On a cold winter’s morning in 1878, medical students gathered in a gas-lit operating theatre where a long wooden table stood ready. As Joseph Bell, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary’s senior surgeon, entered the room, the hubbub died away.
To the relief of some of the younger attendees, there would be no surgery today: instead, Bell was about to give a demonstration of the incredible deductive skills which earned him his nickname, ‘the demon of diagnosis’.
The surgeon took his seat as the patient was ushered in. Bell pressed the tips of his slender fingers together and narrowed his piercing grey eyes as he
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