The Case Of Lady Sannox: Review

The Case Of Lady Sannox: Review

FPJ BureauUpdated: Thursday, May 30, 2019, 09:28 AM IST
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Reviewed by: Nikhil Katara

Book: The Case Of Lady Sannox

Author: Arthur Conan Doyle

Price: 169 (paperback)

Pages: 231

ISBN: 9789386050809

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Publishing Pvt Ltd.

You’ll find there’s so much tragedy in a doctor’s life, my boy that he would not be able to stand it if it were not for the strain of comedy which comes every now and then to leaven it.

‘The first‘Arthur Conan Doyle’ we all meet is the man who invented Sherlock Holmes’ quotes Jerry Pinto in the introduction of the book ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’. For many Doyle’s existence is synonymous to the detective story genre. But few know that from 1876 to 1881, a student of medicine took a fancy to writing short stories inspired from the world of science while he studied at the University of Edinburgh. The initial attempt to publish a story was a failure, but subsequent attempts for the Doctor who doubled up as an Author were successful, and made ground for the most famous detective novels, ever to be written. Conan Doyle’s ability to carve stories and his ability to communicate them have a history of chloroform and tablets, and ‘The Case of Lady Sannox’ is full with these prescriptions.

‘The Case of Lady Sannox’ is a book that contains multiple short stories written by Conan Doyle. While many of them are medically driven, some of them are not. But all these tales have an underlying tension, an unexplained sensation running in them seamlessly. The reader does experience intrigue and a complex emotion while the master story teller weaves his words.

The first story is that of ‘The Physiologists Wife’. Professor Ainslie Grey, an unemotional man  is about to get married. He is a man who believes protoplasm may prove to be the physical basis of love as well as of life. He is also a man who believes that when the atom of Hydrogen gets attracted to the atom of Chlorine to form the perfect molecule of Hydrochloric acid, the forces of attraction are similar to the ones that draw a man towards a woman. So what happens when such a man of science, who relates every human emotion to a scientific quality, experiences a human tragedy? What happens when such a man’s heart breaks? What happens when he has to analyse his own condition?

‘The Doctor of Hoyland’ is an interesting tale of Doctor James Ripley who has a set practice in the village of Hoyland, until one fateful day he encounters a rival, who sets up a consultation clinic near him. The rudest shock arrives when Doctor Ripley meets this new Doctor to find out that the Man who has come to rival him is actually no man at all. It is a woman and a really smart one.

The multiple stories in the book can’t be judged as one. Though most stories have a medical relationship, they are markedly different from each other. Some are eerie like the story titled ‘Lot No 249’ while some are comic like ‘Crabbe’s practice’. But many of them seem to be more like conversations Doyle must have had with his medical friends, discussing patients and their lives. The story titled ‘A Medical Document’ is one such in which three doctors have a conversation just discussing patients they have counselled and lives they have witnessed. One case strikes the reader when the doctor discusses how ‘Nature’ was the cause of divorce for a most loving couple. Everything was fine until the day the husband developed ‘Phthisis’ and the wife developed ‘Rheumatic Fever’. When the husband came below 4000 feet, his symptoms became terrible and when the wife came above 2500 feet her heart started giving way. So they lived within three miles of each other and never met, though they saw each other using field glasses. Nature did not manage to take their lives, but in the debacle, their love died.

Many of these stories have tension in them that works in its favour, though the length of these stories leaves the reader wanting for more. Stories on medicine have found a lot of interest in the contemporary scenario where people binge watch shows like Grey’s anatomy and House MD. The stories in the medical field have human suffering inside its soul and the conflicts that arise in the human body transcend it and release our fundamental fears.  May be that is why such stories do well. The medical language, which many times sound’s quite alien to the lay man, needs to be told in a more accessible way perhaps. So who would be better than a certain Doctor who also doubled up to be an author?

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