Arthur Conan Doyle was a doctor before he became a full-time writer. He trained in medicine at the University of Edinburgh Medical School, qualified in 1881, and initially tried to build a medical career while writing fiction in his spare time.
During his student years, Doyle gained practical experience in several British towns and served as a ship’s surgeon on voyages to the Arctic and West Africa. He later opened a medical practice in Southsea, Portsmouth, in 1882. The practice attracted few patients, leaving him time to develop his literary work.
Medicine strongly influenced Doyle’s fiction. Sherlock Holmes’s companion, Dr. Watson, is a physician and narrator, while Doyle drew on his former teacher Joseph Bell’s powers of observation when shaping Holmes. Doyle’s first Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in 1887, but he continued to identify as both a writer and a physician for much of his life.