BA, MB
1
MB, BSc
1
MB, FRS
1
MRCP
1
4
1%
FRS, FRCP
1
LKQ, CPI
1
LRQ, CPI
1
total 372
TABLE II; Surgeons at London hospitals, 1888
disregarding ‘no title’
No title, etc, listed
157
157
45%
Dr
6
6
2%
MD
12
27
8%
17%
MD, FRCS
7
MD, MRCS
5
MD, CM
1
MD, CB
1
MD, BSC, FRCS
1
FRCS
83
105
30%
55%
FRCSE
1
MB, FRCS
10
BA, MB, FRCS
1
MA, FRCS
3
FRCS, FRS
5
MB, MS, FRCS
1
BM, BS, FRCS
1
FRS
14
16
5%
8%
FRS, FLS
1
DCL, FRS
1
MRCS
18
25
7%
13%
MRCS, LRCP
2
MB, MRCS
4
MA, MRCS
1
MB
4
12
3%
6%
MB, CM
1
MB, MC
4
MS
2
BS
1
Total
total 348
References
1 Arthur Conan Doyle, Hiiro no Shusaku, translated by Kobayashi Tsukasa and Higashiyama Akane (Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 1997.) [Translation of A Study in Scarlet in the OUP edition, 1993.]
2 Ikoma Hisaaki, ‘Watson no Keireki {Watson’s Career],’ Sherlock Holmes Sanka, ed. Kobayashi Tsukasa and Higashiyama Akane (Tokyo: Rippu Shobo, 1980), pp.153-171}.
3 Helen Simpson, ‘Medical Career and Capabilities of Dr John H Watson,’ Baker Street Studies, ed H W Bell (New York: Otto Penzler Books, 1995), pp.35-62).
4 David Young, ‘John H Watson: Medical School and Beyond,’ The New Baker Street Pillar Box, No.29, Feb, 1997.
5 Dicken’s Dictionary of London, 1888 (Moretonhampstead: Old House Books, 1993.) [A facsimile of the 1888 edition.]
6 Christopher Redmond, A Sherlock Holmes Handbook (Toronto: Simon and Pierre, 1993), p.71.
7 William S Baring-Gould, The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol.1 (New York: Clarkson N Potter, 1967), P.74.
8 John Hall, Unexplored Possibilities (Leeds, Tai Xu Press, 1995), P.12
9 Hall, ibid, p.18.
10 Arthur Conan Doyle, Letters to the Press, eds. John Michael Gibson and Richard Lancelyn Green (London: Secker and Warburg, 1986.)
11 E Alvin Rodin and Jack D Key, Medical Casebook of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle (Malabar: Robert E Krieger, 1984), p.302.
12 GJH Evatt, ‘Personal Recollections of the Afghan Campaigns of 1878-79-80: The “Death March” through the Khyber Pass in the Afghan Campaign,’ Journal of the Royal Army Medical Corps, Vol.10, 1905, pp.276-291.
13 T Crawford, ‘Special Report on the Hospital Organisation, Sanitation, and Medical History of the Wars in Afghanistan, 1879-79-80,’ Army Medical Department Report for the Year 1880, Vol.22, 1882.
14 Rodin and Key, op cit, p.7.
15 Rodin and Key, op cit, pp.353-354.
16 Hall, op cit, p.83.
17 Naganuma Kohki, Sherlock Holmes no Chie (Tokyo: Asahi-shinbun-sha, 1961.)
18 Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1924.)
19 Rodin and Key, op cit, p.27.
(The World of Holmes No.30, 2007, in Japanese)
Questions on Holmes
This is a project devised by HY, whereby each participant asks up to three questions and the other tries - tries! - to answer them; the first then comments on the answers, etc, until (with luck) some consensus in reached.
1: “A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA”
Hirayama Yuichi (HY): Why did Holmes not know that Watson intended to go into practice after marrying Mary Morstan?
John Hall (JH): This is a difficult one, especially if we believe that the two men had been in partnership in Holmes’s detective business. The logical reading is that the two men were not as close as is sometimes imagined, and thus Watson did not discuss his financial state with Holmes. But even that is not the whole story, for if Holmes were such a brilliant detective, then he would surely have deduced that Watson intended - and in fact needed - to go back into practice in order to make a living. The logical conclusion from that is that Holmes believed that Watson could support himself and Mrs Watson without going into practice.
How could that have been? Holmes must have been aware that Watson had some other source of income than medical practice, but what source? Holmes, in common with Watson’s readers, knew that Watson had a ‘wound pension’ of some sort; but Watson had complained at the opening of A Study in Scarlet that the pension was inadequate even for an unmarried man, so it is reasonable to suppose that it would be pitifully inadequate for a married man and his wife (and possibly children, if things turned out that way.)
I have long believed that Watson supplemented his army pension - from the earliest days of his acquaintance with Holmes - by writing. Watson himself
labels A Study in Scarlet as a reprint from his reminiscences, and that alone suggests that he was already working on an autobiographical opus. Then we have the hints of possible press reports of Holmes’s cases: Mycroft speaks of hearing of Sherlock everywhere since Watson became his chronicler and this at a time when only A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four had been published.
But Another possibility is that Watson was a paid full partner in Holmes’s detective business up until 1887 or ‘88 and the marriage to Mary Morstan. Ian MacQueen (Sherlock Holmes Detected) thinks that Watson became a partner after 1894 and the Return, when Watson sold his practice to Dr Verner, at Holmes’s request. I think that Watson as already a partner before his marriage, and the money from that enabled him to buy the first practice in Paddington.
If that were so, then Holmes would know Watson had some money in the bank, and so he might think that Watson had enough to ‘retire’ and write his books, instead of going into medical practice.
JH: Why did Holmes and Watson lose touch after Watson’s marriage?
HY: It reads very much as if the relationship cooled off to some extent when Watson married Mary Morstan. Had that not been the case, Watson would surely have sent an invitation to the wedding to Holmes; and Watson would also have sent a note to Holmes to say that he (Watson) as going into practice, if only because Holmes was a prospective patient. The almost total lack of contact suggests that the friendship as not then as strong as it had once been.
When Holmes heard of Watson’s intention to marry Mary, he said, ‘I really cannot congratulate you.’ He then tried to excuse this coldness with, ‘love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgement.’ But it was Watson’s marriage that was at issue, not Holmes’s; nobody was suggesting that Holmes should get married! And Watson was not one for ‘cold reason.’ It seems clear that Holmes did not want Watson to get married. It is possible that Holmes felt, as he later felt in ‘The Blanched Soldier,’ that Watson had ‘deserted’ him.
Watson wrote of Holmes’s reaction when Watson returned to 221b that ‘His manner was not effusive. It seldom was; but he was glad, I think, to see me. With hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly eye, he waved me to an armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a spirit case and a gasogene. . . Then he stood before the fire and looked me over in his singular introspective fashion.’ This is surely the manner of a man who regretted his previous churlishness, but could not bring himself to say ‘Sorry.’ Watson showed his magnanimity and accepted Holmes’s wordless apology. Holmes would have been relieved at his friend’s reaction. When he said, ‘Wedlock suits you,’ that was his blessing on Watson’s marriage.
It may be that Mary’s attitude to Holmes was less than friendly. In ‘The Stock-broker’s Clerk,’ Holmes visits the Watsons, but Mary does not come to see him; and odd way for her to behave. However, in ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery,’ Mary actively encourages Watson to take an interest in the case, so perhaps Mary too had second thoughts?
I think that perhaps Watson’s remark that ‘There was but one woman to [Holmes], and that woman was the late Irene Adler’ was Watson’s small revenge for Holmes’s talk about emotion biasing one’s judgement.
HY: Why did Irene marry Norton with such haste and apparent lack of preparation?
JH: Of all the many problems associated with ‘A Scandal in Bohemia,’ the whole question of the circumstances of the wedding between Irene Adler and Godfrey Norton must be one of the most puzzling.
Let us begin at the end, and look at the ceremony itself. Sherlock Holmes stated that he had gone into the church after Irene Adler and Godfrey Norton. ‘There was not a soul there save the two whom [Holmes] had followed and a surpliced clergyman, who seemed to be expostulating with them.’ Godfrey Norton then seized Holmes, and insisted that he act as a witness. ‘It seems that there had been some informality about their licence, that the clergyman absolutely refused to marry them without a witness of some sort, and that [Holmes’s] lucky appearance saved’ the day. It had to be done quickly, even then, for it was approaching noon, and the wedding would not be legal were it not celebrated before twelve.
Now, this is utter rubbish. Informality or no informality, the clergyman could not marry them without two witnesses. If Holmes were one, who then was the other? We might suggest Irene’s coachman, or the cabbie who drove Norton to the church; or perhaps some minor church official, the sexton or gravedigger might have been present? Might: but we know they were not, for Holmes said as much: ‘There was not a soul there save’ the three we know about. Moreover, as a witness, Holmes would not have to ‘[mumble] responses and [vouch] for things of which [he] knew nothing,’ as he claimed.
The mention of the time of day is also significant. Watson says that ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’ took place in March 1888, although some chronologists might favour 1889. Up until 1886, marriages did indeed have to be celebrated before noon. But in that year the rules were changed, and the cut-off time was 3 pm, except for Roman Catholic church (and the name is fictitious so it is possible) then Holmes might have had to mumble responses, not as a witness but as an acolyte, assisting the priest. This seems promising, but there are two powerful objections to it. The first is that of the witnesses, for if Holmes were assisting the priest there would not even be one, let alone the requisite two; and the second is the sheer implausibility of a priest’s being so ill-prepared that he did not have his own acolyte ready and waiting.
The same lack of preparation seems to have extended to the bride and groom, for their sudden departure smacks of complete ignorance not merely of the structure and content of the ceremony, but of the very fact that it was taking place at all! Watson is sometimes accused of not knowing what day it was, or whether he was married or not, but presumably even he managed to turn up on time for his own wedding! Are we seriously to believe that Norton, a lawyer, failed to remember the time of his?
It surely looks very much as if the wedding were a complete fake. If so, for whose benefit was it staged? One possibility is that Norton, for whatever reason, wished to fool Irene. How believable is that? Norton is a curious character: a successful lawyer who yet could abandon his practice at a moment’s notice and catch the 5.15 am train from Charing Cross to the Continent, never to return. There might be more to Norton than at first appears, and we shall consider him again in a moment; but would Irene be so easily fooled? Remember that she had set her sights on a king. She wanted to marry the King of Bohemia; and then she changed her mind and married - if she did indeed marry - Norton. Would anyone so marriage-oriented be satisfied with a pale simulacrum? Remember too that Irene was an ‘adventuress.’ She relied upon her feminine charms for her living, and experience tells us (or at least it tells me! I cannot of course speak for my distinguished and happily married Japanese colleague) that such ladies are not the sort to be easily fooled.
No: of the four people present in the church, only one had so little knowledge of marriage that fooling him was easy, and that one was the confirmed bachelor and misogynist, Mr Sherlock Holmes.
Hard to believe? Consider, then, the beginning of the episode, and that very hasty departure for the church. Norton charges out of Irene’s house, calls a cab at the top of his voice, roars out his destination - ‘Gross and Hankey’s [presumably a jeweller’s, so Norton had not even bothered to buy the ring at this point, if you believe that!] . . . and then to the Church of St. Monica’ - and thunders off. Before we can collect our scattered wits, here comes Irene herself, also in a bit of a rush - and also announcing ‘The Church of St. Monica,’ just in case anyone missed it first time.
It would look good on television, would it not, or perhaps in Technicolor on the big screen? And that it what it is: pure theatre. Not merely dramatic, but melodramatic, indeed positively transpontine. Again we must ask: for whose benefit wa
s this performance? The answer is surely obvious. It was for Holmes’ benefit, to pique his curiosity, and ensure that he would follow the happy couple to the church and witness (in every sense!) their wedding.
Unlikely? This is what Irene Adler herself wrote to Holmes: ‘I had been warned against you months ago. I had been told that if the King employed an agent it would certainly be you.’ And then Holmes himself had been none too discreet. He had gone along to the mews stables and made enquiries about Irene. Of course, Holmes himself thought that he was being very clever! But it is not at all out of the question that one of those cabbies who ‘had driven [Norton] home a dozen times from Serpentine-mews’ had mentioned the inquisitive stranger to Norton later that morning - ‘Bloke asking about you earlier today, sir’ - or indeed that John, Irene’s coachman, was present and taking careful note, and that he alerted Irene to Holmes’s presence.
Irene herself might easily have checked to see if the house was under observation. In one of her disguises, she might very well have been watching the watchful Holmes, who saw merely Norton ‘in the windows of the sitting-room, pacing up and down, talking excitedly, and waving his arms. Of her [ie Irene] I could see nothing.’ [Emphasis added.] Holmes did not see Irene because she was not there! She was outside, watching Holmes. (In passing, note again the very over-the-top performance by Norton. What on earth did Holmes image the lawyer to be saying that needed wavings of arms, excited talking, and all the rest?)
If the wedding were a fake, then the clergyman must have been in on it. That is not a real problem. He might have been a friend of Norton’s, one professional man might quite easily know another, who had been persuaded to take part in a ‘joke.’ Or he might not have been a clergyman at all, but an actor hired for a couple of hours, just as Holmes himself later hired a whole streetful of people to fool Irene. (If fool her he did.) The church was a quiet one, Holmes himself said that only three people were in there when he entered it. It may well have been that Irene and Norton selected that particular church because they knew the clergyman would be away visiting the sick, or some similar parish duty, at the time in question.
East Wind Coming Page 19
