From Sherlock Holmes as a medical professor

Abstract

Newly graduated from Edinburgh Medical School, Arthur Conan Doyle found himself as a medical novelist with little clientele and plenty of free time. It was in these long periods of obligatory inactivity and forced tenure in his office that he began to write; perhaps it did so as a way to combat tedium or as an attempt to increase his dwindled personal income; the end result was the creation of one of the best known and celebrated literary characters: the "amateur" detective Sherlock Holmes.
A character of well-defined traits and strong characterization, Holmes is one of the few children of the pen who possesses the gift of being treated as if he were really a man of flesh and blood.
Tall and heartbreaking, hooked-nosed and vivid gray eyes, cold and methodical, shrewd observer of active imagination, with extensive and dissexexed knowledge of chemistry, anatomy, botany, tabloid literature, music and laws, which, on the one hand, do not pretend to be scholarly and on the other, far exceed average.