Round The Red Lamp | Page 3

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ROUND THE RED LAMP
BEING FACTS AND FANCIES OF MEDICAL LIFE
By SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

THE PREFACE.
[Being an extract from a long and animated correspondence with a
friend in America.]
I quite recognise the force of your objection that an invalid or a woman
in weak health would get no good from stories which attempt to treat
some features of medical life with a certain amount of realism. If you
deal with this life at all, however, and if you are anxious to make your
doctors something more than marionettes, it is quite essential that you
should paint the darker side, since it is that which is principally
presented to the surgeon or physician. He sees many beautiful things, it
is true, fortitude and heroism, love and self-sacrifice; but they are all
called forth (as our nobler qualities are always called forth) by bitter

sorrow and trial. One cannot write of medical life and be merry over it.
Then why write of it, you may ask? If a subject is painful why treat it at
all? I answer that it is the province of fiction to treat painful things as
well as cheerful ones. The story which wiles away a weary hour fulfils
an obviously good purpose, but not more so, I hold, than that which
helps to emphasise the graver side of life. A tale which may startle the
reader out of his usual grooves of thought, and shocks him into
seriousness, plays the part of the alterative and tonic in medicine, bitter
to the taste but bracing in the result. There are a few stories in this little
collection which might have such an effect, and I have so far shared in
your feeling that I have reserved them from serial publication. In
book-form the reader can see that they are medical stories, and can, if
he or she be so minded, avoid them.
Yours very truly,
A. CONAN DOYLE.
P. S.--You ask about the Red Lamp. It is the usual sign of the general
practitioner in England.

CONTENTS.
BEHIND THE TIMES HIS FIRST OPERATION A STRAGGLER OF
'15 THE THIRD GENERATION A FALSE START THE CURSE OF
EVE SWEETHEARTS A PHYSIOLOGIST'S WIFE THE CASE OF
LADY SANNOX A QUESTION OF DIPLOMACY A MEDICAL
DOCUMENT LOT NO. 249 THE Los AMIGOS FIASCO THE
DOCTORS OF HOYLAND THE SURGEON TALKS

ROUND THE RED LAMP.

BEHIND THE TIMES.

My first interview with Dr. James Winter was under dramatic
circumstances. It occurred at two in the morning in the bedroom of an
old country house. I kicked him twice on the white waistcoat and
knocked off his gold spectacles, while he with the aid of a female
accomplice stifled my angry cries in a flannel petticoat and thrust me
into a warm bath. I am told that one of my parents, who happened to be
present, remarked in a whisper that there was nothing the matter with
my lungs. I cannot recall how Dr. Winter looked at the time, for I had
other things to think of, but his description of my own appearance is far
from flattering. A fluffy head, a body like a trussed goose, very bandy
legs, and feet with the soles turned inwards--those are the main items
which he can remember.
From this time onwards the epochs of my life were the periodical
assaults which Dr. Winter made upon me. He vaccinated me; he cut me
for an abscess; he blistered me for mumps. It was a world of peace and
he the one dark cloud that threatened. But at last there came a time of
real illness--a time when I lay for months together inside my
wickerwork-basket bed, and then it was that I learned that that hard
face could relax, that those country-made creaking boots could steal
very gently to a bedside, and that that rough voice could thin into a
whisper when it spoke to a sick child.
And now the child is himself a medical man, and yet Dr. Winter is the
same as ever. I can see no change since first I can remember him, save
that perhaps the brindled hair is a trifle whiter,