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As a medical student, I read the lore of Joseph Bell, the Scottish surgeon on whom Sherlock Holmes was based. Bell, who taught Arthur Conan Doyle during his medical training at a hospital in Edinburgh, was famously observant, with an “eerie trick of spotting details.” From sailors’ tattoos he could know where they had traveled; from the lilt of a man’s accent, the calluses of his hands, the uneven way the legs of his trousers or the breast pocket of his jacket had faded, he could deduce the man’s hometown, his profession, his vices. “Most men have a head, two arms, a nose, a mouth and a certain number of teeth. It is the little differences—the ‘trifles’—such as the droop of an eyelid, which differentiates men,” Bell told his students. “Use your eyes.”II For his students, he would demonstrate the importance of “trifles,” meeting a patient for the first time and deciphering a sort of autobiography from their body in a theatrical performance. From one man’s elephantiasis—a parasitic infection that clogs the lymphatics and swells the legs—and military habit of never taking off his hat, Bell deduced that he was a Highland regiment officer who had been stationed in Barbados. From another’s military swagger and short stature—too short for a soldier—Bell deduced that he had played in a Highland regiment band. When the man replied that he was a cobbler and had never been in the army, Bell had two particularly burly trainees restrain and undress the man to find the tiny blue D, “deserter,” branded on his skin, the truth written indelibly on his body and his fears exposed, the doctor unmasking the denial.
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Pria Anand (The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains)