Doyle (1859-1930) is famed as the creator of Sherlock Holmes and for developing the genre of crime fiction, which continues to have a distinctively Scottish slant in writers like Ian Rankin. However, he was trained and initially practiced as a doctor. His medical dissertation of 1885 discusses syphilis from a literary as well as a medical perspective. This is certainly the most famous item in the University's vast thesis collection, which records the primary research of many who became eminent scholars.