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    Arthur Conan Doyle - The Parasite: "London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained."
    Arthur Conan Doyle - The Parasite: "London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained."
    Arthur Conan Doyle - The Parasite: "London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained."
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    Arthur Conan Doyle - The Parasite: "London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained."

    By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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    About this ebook

    The Parasite is another celebrated novel belonging to the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle. The protagonist of the narrative is named Austin Gilroy. He is a young professor of physiology whose friend, Professor Wilson, is specializing in occult practices and mesmerism. In one occasion, Gilroy is introduced to Miss Penclosa, a strange, crippled woman who claims to have psychic powers. To persuade the incredulous young man, she hypnotizes his fiancée in front of him. Being now convinced of her powers, though without having any rational explanations for them, Gilroy decides to attend the occult gatherings organized by Wilson and allows Miss Penclosa to practice her powers on him. Miss Penclosa, who falls in love with Gilroy, manages to push him to break his engagement with his fiancée. Gradually, he becomes totally dependent on her and can no longer free himself from her grip. She plays her tricks to make him praise her and caress her until he becomes like a mere toy in her hands. He is only freed when one day, as he is heading towards her house for their daily date, her nurse announces that she has died.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopyright Group
    Release dateSep 24, 2013
    ISBN9781780006079
    Arthur Conan Doyle - The Parasite: "London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained."
    Author

    Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

    Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born on May 22, 1859. He became a doctor in 1882. When this career did not prove successful, Doyle started writing stories. In addition to the popular Sherlock Holmes short stories and novels, Doyle also wrote historical novels, romances, and plays.

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    • 4/5
      This novella concerns a scientist, Professor Gilroy, whose scepticism about the rational basis for hypnotism is replaced by his horror in actually being hypnotised by a Miss Penclosa and forced to carry out actions against his will of which he has no memory afterwards. Miss Penclosa's powerful mind increasingly dominates and controls the Professor's every waking and sleeping moment and he is eventually forced to contemplate a dramatic final solution to the problem in quite a gripping conclusion. A good, short read.

    Book preview

    Arthur Conan Doyle - The Parasite - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

    The Parasite by Arthur Conan Doyle

    If ever a writer needed an introduction Arthur Conan Doyle would not be considered that man. After all, Sherlock Holmes is perhaps the foremost literary detective of any age. Add to this canon his stories of science fiction and his poems, his historical novels, his political campaigning, his efforts in establishing a Court Of Appeal and there is little room for anything else. Except he was also an exceptional writer of short stories of the horrific and macabre. Something very different from what you might expect.

    Born in Arthur Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland. From 1876 - 1881 he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh following which he was employed as a doctor on the Greenland whaler Hope of Peterhead in 1880 and, after his graduation, as a ship's surgeon on the SS Mayumba during a voyage to the West African coast in 1881.  Arriving in Portsmouth in June of that year with less than £10 (£700 today to his name, he set up a medical practice at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea. The practice was initially not very successful. While waiting for patients, Conan Doyle again began writing stories and composed his first novel The Mystery of Cloomber. Although he continued to study and practice medicine his career was now firmly set as a writer.  And thereafter great works continued to pour out of him.

    Index of Contents

    Chapter I

    Chapter II

    Chapter III

    Chapter IV

    Arthur Conan Doyle – A Short Biography

    CHAPTER I

    March 24.  The spring is fairly with us now.  Outside my laboratory window the great chestnut-tree is all covered with the big, glutinous, gummy buds, some of which have already begun to break into little green shuttlecocks.  As you walk down the lanes you are conscious of the rich, silent forces of nature working all around you.  The wet earth smells fruitful and luscious.  Green shoots are peeping out everywhere.  The twigs are stiff with their sap; and the moist, heavy English air is laden with a faintly resinous perfume.  Buds in the hedges, lambs beneath them—everywhere the work of reproduction going forward!

    I can see it without, and I can feel it within.  We also have our spring when the little arterioles dilate, the lymph flows in a brisker stream, the glands work harder, winnowing and straining.  Every year nature readjusts the whole machine.  I can feel the ferment in my blood at this very moment, and as the cool sunshine pours through my window I could dance about in it like a gnat.  So I should, only that Charles Sadler would rush upstairs to know what was the matter.  Besides, I must remember that I am Professor Gilroy.  An old professor may afford to be natural, but when fortune has given one of the first chairs in the university to a man of four-and-thirty he must try and act the part consistently.

    What a fellow Wilson is!  If I could only throw the same enthusiasm into physiology that he does into psychology, I should become a Claude Bernard at the least.  His whole life and soul and energy work to one end.  He drops to sleep collating his results of the past day, and he wakes to plan his researches for the coming one.  And yet, outside the narrow circle who follow his proceedings, he gets so little credit for it.  Physiology is a recognized science.  If I add even a brick to the edifice, every one sees and applauds it.  But Wilson is trying to dig the foundations for a science of the future.  His work is underground and does not show.  Yet he goes on uncomplainingly, corresponding with a hundred semi-maniacs in the hope of finding one reliable witness, sifting a hundred lies on the chance of gaining one little speck of truth, collating old books, devouring new ones, experimenting, lecturing, trying to light up in others the fiery interest which is consuming him.  I am filled with wonder and admiration when I think of him, and yet, when he asks me to associate myself with his researches, I am compelled to tell him that, in their present state, they offer little attraction to a man who is devoted to exact science.  If he could show me something positive and objective, I might then be tempted to approach the question from its physiological side.  So long as half his subjects are tainted with charlatanerie and the other half with hysteria we physiologists must content ourselves with the body and leave the mind to our descendants.

    No doubt I am a materialist.  Agatha says that I am a rank one.  I tell her that is an excellent reason for shortening our engagement, since I am in such urgent need of her spirituality.  And yet I may claim to be a curious example of the effect of education upon temperament, for by nature I am, unless I deceive myself, a highly psychic man.  I was a nervous, sensitive boy, a dreamer, a somnambulist, full of impressions and intuitions.  My black hair, my dark eyes, my thin, olive face, my tapering fingers, are all characteristic of my real temperament, and cause experts like Wilson to claim me as their own.  But my brain is soaked with exact knowledge.  I have trained myself to deal only with fact and with proof.  Surmise and fancy have no place in my scheme of thought.  Show me what I can see with my microscope, cut with my scalpel, weigh in my balance, and I will devote a lifetime to its investigation.  But when you ask me to study feelings, impressions, suggestions, you ask me to do what is distasteful and even demoralizing.  A departure from pure reason affects me like an evil smell or a musical discord.

    Which is a very sufficient reason why I am a little loath to go to Professor Wilson’s tonight.  Still I feel that I could hardly get out of the invitation without positive rudeness; and, now that Mrs. Marden and Agatha are going, of course I would not if I could.  But I had rather meet them anywhere else.  I know that Wilson would draw me into this nebulous semi-science of his if he could.  In his enthusiasm he is perfectly impervious to hints or remonstrances.  Nothing short of a positive quarrel will make him realize my aversion to the whole business.  I have no doubt that he has some new mesmerist or clairvoyant or medium or trickster of some sort whom he is going to exhibit to us, for even his entertainments bear upon his hobby.  Well, it will be a treat for Agatha, at any rate.  She is interested in it, as woman usually is in whatever is vague and mystical and indefinite.

    10.50 P. M.  This diary-keeping of mine is, I fancy, the outcome of

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