5 In order to receive his M.D., Watson would have first had to acquire membership in the Royal College of Surgeons and a licence from the Royal College of Physicians, according to Michael Harrison’s The London of Sherlock Holmes. The latter two qualifications were essential for Watson to open his own medical practice; the M.D. degree, however, indicates that Watson continued his education past the normal medical degree, the M.B. (equivalent to the American M.D.), in pursuit of his interests. In Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: A Medical Digression, Maurice Campbell surmises that Watson received his Bachelor of Medicine (M.B., B.S.—a prerequisite for the M.D. degree) in 1876 from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College (see note 28, below). Robert S. Katz, M.D., in “Doctor Watson—A Physician of Mediocre Qualifications?,” points out that the British M.D. degree is conditioned on presentation of a thesis of outstanding merit and concludes that Watson wrote his thesis on neuropathology, a remarkable achievement in light of the fledgling nature of the field in 1878.
6 When London’s first university college was founded in Bloomsbury in 1828, its mission was—at least in part—to make higher education available to non-Anglicans, who were at that time barred from attending Oxford and Cambridge. “It was a true London institution,” writes Peter Ackroyd in London: The Biography, “its founders comprising radicals, Dissenters, Jews and utilitarians.” (Historian Roy Porter reports that critics scorned it as “that godless institution in Gower Street.”) The college’s educational philosophy, too, differed fundamentally from that of Oxford and Cambridge: the goal of what became known as University College was to produce practising doctors and engineers, not scholars and theologians. A second London college, King’s College, was founded in 1829 by members of the Anglican church; and in 1836, the University of London was formed as an administrative entity designed to examine and confer degrees upon students from both institutions. That jurisdiction was broadened by the Supplemental Charter of 1849, which allowed students from anywhere in the British Empire to earn degrees from the University of London. In 1878—the year Watson earned his degree—the university became the first in the United Kingdom to grant degrees to women, and in fact had been educating women at its London School of Medicine for Women since 1874. The university did not begin offering its own courses until 1900. There is no indication of where Watson actually studied.
Watson’s course of study likely followed along lines similar to those pursued by Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle, when he studied at the University of Edinburgh from 1876 to 1881. In his Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle describes his course of study as “one long weary grind at botany, chemistry, anatomy, physiology and a whole list of compulsory subjects, many of which have a very indirect bearing upon the art of curing. The whole system of teaching, as I look back upon it, seems far too oblique and not nearly practical enough for the purpose in view.” Students learned surgery by observing operations from seats in tiers encircling an operating table. Basic laboratory techniques were also studied, and the fortunate had the benefit of instructors like Dr. Joseph Bell, who could teach the art of diagnosis (see note 1, above). Conan Doyle took employment during his school years as a medical assistant (which required no qualifications), both for the money and the practical experience.
“The London University Building, Burlington Gardens,” by Pennethorne.
Graphic (1870)
Conan Doyle’s living experience, however, may have been markedly different from Watson’s. Conan Doyle found the University of Edinburgh to be “more practical than most other colleges,” he wrote, “since there is none of the atmosphere of an enlarged public school, as is the case in English Universities, but the student lives a free man in his own rooms with no restrictions of any sort.” Where Watson lived during these years is unknown.
7 The Royal Victoria Military Hospital at Netley (now the site of the Royal Victoria Country Park) was opened in 1863 thanks largely to the efforts of Florence Nightingale, whose experiences in the Crimean War inspired her to fight for better medical treatment for wounded soldiers. Lytton Strachey, in his seminal Emininent Victorians, recounts that Nightingale frequently butted heads in this mission with Fox Maule Ramsay, Lord Panmure (known as “the Bison”), the secretary of state for war from 1855 to 1858 and a man, according to Strachey, who was conservative and ambivalent about making any major changes in the established medical order. Lord Panmure supervised construction of the new hospital while Nightingale was out of the country, and she returned to find the plans unacceptable—outdated and adhering to notions of hospital care that she had hoped to reform. Despite her personal appeal to Lord Palmerston, Lord Panmure stood his ground, and construction proceeded apace; “and so,” Strachey writes, “the chief military hospital in England was triumphantly completed on unsanitary principles, with unventilated rooms, and with all the patients’ windows facing northeast.”
8 The prescribed course at Netley consisted of six months’ study of military surgery, military medicine, hygiene, and pathology. Two sessions or courses were given each year, one beginning in April, the other in October, for candidates who passed an entrance examination. Elliot Kimball, in Dr. John H. Watson at Netley, establishes that Watson took the course beginning in October 1879 and terminating in March 1880, having spent the time between June 1878 and October 1879 travelling on the Continent for personal reasons.
9 Created in 1674, the 5th Regiment of Foot—also known as the Fifth Foot, the Fighting Fifth, and the Old and Bold Fifth—became the 5th (Northumberland) Regiment of Fusiliers in 1836, its members serving in the Indian Mutiny and the Second Afghan War. The regiment was renamed as the Northumberland Fusiliers in 1881.
10 The Second Afghan War (1878–1880) was one of three conflicts in which Britain tried to exert control over Afghanistan, a region considered extremely valuable for its northern proximity to India. Further complicating matters was the concern that Russia was gaining greater influence in central Asia, thus posing a threat to British imperialism there. It was an anxiety held most deeply by the viceroy of India, Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, future 1st Earl of Lytton (a diplomat and sometime poet whose father, Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron of Lytton, penned the famous “It was a dark and stormy night,” the first words of the opening sentence of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford). When the emir of Afghanistan, Sher Ali, received a Russian diplomatic mission in Kabul and refused to do likewise for the British, Lytton interpreted the emir’s actions as hostile and called for military maneuvers. “The usual British invasion,” writes Simon Schama in A History of Britain, “was followed by the equally time-honoured local uprising and wholesale slaughter of the British mission, which as usual required a second, punitive campaign—in this case punitive for the British in the losses of both men and money.” Victory was achieved and certain areas of Afghanistan ceded to Britain, but the war’s heavy cost (including the murder of a British envoy at Kabul) helped turn public opinion against the government’s increasingly jingoistic tendencies.
The charge at Maiwand.
11 Also spelled Kandahar or Qandahar, the city was established as the capital of Afghanistan in 1747. It was occupied by the British during the First Afghan War (1839– 1842) and from 1879 to 1881.
12 The Berkshires, officially Princess Charlotte of Wales’s (Berkshire) Regiment, was formed in 1881 from the former 49th and 66th Infantry Regiments. The 66th Foot, as it was known, fought at Maiwand, but by the time Watson wrote up his account (and perhaps by the time he was retired) the Regiment had been incorporated into the Berkshires, and Watson uses the then-current name here.
13 The village of Maiwand, fifty miles from Kandahar, was the scene of a horrific battle that took place on July 27, 1880. The conflict began after Ayub Khan, the governor of Herat and a son of Sher Ali, advanced upon Kandahar with a contingent of 25,000 men. His intent was to displace Sher Ali’s nephew, Abdur-Rahman Khan, now installed as the British-approved emir. General George Burrows and the 66th Infantry Regiment set out to intercept Ayub with the un
derstanding that aid would come from some 6,000 Afghan tribesmen who had been armed by the British. But when the tribesmen defected to join Ayub, the general was left with 2,500 British soldiers to face a force of 25,000 Afghans. “When the enemy cavalry cleared the front,” wrote Captain Mosley Mayne, of the 3rd Cavalry, “we were able to see indistinctly masses and masses of men. Due to the haze it was only when they moved about that we could distinguish them as men and not a dense forest.” Burrows’s forces were routed, and Ayub occupied Maiwand until Sir Frederick Roberts arrived from Kabul with a force of 10,000 to retake the area. Walter Richards, historian of the British Army in India, writes, “There is no grimmer story in all the war annals of the country; no names shine in her honour-roll with more brilliant lustre than do those of the officers and men of the 66th who died in that wild day of terror and ruin on the fatal ridge of Maiwand.”
“There I was struck on the shoulder by a bullet.”
Geo. Hutchinson, A Study in Scarlet (London: Ward, Lock Bowden, and Co., 1891)
14 Watson’s report here of a wounded shoulder contradicts his testimony—in The Sign of Four and elsewhere—of a wounded leg. In “The Noble Bachelor,” for example, Watson mentions that “the Jezail bullet which I had brought back in one of my limbs” forces him to sit with his legs propped up on a chair, and in The Sign of Four, he describes himself as seated “nursing my wounded leg. I had had a jezail bullet through it some time before.” W. B. Hepburn, in “The Jezail Bullet,” reaches the logical conclusion that Watson was wounded twice, but many other scholars ingeniously attempt to explain how two wounds could have been caused by one bullet only. Alvin Rodin and Jack Key, in Medical Casebook of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle, suggest that Watson may have been bent over a patient when shot, with the bullet passing through Watson’s shoulder and leg. Similarly, Peter Brain proposes that Watson was shot from below while squatting over a cliff to answer a call of nature. Others hypothesise that a single bullet may have ricocheted off the bone, grazed the artery, left the body at an acute angle, and then entered the leg, while several physician-scholars point out that the bullet may have passed along the subclavian artery and lodged in a place remote from the entry wound. Julian Wolff, however, concludes that Watson deliberately misrepresented the site of the wound so as to avoid mentioning the actual, embarrassing site: his groin.
Sketch of the action at Maiwand on July 27, 1880.
15 Although the original text is “Jezail,” the correct form of the word is “jezail,” not capitalised, referring not to an Afghan tribe but to a type of gun. Whether this is a printer’s error or the author’s is unclear. According to George Clifford Whitworth (An Anglo-Indian Dictionary: A Glossary of Indian Terms Used in English and of Such English or Other Non-Indian Terms as Have Obtained Special Meaning in India), “juzail (Pashto, corrupt form)” is a “large heavy rifle, with an iron forked rest, used by Afgháns; it carries generally an ounce ball, which is put into the barrel naked.” The ball must be “hammered a good deal to get it home.” Philip Weller, in “On Jezails and Things Afghan,” describes the word as “a rather loose, generic term, similar in nature to the word ‘musket,’ in that it could be applied to lots of different sorts of weapons, with one of the only common features being the muzzle-loading aspect.” It may be derived from the Arabic word for “big”: jazil and, in the plural, jaza’il; the person armed with a jezail is a jaza’ilchi. In Eighteen Years in the Khyber (1900), the Anglo-Indian soldier and administrator Colonel Sir Robert Warburton (1842–1899) speaks of soldiers called Jezailchies. And, in Rudyard Kipling’s 1900 poem “The Last Suttee,” “All night the cressets glimmered pale / On Ulwar sabre and Tonk jezail.”
Jezail rifle.
Courtesy of Richard D. Lesh, BSI, and the Maiwand Jezails, a scion society of the BSI.
16 “Ghazi” was an honorific applied to veteran Muslim warriors, particularly for those who had fought successfully against infidels. They were reputed to use torture and painful methods of execution—hence Watson’s description of them as “murderous.”
17 Stephen M. Black contends that Watson was killed, not wounded, at Maiwand, and that “Murray” (whom he identifies as Pvt. Henry Murrell, Serial #1555, Rifleman, 66th Berkshires) took his identity. Murrell’s guilt for this masquerade, Black argues, induced all of the errors of dates, places, and names rampant throughout the Canon, including his absentmindedness about his own wound.
18 Probably what is now termed typhoid fever, which Watson could have contracted by ingesting food or water contaminated with the bacterium Salmonella typhi. Food may be contaminated by flies (who pick up the bacterium from human waste), by infected persons who may have handled the food, or by polluted water that has been used for cleaning. Typhoid fever unfortunately remains a common disease worldwide, with an estimated 10 percent fatality rate, and claimed the lives of many famous victims during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, including Rudyard Kipling, Wilbur Wright, Franz Schubert, and Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Victoria’s consort (although later diagnosticians suggest Albert may have actually died from stomach cancer).
The Prince Consort, Albert of Saxe-Coburg. Oscar G. Reylander (ca. 1860)
It was not until 1907, with the identification of the infamous “Typhoid Mary” Mallon, a cook in a private home, as the source of an outbreak of typhoid fever, that American health officials realised that a healthy person, with no symptoms of the disease, could be a deadly carrier. Initially confined to a government-controlled island in the Bronx’s East River, after a legal struggle, Mallon won her release, agreeing to give up her occupation and report to health officials regularly. She proceeded to vanish for five years. When an epidemic of typhus broke out in a Manhattan maternity hospital, Mallon was discovered working there as a cook under a false name. She was again confined to the island facility, where she remained until her death twenty-three years later. The infection of forty-seven people, three of whom died, is attributed to Mallon. At the time of Mallon’s first arrest, there was at least one other known carrier in New York, Tony Labella, who had caused more cases of typhoid (120) and deaths (seven) than Mallon. Labella fled to New Jersey and was no more cooperative than Mallon.
Watson’s symptoms would have included fever, coughing, loss of appetite, diarrhea or constipation, possible intestinal haemorrhaging, and a skin rash of rose-coloured spots. A vaccine was not available until 1898, too late to aid Watson. A British soldier’s risk of dying from a disease such as typhoid was often greater than his risk of dying in battle.
19 Where were Watson’s “kith and kin”? Watson’s father, J. Watson, had been dead “many years” by 1888, and his elder brother had died of drink shortly before the events recorded in The Sign of Four (see text accompanying note 32 to that novel, below). There are numerous suggestions of Watson’s family home, including Hampshire, Berkshire, Northumberland, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, and even America. In “Watson: Treason in the Blood,” Hartley R. Nathan and Clifford S. Goldfarb present evidence that Watson may have descended from two of the leaders of the 1816 Regency Rebellion, James Watson and his son James (Jemmy) Watson, who subsequently fled to America. Our Dr. Watson was in fact also named James, point out the authors (see “The Man with the Twisted Lip”), but evidently changed his name to John to avoid the stigma of identification with his grandfather and great-grandfather. This thesis explains Watson’s lack of British family and suggests an American origin. In contrast, in “Art in Whose Blood?,” this editor proposes a relationship with Scottish portrait painter John Watson Gordon (real name: John Watson).
20 This would have been worth about U.S. $2.87 in 1878, or about £29 (U.S. $45) in today’s purchasing power. Eleven shillings and sixpence would have been barely enough to support Watson in London, where lodgings at a boardinghouse might have cost 7s. per day, although less expensive locations might have run as little as 30s. to 40s. per week. Several scholars suggest that Watson may have been receiving support from his family during this time, although his
father and brother had little enough later (see The Sign of Four, text accompanying note 32).
21 Baedeker, in 1896, lists numerous “quiet and comfortable” hotels in the streets leading from the Strand to the Thames. For example, the Arundel Hotel, at No. 19 Arundel St., on the Embankment, charged from 6s. per day for “room, attendance, and breakfast,” with dinner an additional 3s.
22 So named because it originally skirted the bank of the river Thames, the Strand was the great artery of traffic between the City and the West End. It contained many newspaper offices and theatres and has Canonical associations as the home of “Simpson’s” restaurant, a favourite of Holmes (“The Dying Detective” and “The Illustrious Client”), and the namesake of the Strand Magazine, headquartered near the corner of the Strand and Southampton Street, as fancifully depicted on its cover.
23 John Ball expresses the view that Arthur Conan Doyle and Watson met at this time, for both were in similar circumstances, seeking gainful employment as doctors. Whether they met in the offices of a physician’s supplier, at a lecture, or at a library, “a friendship and a collaboration was formed which was to enrich the world. For, great as was the association between Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes, of nearly equal importance to posterity was the second collaboration between Dr. Watson and the other physician who was also destined for immortal fame, Dr. Arthur Conan Doyle.”
24 The novelist and Sherlockian scholar Christopher Morley, founder of the Baker Street Irregulars, in an unpublished letter to Edgar Smith, then editor of the Baker Street Journal, proposes January 1, 1881, as the day of Watson’s fateful decision—“a day when Watson would naturally be making resolutions for a more frugal life.” The holiday also explains, suggests Morley, why the laboratory to which Stamford led Watson was all but deserted.
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