Arthur Conan Doyle

(1859 - 1930)

While studying medicine in Edinburgh in the early 1880s, Arthur Conan Doyle met a professor whose detailed observations and patient diagnoses became the model for Sherlock Holmes. He published the first of four novels about the detective, A Study in Scarlet, in 1887, and killed his protagonist in 1893—only to revive him in 1903. Conan Doyle served as a volunteer doctor in the Second Boer War, joined the Society for Psychical Research and wrote a history of Spiritualism, played on a cricket team of authors, and judged the world’s first bodybuilding competition.