Bodies from the Library 3 by Tony Medawar

Author:Tony Medawar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2020-05-19T17:00:00+00:00

JOSEPHINE BELL

‘Josephine Bell’ was the pseudonym of Doris Bell Collier. She was born on 8 December 1897 in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, the daughter of Maud Tessimond Windsor and Joseph Collier, a surgeon. From 1910 she studied at Godolphin School, Salisbury, and in 1916, at the age of eighteen, she went up to Cambridge University to study Natural Sciences at Newnham College, taking time out to work on the land towards the end of the First World War.

Collier graduated in 1919, the same year that her elder brother Jack was killed in a flying accident in Spain, devastating her mother and her other brother Donald. In 1922, following in the footsteps of her father and great-grandfather, she decided to become a doctor and enrolled as a student at University College Hospital, London. She was diligent, even working in the emergency department of Hampstead General Hospital as a casualty officer. But she also had time for extramural matters and, on 6 January 1923 married Norman Dyer Ball, a pathologist at UCH who had lost an eye in the Great War. The following year, which included a spell as house physician, she gained the customary double degree of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery.

The couple moved to Croom’s Hill in Greenwich where Dyer Ball set up in general practice, working alongside his wife until 1935 when ill health forced him to sell up. They moved to Walden in Headley, Hampshire, to stay with Collier’s mother, whose second husband Jean Éstradie had died three years earlier. Dyer Ball’s health began slowly to improve and the couple decided that the following summer they would make a long sea voyage. However, on the day after their thirteenth wedding anniversary and not long after he had been involved in a minor car accident, Dyer Ball drove up to London to do some shopping. He bumped into the wife of one of his neighbours at Croom’s Hill and offered to give her a lift home. However, their journey ended in tragedy when the car mounted the kerb, rolled over twice and collided with a lorry. His passenger died almost immediately while Dyer Ball died in hospital a little time later.

Not even forty years old and widowed with four young children, Collier moved to Bordon in East Hampshire. She secured a position as a Clinical Assistant at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford and to supplement her income turned to writing. Her first novel, Murder in Hospital (1937), dedicated to her late husband, was written under a pseudonym that some have suggested was an homage to the original of Sherlock Holmes, Dr Joseph Bell. However, the truth is much simpler: in coining the name ‘Josephine Bell’, Collier simply combined her own middle name with the first name of her father, who had died in 1905 before she was ten. Any connection to Joseph Bell was at most a happy coincidence.

Murder in Hospital was praised for its clever plot and even more so as a study of hospital mores.

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