Memories and Adventures

by Arthur Conan Doyle

MY FIRST EXPERIENCES IN PRACTICE

A Strange Character—His Honeymoon—His Bristol Practice—Telegram from Plymouth—Six Amusing Weeks—A Deep Plot—My Southsea Venture—Furnishing on the Cheap—The Plot Explodes.

I have now come to the temporary end of my voyages, which were to be renewed in years to come, and I have reached the time when, under very curious circumstances, I endeavoured to establish myself in medical practice. In a book written some years afterwards called “The Stark Munro Letters,” I drew in very close detail the events of the next few years, and there the curious reader will find them more clearly and fully set out than would be to scale in these pages. I would only remark, should any reader reconstruct me or my career from that book, that there are some few incidents there which are imaginary, and that, especially, the whole incident of the case of a lunatic and of Lord Saltire in Chapter IV occurred to a friend and not to myself. Otherwise the whole history of my association with the man whom I called Cullingworth, his extraordinary character, our parting and the way in which I was left to what seemed certain ruin, were all as depicted. I will here simply give the essentials of the story, and retain the fictitious name.

In my last year of study at Edinburgh I formed a friendship with this remarkable student. He came of a famous medical family, his father having been a great authority upon zymotic disease. He came also of a famous athletic stock, and was a great Rugby forward himself, though rather handicapped by the Berserk fury with which he would play. He was up to international form, and his younger brother was reckoned by good judges to be about the best forward who ever donned the rose-embroidered jersey of England.

Cullingworth was as strong mentally as physically. In person he was about 5 ft. 9 in. in height, perfectly built, with a bulldog jaw, bloodshot deep-set eyes, overhanging brows, and yellowish hair as stiff as wire, which spurted up above his brows. He was a man born for trouble and adventure, unconventional in his designs and formidable in his powers of execution—a man of action with a big but incalculable brain guiding the action. He died in early middle age, and I understand that an autopsy revealed some cerebral abnormality, so that there was no doubt a pathological element in his strange explosive character. For some reason he took a fancy to me, and appeared to attach an undue importance to my advice.

When I met him first he had just indulged in one of his wild escapades, which ended usually in a fight or in a transitory appearance in a police court, but on this occasion was more serious and permanent. He had run off with a charming young lady and married her, she being a ward in Chancery and under age. However, the deed was done and all the lawyers in the world could not undo it, though they might punish the culprit. He told me how he and the lady had gone over a Bradshaw with the intention that when they came on a station of which neither of them had ever heard, they would make for that place and spend their honeymoon there. They came therefore upon some awful name, Clodpole-in-the-Marsh or something of the kind, and there they sojourned in the village inn. Cullingworth stained his yellow hair black, but the stain took in some places and not in others, so that he looked as if he had escaped from Barnum’s show. What Clodpole-in-the-Marsh could have thought of such an extraordinary couple I cannot imagine, and it is probably the one occasion on which it ever buzzed. I cannot think of any surer way of getting publicity than that which Cullingworth took to avoid detection. In London they would have been perfectly unobserved. I remember that for years Cullingworth’s hair presented curious iridescent tints which were the remains of his disguise.

He brought his bride safely to Edinburgh, where they hired a flat and lived in it without furnishing it save for the absolutely needful. I have dined with them there on an apple dumpling, seated on a pile of thick volumes as there was no chair. We introduced them to a few friends, did what we could for the lonely lady, and finally they drifted off, and for a time we heard no more.

Just before I started for Africa I got a long telegram from Cullingworth imploring me to go to Bristol as he needed my advice. I was in Birmingham and I set forth at once. When I reached Bristol he conducted me to a fine mansion, and there poured out his tale of woe. He had started in great style, hoping to rally the remains of his father’s patients, but his money had run out, he was dunned by his tradespeople, there were no patients, and what was he to do? We had a joyous riotous time for two days, for there was an exuberant atmosphere about the man which rose above all trouble. The only advice I could give was that he should make a composition with his creditors. I heard afterwards that he assembled them, addressed them in a long and emotional speech, reduced them almost to tears with his picture of the struggles of a deserving young man, and finally got a unanimous vote of confidence from them with full consent that he should pay at his own leisure. It was the sort of thing that he would do, and tell the story afterwards with a bull’s roar of laughter which could be heard down the street.

When I had been back a couple of months from Africa, I received another telegram—he always telegraphed and never wrote—which ran in some such way as this: “Started here last June. Colossal success. Come down by next train if possible. Plenty of room for you. Splendid opening.” The telegram was stamped Plymouth. A second even more explosive telegram upbraided me for delay and guaranteed me £300 the first year. This looked like business, so off I went.

The events of the next six weeks, in the late spring and early summer of 1882, were more fitted for some rollicking novel than for the sober pages of a veracious chronicle. The conditions which I found at Plymouth were incredible. In a short time this man, half genius and half quack, had founded a practice worth several thousand pounds of ready money in the year. “Free consultations but pay for your medicine,” was his slogan, and as he charged a good price for the latter it worked out all the same in the end. The mere words “Free Consultations” attracted crowds. He used drugs in a heroic and indiscriminate manner which produced dramatic results but at an unjustifiable risk. I remember one instance where dropsy had disappeared before a severe dose of croton oil in a way that set all the gossips talking. People flocked into the town from 20 and 30 miles round, and not only his waiting rooms, but his stairs and his passages, were crammed. His behaviour to them was extraordinary. He roared and shouted, scolded them, joked them, pushed them about, and pursued them sometimes into the street, or addressed them collectively from the landing. A morning with him when the practice was in full blast was as funny as any pantomime and I was exhausted with laughter. He had a well-worn volume on Medical Jurisprudence which he pretended was the Bible, and he swore old women on it that they would drink no more tea. I have no doubt he did a great deal of good, for there was reason and knowledge behind all that he did, but his manner of doing it was unorthodox in the extreme. His wife made up the prescriptions at a pigeon-hole at the end of a passage and received the price which was marked on the label carried down by the patient. Every evening Cullingworth walked back to his great residential house upon the Hoe, bearing his bag of silver, his coat flying, his hat on the back of his head, and his great fangs grinning up at every doctor whose disgusted face showed at a window.