The First Operation - Round the Red Lamp - Arthur Conan Doyle - 130 / 365 of reading one short story every day.

The First Operation - Round the Red Lamp - 1894



Round the Red Lamp is a collection of 17 short stories, all of which centers on physicians and the life and community of doctors. Conan Doyle’s detective stories often refer to forensic evidence and medical principles. The plots of many stories often seem like extended medical analyses, moving from hypothesis to diagnosis through the accumulation of facts and Holmes’ characteristic deductive reasoning.

Conan Doyle’s connection with medicine is made most explicit in these stories, in which he fully explores his love for his former profession. While his stories initially garnered praise and widespread popularity when published in the magazine Strand, he decided to leave medical career to become a full-time writer. even then the medical field did not leave his psyche. Traces of that white coat community lingered on and can be seen in his future writings. Readers can see that in the character of Dr. Watson with his helpful suggestions to Holmes' conclusions in various cases, but also in Holmes’s deductive methods, which were famously inspired by Conan Doyle’s former professor of surgery, Dr. Joseph Bell.



Artist's image of Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle in his student clinic.
(From the Stark Munro Letters, A. C. Doyle, 1895)

In a letter to a friend, which was later used as the preface to the collection, Conan Doyle suggests that medicine and fiction could generate similar palliative effects: “A tale which may startle the reader out of his usual grooves of thought, and shocks him into seriousness, plays the part of the alterative and tonic in medicine, bitter to the taste but bracing in the result”. In an interview given to The Idler magazine, also in 1894, Conan Doyle uses another medical metaphor to describe the practice of writing: “To get an idea to penetrate to the masses of the people you must put fiction round it, like sugar round a pill. No statesman and no ecclesiastic will have more influence on public opinion than the novelist of the future will have”.


The First Operation is a comical story about a first year student and his first day at surgery. The student as well as his senior, who guides him, remains unnamed. I think it was a deliberate genius by Doyle to emphasize on the nature of relationship between the two - one a novice and a learner as well as the other a seasoned learned person of practice, as well as to show that in professions such as medicine, there is a need to have gradual and systematic accumulation of practice and theory. Thus throughout the story there is student and a teacher.


The young man is nervous at the moment and is about to witness a surgery, along with some other classmates. The patient is a woman who has a tumor at the throat. The tumor itself is described quite animatedly. Blue veins with purple skin and creamy background. I think we commoners see these things as ugly or fancy but for nurses and doctors this is second skin (pun not intended).


When the senior doctor starts a lecture on the clinical description of the lady's health and tumor situation , the young man is affected by the whole atmosphere in the room - the tumor, the heaviness of the mood and the lecture. Promptly he faints. When he is about, his classmates have a good laugh at the exact reason of his faintness.





Vintage 1930 illustartion

caption partial courtesy by Nyumed Blog