Arthur Conan Doyle's Round the Red Lamp, Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life is an eclectic collection of fifteen short stories, first published in October 1894. Its title (which came to Conan Doyle late in the process of revision) refers to the red lamp that typically signalled the presence of a general practitioner willing to treat walk-ins for a small fee, and usually found in poorer areas of towns. Conan Doyle therefore mined his experience as a medical student (at Edinburgh, 1876–81), as a medical assistant in Sheffield, Birmingham and Plymouth (various short-term posts taken up between 1877 and 1881), and as a provincial GP with his own practice in Southsea (1882–90) for two books in 1894. First, while wintering in Davos with his tubercular wife, he wrote the transparently autobiographical The Stark Munro Letters, based on his medical partnership with the volatile and eccentric Dr George Turnavine Budd. This was serialized in the Idler from October 1894 and published as a book in 1895. Also in Davos and back in London, Conan Doyle then worked up this collection of stories loosely linked by medical themes. He considered Stark Munro a significant work, a portrait of the artist as a young man. Round the Red Lamp had less of a place in his own sense of his body of work.

There are some good reasons for the relative obscurity of Round the Red Lamp in the Conan Doyle canon. It is a hybrid, interstitial work, which appeared in the midst of his success with his historical novels and the Sherlock Holmes serializations in the Strand Magazine. It was pitched as a series of medical stories for Jerome K. Jerome at the Idler, but some of the stories were too ‘strong’ for the magazine, and Jerome wanted ones ‘less sad’, so only four appeared there. Others were sold in the magazine market by Conan Doyle's agent A. P. Watt to Black & White, Harper's Monthly or the Illustrated London News.