A writer that one might predict to have had an interest in homeopathy would be Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), author of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories. The Scottish Doyle popularized the field of crime fiction and put Scotland Yard on the map. He was a prolific writer who also wrote science fiction, historical novels, plays, romances, poetry, and nonfiction.

In many ways, being a good homeopath is a lot like being Sherlock Holmes. A good homeopath obtains an enormous amount of detail about the totality of a sick person’s symptoms. A good homeopath probes and probes and probes, asking open-ended questions that lead patients to describe what they are experiencing in their own words. A good homeopath is open to hearing things he or she does not expect, and makes the best use of unusual symptoms that the sick person describes. Sherlock Holmes was also known to assert: “That which is out of the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance.” And again: “That which seemingly confuses the case is the very thing that furnishes the clue to its solution.” Both of these statements are an integral part of homeopathic casetaking and case analysis. Homeopaths usually conduct a conventional diagnosis, but they then always seek to find the symptoms that are unusual for the diagnosis, and these unique symptoms are vital in selecting the medicine for the patient.

There is an intriguing reference in Doyle’s Lost World (1912). Many people are familiar with this novel because several movies were made of it (including a pioneering 1925 silent film with stop-motion special effects of the dinosaurs done by the same wizard who later created the special effects for the original King Kong). It is one of Doyle’s Professor Challenger stories. Challenger was a zoological “Indiana Jones-type” with a reputation for beating up reporters whose interviews were anathema to him. In Lost World, the narrator is a reporter who bravely decides to interview the violent professor, and a physician friend of this reporter advises him to take along a new remedy that is reported to be “better than arnica” for dealing with the injuries he is sure to suffer from the encounter. But then, the narrator of the story asserts, “Some people have such extraordinary notions of humor” (as though there could ever be something better than arnica).

Arnica is one of homeopathy’s most well-known remedies for shock of injury, for sprains and strains, and for certain pre- and post-surgical problems.

Of additional interest is the fact that Doyle originally trained as a medical doctor, but his frustration, bitterness, and even cynicism is well expressed in his great Holmes adventure, “The Adventure of the Resident Patient,” a story in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). Ultimately, we must all feel quite blessed that Doyle was not so appreciative of homeopathic medicine that he practiced it rather than writing his stories.