Assessment and significance of Arthur Conan Doyle's medical writings.

Doyle's medical writings represent a valuable contribution to both the scientific and nonscientific aspects of medicine of the late 19th Century. Up to the present, accounts of these writings have been few, and none of them have been evaluative of their scientific merit. Analysis of Doyle's writings on infectious diseases in particular reveals a remarkable insight, for the 1880s, into the bacterial causation of disease and prevention through immunization.