In Michael Shepherd's 1984 Squibb History of Psychiatry Lecture, he treats the near-synchronous emergence, in the 1880s, of Dr Freud and Sherlock Holmes as symptomatic of an epidemiologically significant phase in scientific history. He argues that Freud and Conan Doyle, who had been a pupil of a Dr Joseph Bell, an Edinburgh surgeon of legendary powers in diagnosis, may be viewed as late nineteenth-century exponents of inferential thinking in the sciences. That method, in which imagination and intuition arc combined with the close observation of detail, taken as clues, seemed to promise the discovery of the causes that lay behind already observed consequences. Furthermore, in 1883, another medical doctor, writing under the pseudonym of Morelli, extended the inferential method into art