Doyle Syndrome

Today, I had the fortune of meeting a patient with Marfan's syndrome.  The disease is officially named after the French physician Antoine Marfan but almost a decade earlier Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had created a villain who was very likely to have the condition in his very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet.  Doyle, through the voice of Watson, described the character of Jefferson Hope as a tall man in his late thirties who an aortic aneurysm.   These are common features seen in Marfan's syndrome which is now known to be a connective tissue disorder.  As Doyle was a physician, himself, he frequently had very clinical descriptions of characters (probably the most accurate in all of fiction) and it is likely he had made an association between very tall, slender individuals and aortic aneurysms.