93. The alcoholism of his father affected Conan Doyle very significantly. Conan decided to leave the exact details of this crisis out of his autobiography Memories and Adventures, but the subject of alcoholism was not taken lightly in his later fictional stories.Conan Doyle was home-schooled until the age of nine when he was sent to the Jesuit prep school of Hodder in Lancashire. Hodder was attached to the Jesuit secondary school of Stonyhurst, which is where he later ended up. While he was attending school here, Conan began to seriously think about what he believed from a religious standpoint, and by the time that he had left school in 1875, he had completely rejected Catholicism, and possibly even Christianity in general. The brainstorming and ideas that must have been going through his head at this time about religion are thought to be the basis for the “semi-autobiographical novel,” The Stark Munro Letters.After his days at Stonyhurst, Conan went back to Edinburgh and attended the University from 1876 to 1881. Other than giving him a medical degree, the attendance at Edinburgh University also allowed him to meet two people that were later used as models for a couple of fictional characters in his writings: “Professor Rutherford, whose Assyrian beard, prodigious voice, enormous chest, and singular manner became translated into Professor George Edward Challenger of The Lost World; and Dr. Joseph Bell, whose amazing deductions concerning the history of his patients were to provide the ideas behind the deductive skills of Sherlock Holmes.”In 1882, Dr. George Turnavine Budd invited Conan Doyle to become his partner in a medical practice in Plymouth. When their partnership broke up, Conan moved down to Southsea where he began his own medical practice. However, in his spare time he began to expand his literary skills a little more. It was there in Southsea that he created the character of Sherlock Holmes a...
