Round the Red Lamp

The first scholarly edition of Arthur Conan Doyle's controversial collection of medical stories from the height of his initial fame in 1894 Arthur Conan Doyle trained in medicine at Edinburgh University in the 1870s and then spent eight years as a General Practitioner in Southsea, before deciding to become a professional author in 1890. The stories collected in Round the Red Lamp are gathered from his medical training and incidents in his life as a provincial GP. Some of the stories are daring - dealing explicitly with child birth, sexually transmitted diseases and malpractice. Some are sentimental or comic vignettes. Some are Gothic horrors. On publication the shades of dark and light bewildered some of his readers and the medical realism outraged others. Round the Red Lamp is a vital collection in understanding Conan Doyle's shift of profession from medic to author. [Bio]Roger Luckhurst is Geoffrey Tillotson Professor of Nineteenth Century Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of many books on science fiction and the Gothic, and specialises in the late nineteenth century.