No matter which Sherlock Holmes you visualize as you read the canon – the suave, top-hatted Jeremy Brett? Perhaps the ever-so-tightly-suited Benedict Cumberbatch? – you’re wrong. The “real” Holmes was a patrician gent named Dr. Joseph Bell, who lectured at the University of Edinburgh’s medical school in the 19th century and had a knack for revealing things about a person that a casual acquaintance could never have known.