Which university did Arthur Conan Doyle attend?

Arthur Conan Doyle attended the University of Edinburgh, where he studied medicine at its medical school from 1876 to 1881. His time there shaped both his professional life and the analytical style of his most famous fictional detective.

Doyle qualified with Bachelor of Medicine and Master of Surgery degrees in 1881. He later completed a Doctor of Medicine degree at Edinburgh in 1885, submitting a dissertation on tabes dorsalis, a disease affecting the nervous system. His education was therefore medical rather than literary, although he began publishing stories while still a student.

One of Doyle’s Edinburgh teachers was Joseph Bell, a surgeon renowned for drawing rapid conclusions from small physical clues. Bell is widely regarded as an important inspiration for Sherlock Holmes’s methods of observation and deduction. Doyle’s first published fiction appeared in 1879, several years before A Study in Scarlet brought Holmes to readers in 1887.