Meet Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, Doyle's eccentric lecturer, Dr Joseph Bell. Travel the Caribbean with William Dampier and Henry Morgan's ships doctors. Cringe as a demented Josef Stalin imprisons and viciously tortures each of his eight doctors to the point of confession because he thought they were poisoning him. Follow John Keats, who never practiced medicine because his literary career took off, to Italy where he tragically battles terminal illness. Not Your Ordinary Doctor is a titillating collection filled with historical curiosities, whimsy, and fascinating, fresh speculation. There are the doctors who attended royalty and other rulers such as Elizabeth I, Napoleon, George III and Alexander the Great - a brave and special breed indeed; those who were artists, musicians and writers such as Maughm, Conan Doyle, Borodin and Chekhov; others still who were sporting heroes, adventurers and inventors like Grace, Livingston, Guillotin, Guevera and Gattling. And then there are the deranged mass murderers like Banda, Webster, Ruxton and too many Nazis to name. All in all we meet 60 medical truants who found fame in fields other than medicine. Their stories are in turns heroic and absurd, dazzling and ghoulish, inspired and tragic and, in the hands of master story-teller Jim Leavesley, never, ever dull.
