The Stark Munro Letters - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (week 2)

J. Stark Munro is a recent medical graduate: young, idealistic, and struggling to make ends meet. He enters into a partnership with Doctor James Cullingworth, a practitioner of unquestionable ingenuity and questionable ethics. Cullingworth employs sensationalism, publicity stunts, and unabashed "quackery" to retain an indiscriminate stream of "unhealthy, wealthy, and unwise" clientele.

Through a series of letters, Munro narrates his career struggles and coming-of-age. He contemplates Victorian societal conventions, medical ethics, philosophy, human nature, science, evolution, religion, and spirituality.

The Stark Munro Letters (1895) is one of Arthur Conan Doyle's most personal works: an epistolary novel of a doctor's formative years, semi-autobiographically recollecting Doyle's own origins as a physician before transitioning to full-time authorship. It was written as Doyle was transitioning (again) from producing massively successful Sherlock Holmes adventures to more "serious" literature, and transitioning from orthodox Christianity to spiritualism. The novel's critique of the late 19th century medical landscape articulates problematics of doctor-patient relationships, the era's moral and scientific limitations, and, in the colorful Cullingworth, features "one of the finest characters Dr. Doyle has yet drawn."

Schedule:

• Week 1 (Oct 18): Letters 1-8
• Week 2 (Oct 25): Letters 9-16

The Stark Munro Letters:

• Kindle
• Gutenberg
• Google books
• The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia
• Librivox 6h 50m

Supplemental:

• On Compulsory Vaccination Doyle's letter published 27 July 1887

Trivia:

• The Stark Munro Letters was finished at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps (later made famous by Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain) while his wife was being treated for tuberculosis. During his stay, Doyle pioneered the trend of Alpine skiing.

Extracts:

• "Now, our doctor was a serious old fellow, much given to metaphysics, and used to talk about original sin." (Redburn, 17)
• "A sick philosopher is incurable.... [b]ecause either he spurns his powder, or, if he take it, it proves a blank cartridge, though the same given to a rustic in like extremity, would act like a charm. I am no materialist; but the mind so acts upon the body, that if the one have no confidence, neither has the other." (Confidence-Man, 16)
• "Well knowing the enthusiasm of the Surgeon for all specimens of morbid anatomy, some of the ward-room officers used to play upon his credulity.... Once, when they had some sago pudding for dinner... they deposited it on the gun-room table, with a note, purporting to come from an eminent physician in Rio, connected with the Grand National Museum on the Praca d’ Acclamacao, begging leave to present the scientific Senhor Cuticle—with the donor’s compliments—an uncommonly fine specimen of a cancer." (White-Jacket, 61)
• "Connected with the sick-bay... was a regular apothecary’s shop.... displaying tiers of shelves on all four sides filled with green bottles and gallipots; beneath were multitudinous drawers bearing incomprehensible gilded inscriptions in abbreviated Latin.... And there you would see him, with a green shade over his eyes, seated on a stool, and pounding his pestle in a great iron mortar that looked like a howitzer, mixing some jallapy compound. A smoky lamp shed a flickering, yellow-fever tinge upon his pallid face and the closely-packed regiments of gallipots." (White-Jacket, 77)
• "Several times when I felt in need of a little medicine... without speaking a word, this cadaverous young man would mix me my potion in a tin cup, and hand it out through the little opening in his door, like the boxed-up treasurer giving you your change at the ticket-office of a theatre...." (White-Jacket, 77)
• "... is it not remarkable, to say the least, that a shore apothecary should actually charge you money—round dollars and cents—for giving you a horrible nausea? ....I always got sea-sick after taking medicine and going aloft with it. Seldom or never did it do me any lasting good." (White-Jacket, 77)
• "A miserable world! Who would take the trouble to make a fortune in it, when he knows not how long he can keep it, for the thousand villains and asses who have the management of railroads and steamboats, and innumerable other vital things in the world." ("Cock-a-doodle-doo!")
• "I mean, sir, the same ancient Catholic Church to which you and I, and Captain Peleg there, and Queequeg here, and all of us, and every mother’s son and soul of us belong; the great and everlasting First Congregation of this whole worshipping world; we all belong to that; only some of us cherish some queer crotchets no ways touching the grand belief; in that we all join hands." (Moby-Dick, 18)
• "Flask, alas! was a butterless man!" (Moby-Dick, 34)

This meetup is part of the series Circuses and Snake Oil.