

The case of Jack the Ripper was filled with brutal killings that confused and frustrated investigators to the point that Scotland Yard began to enlist help from detectives around the United Kingdom, Joseph Bell and Sir Littlejohn included. In this case, the two doctors didn't work together but instead conducted two independent investigations. As Bell put it, "When two men set out to investigate a crime mystery, it is where their researches intersect that we have a result." And, this is where the conspiracy buffs get interested.

You know how the Ripper case never got solved? Well, it actually might have been solved, but no one alive today has evidence to prove the identity of the killer. According to Scottish Field, Bell and Littlejohn may have cracked the case. They say that at the end of both doctors' investigations, the pair met to exchange the name of their suspect by writing them down and exchanging names. And they supposedly both wrote the same name. Scottish Field notes that the murders stopped soon after and nothing seems to have come of their investigation.

In the political landscape of the late 1800s, right around the time of the women's suffrage movement in America, the real-life Sherlock Holmes was well ahead of the game in supporting women's rights. He adamantly campaigned for women to be admitted to medical school, according to National Galleries Scotland, unheard of at the time. Bell even wrote a helpful manual titled Notes on Surgery for Nurses, one of the earliest medical texts for nurses. He dedicated it to his friend, Florence Nightingale.

Joseph Bell was also a key figure and founder of the Queen Victoria Jubilee Institute for Nurses in Edinburgh, where he held the office of vice president. Though controversial at the time, Bell agreed to formally teach medicine to female students, according to Scottish Field. This lined up pretty well with his support of women's suffrage, which was also controversial at the time.

Sure, Joseph Bell didn't write the sort of fiction that would bring him oodles of fame like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did, but he had a literary career of his own, mostly in the field of medicine. Joseph Bell's books, being what they were, did fairly well. Notes on Surgery for Nurses would be a best-seller through the 1890s, according to The Queen's Nursing Institute Scotland, and his Manual of the Operations of Surgery would manage to run seven editions. Bell would also author several medical theses and other articles on non-medical topics throughout his life. He even worked as Edin Medical Journal's editor for a solid 23 years.

Bell also wrote poetry, according to The Real Life Sherlock Holmes: A Biography of Joseph Bell, mostly dabbling in poems regarding nature or inspired by religious themes. Poetry never really became part of Bell's money-making career, but with all of the other accomplishments under his belt, we can probably forgive the real-life Sherlock Holmes for not becoming a world-renowned poet as well.