Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born in 1859 in Edinburgh,
Scotland to an Irish Catholic family. He was sent away to school in
England to the draconian Stonyhurst College. This was partly to give
the boy a good Jesuit education, one which was to destroy his faith,
and partly to get him out of the way of his increasingly demented
father.
He studied medicine at Edinburgh University and in spite of colleagues
of the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and J M Barrie, was not entirely
gripped by his studies there. An adventurer at heart, he spent a year
in the middle of his studies as a ship’s surgeon on an Arctic whaler.
It was while he was practicing medicine in Portsmouth that he started
writing A Study In Scarlet, what was to be the first of the series of
tales about the most famous detective of all time, Sherlock Holmes.
