If you are a mystery reader, this one’s for you.

Mysteries, at the end of the day, really are a study in human nature—which leads to crime and the solving of one.

In her New York Times column, Diagnosis, Lisa Sanders, M.D., examines Sherlock Holmes as a doctor rather than a reader.

He’s eccentric, intense and in print or on the screen, a case himself.

She looks at what Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, M.D., used for inspiration in creating Holmes and Dr. Watson. Doyle, as Dr. Sanders notes, was educated at the University of Edinburgh, at the time one of the most important institutions in medical education.

It’s fun to read and you will learn about some diagnoses which are not well understood even now.

The New York Times

…”Recently I found myself dipping again into my well-worn volumes of these remarkable stories, but this time I couldn’t help looking at Sherlock Holmes with the eyes of a doctor. What I saw was what any doctor would see: a patient. The question for me was, Could the strange behavior of Sherlock Holmes be diagnosed?

“He does have symptoms. He appears oblivious to the rhythms and courtesies of normal social intercourse — he doesn’t converse so much as lecture. His interests and knowledge are deep but narrow. He is strangely “coldblooded,” and perhaps as a consequence, he is also alone in the world. He has no friends other than the extremely tolerant Watson; a brother, even stranger and more isolated than he, is his only family. Was Arthur Conan Doyle presenting some sort of genetically transmitted personality disorder or mental illness he’d observed, or was Sherlock Holmes merely an interesting character created from scratch?”

Source: New York Times, December 4, 2009