SI]ecial article I
I
Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Malcolm Morris Richard M. Caplan, MD Iowa City, Iowa
You certainly know who Sherlock Holmes is, and you probably know at least a little about Arthur Conan Doyle. But I can safely guess that few of you know of Malcolm Morris. So my mission is to acquaint you with a dermatologist who well deserves remembering because of his substantial importance to dermatology and to show his importance to Conan Doyle and therefore, indirectly, to Sherlock Holmes. The best known link between Doyle and Malcolm Morris comes from two references to Morris in Doyle's 1924 autobiography, Memories and A d ventures. 1 First, one needs to know that in 1890 Doyle became intensely interested in Robert Koch's claim that tuberculin could be used effectively to cure tuberculosis--so interested, in fact, that he travelled to Berlin that year to hear Koch's announcements and demonstrations. It was on the train, en route to Berlin, that Malcolm Morris made an important suggestion. Here is how Doyle tells it: I went on to Berlin that night and found myself in the Continental express with a very handsome and courteous London physician bound upon the same errand as myself.We passed most of the night talking and I learned that his name was Malcolm Morris and that he also had been a provincial doctor, but that he had come to London and had made a considerable hit as a skin specialist in Harley Street. It was the beginning of a friendship which endured .... Two days later I was back in Southsea, but I came back a changed man. I had spread my wings and had felt something of the powers within me. Especially I had been influencedby a long talk with Malcolm Morris, in which he assured me that I was wasting my life in the provinces and had too small a field for my activities. He insisted that I From the University of Iowa College of Medicine. Moditied from a presentation made to the Sir James Saunders Society at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Dermatology, Atlanta, Georgia, Dec. 4, 1990. No reprints available. 16/1/'31769
should leave general practice and go to London. I answered that I was by no means sure of my literary success as yet, and that I could not so easily abandon the medical career which had cost my mother such sacrificesand myself so many years of study. He asked me if there was any special branch of the profession on which I could concentrate so as to get away from general practice. I said that of late years I had been interested in eye work... "Well," said Morris, "why not specialize upon the eye? Go to Vienna, put in six months' work, come back and start in London. Thus you will have a nice clean life with plenty of leisure for your literature." I came home with this great suggestion buzzing in my head. "That's certainly an important contribution to the personal story of Doyle," you may be saying to yourself, "but what has that to do with Sherlock Holmes?" The answer may be found in a different autobiography--this one written by the son of Malcolm Morris, whose name was Sir Harold Spencer Morris. He became an eminent attorney in Britain and represented East Bristol in Parliament. Born in 1876 and dying in 1967, he published his own lifestory under the title Back View 2 in 1960, when he was 84. He explains there that Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, while practicing medicine in Southsea on the Southern coast, would at times bring patients to London for a dermatologic consultation with his father, whose reputation was already great. Here are the words of the younger Morris: [My father].., would often.., follow [clinical] clues like a detective, and in this respect his mind worked in sympathy with that of another great man, who gave up medicine for letters--Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In his early years Conan Doyle was in practice at Southsea. One day he brought a patient up for a consultation with my father and from the beginning they got on well together. After Conan Doyle gave up his Southsea practice in 1886 and took one in London they saw much more of one another and 251
252
Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology
Caplan
became personal friends. About that time each had a momentous decision to make, and for my father it was whether he should move to Harley Street. Conan Doyle assured him that he was destined for the top rungs of the ladder and persuaded him that he must go there. For Conan Doyle the momentous question was whether he should give up medicine and devote himself solely to writing. H e had a wife and family to support on what he made from his practice and although he loved his medical work a life of letters hem a magnetic attraction for him. Sherlock Holmes had made his bow to the public in A Study inScarlet in 1887 and they often discussed whether his methods of detection could be developed in a series of adventures to make him an outstanding personality. When the second Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four, was published in 1889, my father went straight away to Conan Doyle and advised him to take the plunge and confine himself to literature, for in that lay his success i n life. Early in 1890 Conan Doyle sold his practice. At this point Sir Harold Morris begins chapter 7, entitled "Sherlock Holmes." I draw your attention to two items of special interest: When Conan Doyle was beginning to write his second Sherlock Holmes book, The Sign of Four, my father said to him, "Why not make Holmes show his skill on something quite ordinary. Take my watch and see what you can make of it and then if you and your wife will come to dinner to-morrow night you can read out to us Sherlock's deductions." It was a happy little dinner party the next evening, my father, my mother, and Dr. and Mrs. Conan Doyle. When dinner was at the fruit, port and coffee stage and the parlour-maid had left the room, Conan Doyle read out from the first chapter of The Sign of Four, entitled "The Science of Deduction", where Watson says [and here Morris quotes that wonderful passage in which Holmes remarks after studying Watson's pocketwatch]: Subject to your correction, I should judge that the watch belonged to your elder brother, who inherited it from your father... He was a man of untidy habits--very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died. That is all I can gather.
T h e second item will also be told best in the words of the younger Morris: One day Conan Doyle said, "Can you think of a suitable part of London where Sherlock Holmes should live?" They considered many districts and ultimately my father said, "Why not put him and Watson into diggings at 21 Baker Street, which is the house where my grandfather John Morris lived when he retired from the Bombay Civil Service?" Conan Doyle liked the idea of Baker Street. H e went to look at No. 21 and, on the pretext that his grandfather had lived there fifty years before, asked if he might see some of the rooms. He was not enthusiastically received and saw nothing more than the hall, the dining-room, and the room behind it on the ground floor. He was disappointed, because he wanted to see the drawing-room on the first floor which he intended to make the sitting-room of Holmes and Watson. Fortunately my father had the particulars of sale of 2t Baker Street for the auction of the house on the 24th November, 1840, by order of the executors of the late John Morris, Esq, deceased. Conan Doyle pored over these particulars of sale and, after two or three visits to look at the house again, he assigned the various rooms to his satisfaction... Conan Doyle knew every detail of it: to him they were real people living in a real house, and that house was No. 21 ... The first two sentences in Chapter lI of A Study
in Scarlet are: We met next day as he had arranged, and inspected the rooms at No. 221B, Baker Street, of which he had spoken at our meeting. They consisted of a couple of comfortable bedrooms and a single large airy sittingroom, cheerfully furnished, and illuminated by two broad windows. No. 21 Baker Street was at that time a private house and Conan Doyle thought that it would not be right to give the actual number as the residents might object to their house being occupied by a detective with various oddly assorted persons visiting him, so he invented 221B. Now you've heard what Doyle said of M a l c o l m Morris and of what the younger Morris said of his father's relationship to Doyle. The quick ones a m o n g you will have noticed already a dating discrepancy.
Volume 26 Number 1, Part 1 February 1992
Doyle said in 1924 that he met Dr. Morris on a train to Berlin in 1890. Dr. Morris's son said, however, in 1960 that his father served as a dermatologic consultant to Dr. Doyle while he still practiced in Southsea, and while he was developing his thoughts about the detective--in other words, even before the 1887 publication of A Study in Scarlet wherein appeared the address 221B Baker Street. Since both versions of the thning and relationships cannot be correct, you may choose which autobiographical long-range memory you prefer to believe, if either. This problem of "getting the dates straight" is of course one of the great annoyances, yet challenges and joys, of Sherlockian scholarship. My final task is to tell you more about the life and dermatologic contributions of Dr. Malcolm Morris, who became Sir Malcolm Morris in 1908 in recognition of his professional services to Edward VII. Morris's obituary in Lancet 3 said Morris chose "to regard Knighthood as a recognition of the position gained for dermatology as a branch of scientific medical study." Much of what I will now teU you comes from two lengthy obituaries published in the British Medical Journal 4 and here condensed. Malcolm Morris was the youngest of 15 children, whose father was in the Indian Civil Service but died fairly young, leaving his widow and younger children to survive on a meager pension. Malcolm decided on a medical career at a young age when he was taken to a hospital following an injury. Ultimately he studied medicine at St. Mary's Hospital and obtained his diploma in 1870 at age 21. Because he married young and subsequently enjoyed a long and happy marriage, he needed an income and so went to a general practice in Yorkshire for three years. But his vigor and ambition brought him back to London, where he took up the study of skin diseases, especially with Jonathan Hutchinson and Warren Tay at the Hospital for Diseases of the Skin in Blackfriars. In 1879 he published his well known manual, Skin Diseases. By 1884 St. Mary's Hospital felt ready to establish a department for skin diseases and asked Malcolm Morris to lead it, a decision which proved an enormous success. The next chief stop in his career was being appointed medical editor to the well known publishing house of Cassell and Co. in the early eighties. On these two foundations--dermatology and books-the rest of his career was built. He had an editorial
Sherlock Holmes
253
instinct for securing suitable authors. His work with Cassell and Co. also provided him a ready outlet for the publication of many of his own subsequent books... In his work as a dermatologist Morris's studies were widened by frequent visits to Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, and Paris. He took considerable interest in developing the British Journal o f Dermatology: he passed through the presidency of the section of dermatology of the Royal Society of Medicine and was made president of the section of dermatology at the 13th International Congress of Medicine (London, 1913). At about that time he wrote an article in the Lancet strongly advocating a royal commission on venereal disease. This was taken up in the daily press and was soon followed by the appointment of a Royal Commission and by formation of the National Council for Combatting Venereal Diseases of which he was a vice president. There can be little doubt that it was chiefly through Morris's outspoken appeals that the age-long ban on the public discussion of this social curse was removed. Morris's brisk journalistic style was evident in many of his writings at that period. Not only had he an apt and fluent pen, but he was a very clear and effective speaker, with a happy gift for expounding scientific matters to lay audiences... He organized the National Association for the Prevention of Consumption in 1898, was its first treasurer, represented it at the Berlin Congress in 1899, and was secretary general of the British Congress of Tuberculosis in London in 1901. He became president of the HarveJan Society; chairman of the Radium Institute; member of the Royal Commission of Venereal Diseases from 1913 to 1915; fellow of the Royal Sanitary Institute; member of the International Council on Leprosy. He had been a member of the British Medical Association since 1872 and served as vice president of the section of dermatology in 1890 and in1895, and then in 1897 was president. From 1895 to 1902 he edited the journal The Practitioner. He had untiring energy and power. He appeared to find in a committee meeting the delight which other men find in sport. He once asked a friend why he liked going to a theatre where he could only see the feeble representations of imaginary human passions, when by going to a committee meeting he could watch and enjoy the real thing. He relished anything intellectual... Morris was very successful
254
Caplan
as a teacher, for he early recognized that as a means of imparting knowledge, practical demonstrations have a far greater value than academic lectures, and it was in the outpatient room that his most important work was accomplished. Few members of our profession have led a more active or useful life, for he was always in the forefront of any movement which gave promise of benefit to the community. In years he had lived three score and fourteen, but the gods must have loved him, for he died young. [And the Lancet obituary concludes with this flourish] The secret of keeping young was to have, to cultivate, and to preserve interest in public questions when that interest was directed towards the betterment of his fellow man. His major published books, apart from many journal articles, included Skin Diseases, a Manual for Student and Practitioner, which was first published in 1879 and went through six editions through 1917. His writings and editorial activities were amazingly diverse. In his later years he became increasingly concerned with matters of public health, being the author of The Nation's Health: The Stamping out of Venereal Disease (1917); The Story of English Public Health (1919); and the Dictionary o f Practical Medicine, wh ieh he edited in 1921. I want to bring only two further citations to your attention. One is in the preface of his work, The Story of English Public Health, s in which he acknowledges free use of Sir John Simon's "English Sanitary Institutions," which records the history of the matter through 1890. For permission to draw on its treasures, Morris tenders his warmest thanks to Mr. John Murray, publisher of Simon's second edition in 1897. Soperhaps we at last know what happened to Murray, the faithful orderly who helped Dr. Watson escape after his wound at the battle of Maiwand. The second and final citation will provide a taste
Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology
of Morris's felicitous writing. It begins the Harveian oration 6 that he was privileged to deliver in 1905. Probably in no province of medical practice has greater progress been made recently than in dermatology. Measured by years, it is little more than a century since John Hunter classified skin diseases into those that mercury could cure, those that sulphur could cure, and those that the devil himself could not cure, and only about half as long since Erasmus Wilson treated according to the general formula: arsenic inside and zinc ointment outside.
From this sampling of activities and writings you know much more than before about Malcolm Morris, whose energy, writing, teaching, consulting, and breadth of dedicated servicc to many community needs certainly justifies his being remembered in the dermatologic pantheon. To summarize for this assemblage of dermatologic Sherlockians, the takehome messages about Sir Malcoh'n Morris are these: he suggested that Doyle become a specialist and move to London; he encouraged Doyle to write a book about a detective, and ultimately, to give up. medicine in favor of writing; he provided Doyle a practical and ultimately famous test of his skills at observation and inference; and he first suggested that residence whose floor plan and decor we all can see in our mind's eye at this very moment, and the location of which accounts for the immortal address: 221B Baker Street. R EFb:RENCES I. Doyle AC. Memories and adventures. Boston: Little, Brown, 1924:82-5. 2. Morris HS. Back view. London: Peter Davies, 1960:46ff. 3. Obituary of Sir Malcolm Morris. Lancet March 1, 1924, p 467. 4. Obituaries ol"Sir Malcolm Morris. Br Med J 1924; 1:407-9. 5. Morris MA. The story oI' English public health. London: Cassell & Co, 1919. 6. Morris MA. Some new therapeutic methods in dermatology (The oration to the Harveian Society of London). Br Med J 1905;1:697-700.
I
Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Malcolm Morris Richard M. Caplan, MD Iowa City, Iowa
You certainly know who Sherlock Holmes is, and you probably know at least a little about Arthur Conan Doyle. But I can safely guess that few of you know of Malcolm Morris. So my mission is to acquaint you with a dermatologist who well deserves remembering because of his substantial importance to dermatology and to show his importance to Conan Doyle and therefore, indirectly, to Sherlock Holmes. The best known link between Doyle and Malcolm Morris comes from two references to Morris in Doyle's 1924 autobiography, Memories and A d ventures. 1 First, one needs to know that in 1890 Doyle became intensely interested in Robert Koch's claim that tuberculin could be used effectively to cure tuberculosis--so interested, in fact, that he travelled to Berlin that year to hear Koch's announcements and demonstrations. It was on the train, en route to Berlin, that Malcolm Morris made an important suggestion. Here is how Doyle tells it: I went on to Berlin that night and found myself in the Continental express with a very handsome and courteous London physician bound upon the same errand as myself.We passed most of the night talking and I learned that his name was Malcolm Morris and that he also had been a provincial doctor, but that he had come to London and had made a considerable hit as a skin specialist in Harley Street. It was the beginning of a friendship which endured .... Two days later I was back in Southsea, but I came back a changed man. I had spread my wings and had felt something of the powers within me. Especially I had been influencedby a long talk with Malcolm Morris, in which he assured me that I was wasting my life in the provinces and had too small a field for my activities. He insisted that I From the University of Iowa College of Medicine. Moditied from a presentation made to the Sir James Saunders Society at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Dermatology, Atlanta, Georgia, Dec. 4, 1990. No reprints available. 16/1/'31769
should leave general practice and go to London. I answered that I was by no means sure of my literary success as yet, and that I could not so easily abandon the medical career which had cost my mother such sacrificesand myself so many years of study. He asked me if there was any special branch of the profession on which I could concentrate so as to get away from general practice. I said that of late years I had been interested in eye work... "Well," said Morris, "why not specialize upon the eye? Go to Vienna, put in six months' work, come back and start in London. Thus you will have a nice clean life with plenty of leisure for your literature." I came home with this great suggestion buzzing in my head. "That's certainly an important contribution to the personal story of Doyle," you may be saying to yourself, "but what has that to do with Sherlock Holmes?" The answer may be found in a different autobiography--this one written by the son of Malcolm Morris, whose name was Sir Harold Spencer Morris. He became an eminent attorney in Britain and represented East Bristol in Parliament. Born in 1876 and dying in 1967, he published his own lifestory under the title Back View 2 in 1960, when he was 84. He explains there that Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, while practicing medicine in Southsea on the Southern coast, would at times bring patients to London for a dermatologic consultation with his father, whose reputation was already great. Here are the words of the younger Morris: [My father].., would often.., follow [clinical] clues like a detective, and in this respect his mind worked in sympathy with that of another great man, who gave up medicine for letters--Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In his early years Conan Doyle was in practice at Southsea. One day he brought a patient up for a consultation with my father and from the beginning they got on well together. After Conan Doyle gave up his Southsea practice in 1886 and took one in London they saw much more of one another and 251
252
Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology
Caplan
became personal friends. About that time each had a momentous decision to make, and for my father it was whether he should move to Harley Street. Conan Doyle assured him that he was destined for the top rungs of the ladder and persuaded him that he must go there. For Conan Doyle the momentous question was whether he should give up medicine and devote himself solely to writing. H e had a wife and family to support on what he made from his practice and although he loved his medical work a life of letters hem a magnetic attraction for him. Sherlock Holmes had made his bow to the public in A Study inScarlet in 1887 and they often discussed whether his methods of detection could be developed in a series of adventures to make him an outstanding personality. When the second Sherlock Holmes story, The Sign of Four, was published in 1889, my father went straight away to Conan Doyle and advised him to take the plunge and confine himself to literature, for in that lay his success i n life. Early in 1890 Conan Doyle sold his practice. At this point Sir Harold Morris begins chapter 7, entitled "Sherlock Holmes." I draw your attention to two items of special interest: When Conan Doyle was beginning to write his second Sherlock Holmes book, The Sign of Four, my father said to him, "Why not make Holmes show his skill on something quite ordinary. Take my watch and see what you can make of it and then if you and your wife will come to dinner to-morrow night you can read out to us Sherlock's deductions." It was a happy little dinner party the next evening, my father, my mother, and Dr. and Mrs. Conan Doyle. When dinner was at the fruit, port and coffee stage and the parlour-maid had left the room, Conan Doyle read out from the first chapter of The Sign of Four, entitled "The Science of Deduction", where Watson says [and here Morris quotes that wonderful passage in which Holmes remarks after studying Watson's pocketwatch]: Subject to your correction, I should judge that the watch belonged to your elder brother, who inherited it from your father... He was a man of untidy habits--very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died. That is all I can gather.
T h e second item will also be told best in the words of the younger Morris: One day Conan Doyle said, "Can you think of a suitable part of London where Sherlock Holmes should live?" They considered many districts and ultimately my father said, "Why not put him and Watson into diggings at 21 Baker Street, which is the house where my grandfather John Morris lived when he retired from the Bombay Civil Service?" Conan Doyle liked the idea of Baker Street. H e went to look at No. 21 and, on the pretext that his grandfather had lived there fifty years before, asked if he might see some of the rooms. He was not enthusiastically received and saw nothing more than the hall, the dining-room, and the room behind it on the ground floor. He was disappointed, because he wanted to see the drawing-room on the first floor which he intended to make the sitting-room of Holmes and Watson. Fortunately my father had the particulars of sale of 2t Baker Street for the auction of the house on the 24th November, 1840, by order of the executors of the late John Morris, Esq, deceased. Conan Doyle pored over these particulars of sale and, after two or three visits to look at the house again, he assigned the various rooms to his satisfaction... Conan Doyle knew every detail of it: to him they were real people living in a real house, and that house was No. 21 ... The first two sentences in Chapter lI of A Study
in Scarlet are: We met next day as he had arranged, and inspected the rooms at No. 221B, Baker Street, of which he had spoken at our meeting. They consisted of a couple of comfortable bedrooms and a single large airy sittingroom, cheerfully furnished, and illuminated by two broad windows. No. 21 Baker Street was at that time a private house and Conan Doyle thought that it would not be right to give the actual number as the residents might object to their house being occupied by a detective with various oddly assorted persons visiting him, so he invented 221B. Now you've heard what Doyle said of M a l c o l m Morris and of what the younger Morris said of his father's relationship to Doyle. The quick ones a m o n g you will have noticed already a dating discrepancy.
Volume 26 Number 1, Part 1 February 1992
Doyle said in 1924 that he met Dr. Morris on a train to Berlin in 1890. Dr. Morris's son said, however, in 1960 that his father served as a dermatologic consultant to Dr. Doyle while he still practiced in Southsea, and while he was developing his thoughts about the detective--in other words, even before the 1887 publication of A Study in Scarlet wherein appeared the address 221B Baker Street. Since both versions of the thning and relationships cannot be correct, you may choose which autobiographical long-range memory you prefer to believe, if either. This problem of "getting the dates straight" is of course one of the great annoyances, yet challenges and joys, of Sherlockian scholarship. My final task is to tell you more about the life and dermatologic contributions of Dr. Malcolm Morris, who became Sir Malcolm Morris in 1908 in recognition of his professional services to Edward VII. Morris's obituary in Lancet 3 said Morris chose "to regard Knighthood as a recognition of the position gained for dermatology as a branch of scientific medical study." Much of what I will now teU you comes from two lengthy obituaries published in the British Medical Journal 4 and here condensed. Malcolm Morris was the youngest of 15 children, whose father was in the Indian Civil Service but died fairly young, leaving his widow and younger children to survive on a meager pension. Malcolm decided on a medical career at a young age when he was taken to a hospital following an injury. Ultimately he studied medicine at St. Mary's Hospital and obtained his diploma in 1870 at age 21. Because he married young and subsequently enjoyed a long and happy marriage, he needed an income and so went to a general practice in Yorkshire for three years. But his vigor and ambition brought him back to London, where he took up the study of skin diseases, especially with Jonathan Hutchinson and Warren Tay at the Hospital for Diseases of the Skin in Blackfriars. In 1879 he published his well known manual, Skin Diseases. By 1884 St. Mary's Hospital felt ready to establish a department for skin diseases and asked Malcolm Morris to lead it, a decision which proved an enormous success. The next chief stop in his career was being appointed medical editor to the well known publishing house of Cassell and Co. in the early eighties. On these two foundations--dermatology and books-the rest of his career was built. He had an editorial
Sherlock Holmes
253
instinct for securing suitable authors. His work with Cassell and Co. also provided him a ready outlet for the publication of many of his own subsequent books... In his work as a dermatologist Morris's studies were widened by frequent visits to Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, and Paris. He took considerable interest in developing the British Journal o f Dermatology: he passed through the presidency of the section of dermatology of the Royal Society of Medicine and was made president of the section of dermatology at the 13th International Congress of Medicine (London, 1913). At about that time he wrote an article in the Lancet strongly advocating a royal commission on venereal disease. This was taken up in the daily press and was soon followed by the appointment of a Royal Commission and by formation of the National Council for Combatting Venereal Diseases of which he was a vice president. There can be little doubt that it was chiefly through Morris's outspoken appeals that the age-long ban on the public discussion of this social curse was removed. Morris's brisk journalistic style was evident in many of his writings at that period. Not only had he an apt and fluent pen, but he was a very clear and effective speaker, with a happy gift for expounding scientific matters to lay audiences... He organized the National Association for the Prevention of Consumption in 1898, was its first treasurer, represented it at the Berlin Congress in 1899, and was secretary general of the British Congress of Tuberculosis in London in 1901. He became president of the HarveJan Society; chairman of the Radium Institute; member of the Royal Commission of Venereal Diseases from 1913 to 1915; fellow of the Royal Sanitary Institute; member of the International Council on Leprosy. He had been a member of the British Medical Association since 1872 and served as vice president of the section of dermatology in 1890 and in1895, and then in 1897 was president. From 1895 to 1902 he edited the journal The Practitioner. He had untiring energy and power. He appeared to find in a committee meeting the delight which other men find in sport. He once asked a friend why he liked going to a theatre where he could only see the feeble representations of imaginary human passions, when by going to a committee meeting he could watch and enjoy the real thing. He relished anything intellectual... Morris was very successful
254
Caplan
as a teacher, for he early recognized that as a means of imparting knowledge, practical demonstrations have a far greater value than academic lectures, and it was in the outpatient room that his most important work was accomplished. Few members of our profession have led a more active or useful life, for he was always in the forefront of any movement which gave promise of benefit to the community. In years he had lived three score and fourteen, but the gods must have loved him, for he died young. [And the Lancet obituary concludes with this flourish] The secret of keeping young was to have, to cultivate, and to preserve interest in public questions when that interest was directed towards the betterment of his fellow man. His major published books, apart from many journal articles, included Skin Diseases, a Manual for Student and Practitioner, which was first published in 1879 and went through six editions through 1917. His writings and editorial activities were amazingly diverse. In his later years he became increasingly concerned with matters of public health, being the author of The Nation's Health: The Stamping out of Venereal Disease (1917); The Story of English Public Health (1919); and the Dictionary o f Practical Medicine, wh ieh he edited in 1921. I want to bring only two further citations to your attention. One is in the preface of his work, The Story of English Public Health, s in which he acknowledges free use of Sir John Simon's "English Sanitary Institutions," which records the history of the matter through 1890. For permission to draw on its treasures, Morris tenders his warmest thanks to Mr. John Murray, publisher of Simon's second edition in 1897. Soperhaps we at last know what happened to Murray, the faithful orderly who helped Dr. Watson escape after his wound at the battle of Maiwand. The second and final citation will provide a taste
Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology
of Morris's felicitous writing. It begins the Harveian oration 6 that he was privileged to deliver in 1905. Probably in no province of medical practice has greater progress been made recently than in dermatology. Measured by years, it is little more than a century since John Hunter classified skin diseases into those that mercury could cure, those that sulphur could cure, and those that the devil himself could not cure, and only about half as long since Erasmus Wilson treated according to the general formula: arsenic inside and zinc ointment outside.
From this sampling of activities and writings you know much more than before about Malcolm Morris, whose energy, writing, teaching, consulting, and breadth of dedicated servicc to many community needs certainly justifies his being remembered in the dermatologic pantheon. To summarize for this assemblage of dermatologic Sherlockians, the takehome messages about Sir Malcoh'n Morris are these: he suggested that Doyle become a specialist and move to London; he encouraged Doyle to write a book about a detective, and ultimately, to give up. medicine in favor of writing; he provided Doyle a practical and ultimately famous test of his skills at observation and inference; and he first suggested that residence whose floor plan and decor we all can see in our mind's eye at this very moment, and the location of which accounts for the immortal address: 221B Baker Street. R EFb:RENCES I. Doyle AC. Memories and adventures. Boston: Little, Brown, 1924:82-5. 2. Morris HS. Back view. London: Peter Davies, 1960:46ff. 3. Obituary of Sir Malcolm Morris. Lancet March 1, 1924, p 467. 4. Obituaries ol"Sir Malcolm Morris. Br Med J 1924; 1:407-9. 5. Morris MA. The story oI' English public health. London: Cassell & Co, 1919. 6. Morris MA. Some new therapeutic methods in dermatology (The oration to the Harveian Society of London). Br Med J 1905;1:697-700.
