Dr. Watson

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John H. Watson
Sherlock Holmes character
Paget holmes.png
First appearance A Study in Scarlet
Last appearance "His Last Bow"
Created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Gender Male
Occupation Physician
Title Doctor
Spouse(s) Mary Morstan
Nationality British


Character creation[edit]


In the words of William L. De Andrea,




Fictional character biography[edit]

Dr Watson's first name is mentioned on only three occasions. Part one of the very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, is subtitled Being a reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., Late of the Army Medical Department.[4] In "The Problem of Thor Bridge", Watson says that his dispatch box is labeled 'John H. Watson, M.D'.[5] Mary (Watson's wife) calls him 'James' in "The Man with the Twisted Lip"; Dorothy L. Sayers speculates that Mary may be referring to his middle name Hamish (an Anglicisation of Sheumais, the vocative form of the Scottish Gaelic for James, Seumas), though Doyle himself never addresses this beyond including the initial.[6]

In A Study in Scarlet, Watson, as the narrator, recounts his earlier life before meeting Holmes. It is established that Watson received his medical degree from Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, the University of London in 1878, and had subsequently gone on to train at Netley as a surgeon in the British Army. If one assumes that Watson entered the University of London at around the age of twenty-five, he would have been born around 1853. He joined British forces in India, saw service in the Second Anglo-Afghan War, was wounded at the Battle of Maiwand (July 1880) by a Jezail bullet in the shoulder,[Note 1] suffered enteric fever and was sent back to England on the troopship HMS Orontes following his recovery.[7]

In 1881, Watson runs into an old friend of his named Stamford, who tells him that an acquaintance of his, Sherlock Holmes, is looking for someone to split the rent at a flat in 221B Baker Street. Watson meets Holmes for the first time at a local hospital, where Holmes is conducting a scientific experiment. Holmes and Watson list their faults to each other to determine whether they can live together. The first of Watson's "confessions" is that he keeps a bull pup. Concluding that they are compatible, they subsequently move into the flat. When Watson notices multiple guests frequenting the flat, Holmes reveals that he is a "consulting detective" and that the guests are his clients.[8]


In The Sign of the Four, John Watson becomes engaged to Mary Morstan, a governess. In "The Adventure of the Empty House", statements by Watson imply that Morstan has died by the time Holmes returns after faking his death; that fact is confirmed when Watson moves back to Baker Street to share lodgings with Holmes, as he had done as a bachelor. Conan Doyle made mention of a second wife in "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client" and "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier", but this wife was never named, described, or explained. It was mentioned in His Last Bow that Watson was rejoining the service in London once more. Watson married a third time in Oct 1902, after "The Adventure of the Illustrious Client".

At the beginning of A Study in Scarlet, Watson states he had "neither kith nor kin in England". In the Sign of the Four, it is established his father and older brother are deceased and both shared the initial 'H'. In this story, Holmes examines an old watch in Watson's possession that was formerly his father's before being inherited by his brother. Holmes estimates the watch to have a value of 50 guineas,[Note 2] so H. Watson senior was a very prosperous man if he could have afforded such an item. Holmes deduced from the watch that Watson's brother was "a man of untidy habits-very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects but threw away his chances, lived for sometime in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity and finally, taking to drink he died."

Watson as Holmes' biographer[edit]

Throughout Doyle's novels, Watson is presented as Holmes' biographer. At the end of the first published Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, Watson is so impressed by Holmes' handling of the case and so incensed by Scotland Yard's claiming full credit for its solution that he exclaims: "Your merits should be publicly recognised. You should publish an account of the case. If you won't, I will for you." Holmes suavely responds: "You may do what you like, Doctor."[9] Hence Watson did write the story, presented as "a reprint from the reminiscences of John H. Watson".[8]

In the first chapter of the second story that Watson records, The Sign of Four, Holmes comments on Watson's first effort as a biographer—but with a distinct lack of enthusiasm: "I glanced over it. Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism... The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes, by which I succeeded in unravelling it." Watson admits, "I was annoyed at this criticism of a work which had been specially designed to please him. I confess, too, that I was irritated by the egotism which seemed to demand that every line of my pamphlet should be devoted to his own special doings."[10]

Holmes sometimes accuses Watson of exaggerating his abilities. In "Silver Blaze", Holmes confesses: "I made a blunder, my dear Watson—which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through your memoirs." When Holmes felt he had bungled something, he could exclaim: "Watson, Watson, if you are an honest man you will record this also and set it against my successes!" (The Hound of the Baskervilles, chapters 5–6.) In his prologue to "The Adventure of the Yellow Face," Watson himself remarked: "In publishing these short sketches [of Holmes’ cases]...it is only natural that I should dwell rather upon his successes than upon his failures", although he notes that this is also because where Holmes failed often nobody else succeeded.

Sometimes Watson (or rather Conan Doyle) seems determined to stop publishing stories about Holmes. In "The Adventure of the Second Stain", Watson declares that he had intended the previous story (“The Adventure of the Abbey Grange”) "to be the last of those exploits of my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, which I should ever communicate to the public," but later Watson decided that "this long series of episodes should culminate in the most important international case which he has ever been called upon to handle" ("The Second Stain" being that case). Of course, the "long series of episodes" did not end with this story; there were some twenty stories yet to come.

Watson was able to cooperate with Holmes during seventeen of the twenty-three years the detective was in active practice, keeping "notes of his doings". Watson's published accounts are supposed to be based on these notes.[citation needed] In the later stories, written after Holmes' retirement (ca. 1903–04), Watson repeatedly refers to his notes about the various cases: "I have notes of many hundreds of cases to which I have never alluded.” He explained that after Holmes' retirement, the detective showed reluctance "to the continued publication of his experiences. So long as he was in actual professional practice the records of his successes were of some practical value to him, but since he has definitely retired...notoriety has become hateful to him" ("The Adventure of the Second Stain"). But during Holmes' active career, the publicity Watson gave to his cases was apparently good for business, however superficial Watson’s narratives may have seemed to the detective.

In "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier," one of only two stories supposedly written by Holmes himself, the detective remarks about Watson: "I have often had occasion to point out to him how superficial are his accounts and to accuse him of pandering to popular taste instead of confining himself rigidly to facts and figures." Yet, when Holmes confronts the need to be his own chronicler, he realises just how difficult it is to write a narrative that will hold the reader's attention, and then he confesses that Watson would have been the better choice to write the story. In any case, Holmes regularly referred to Watson as my "faithful friend and biographer," and at least once exclaims, "I am lost without my Boswell."



After Holmes' retirement, Watson often cites special permission from his friend for the publication of further stories. Yet he also received occasional unsolicited suggestions from Holmes about what stories to tell, as noted at the beginning of "The Adventure of the Devil's Foot". After receiving a telegram from Holmes, Watson promptly "hunt[ed] out the notes which give me the exact details of the case and to lay the narrative before my readers."

Personal characteristics[edit]

Physical appearance[edit]



Skills and personality[edit]










The series of Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson portrayed the doctor as a lovable but incompetent bungler whose main jobs were to act amazed at Sherlock and find trouble[14] Some modern treatments, however, have presented a more competent Watson.


Watson was played by actor André Morell in the 1959 film version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Morell was particularly keen that his version of Watson should be closer to that originally depicted in Conan Doyle's stories, and away from Nigel Bruce's interpretation of the role.[15] Other depictions include Robert Duvall opposite Nicol Williamson's Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1978), Donald Houston, who played Watson to John Neville's Holmes in A Study in Terror (1965); a rather belligerent, acerbic Watson portrayed by Colin Blakely in Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), in which Holmes was played by Robert Stephens (who starts the rumour that they are homosexual lovers so women will not chase after him); and James Mason's portrayal in Murder by Decree (1978), with Christopher Plummer as Holmes. Ian Hart portrayed a young, capable and fit Watson twice for BBC Television, once opposite Richard Roxburgh as Holmes (in a 2002 adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles) and for a second time opposite Rupert Everett as the Great Detective in the new story Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004).

In the Soviet/Russian Sherlock Holmes film series directed by Igor Maslennikov Dr. Watson was played by Vitaly Solomin. He is portrayed in the book as a brave and intelligent man, but not especially physically strong.



Watson appears on the 2010 direct-to-DVD Asylum film Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, a science fiction reinvention in which he is portrayed by actor Gareth David-Lloyd. At the beginning of the film, Watson is an elderly man portrayed by David Shackleton during the Blitz in 1940. He tells his nurse the tale of the adventure which he and Holmes vowed never to tell the public. In 1889, he is a home doctor and personal physician and biographer of Sherlock Holmes (Ben Syder), who often teases that Watson is quite a ladies-man. Watson is portrayed as easily confused by Holmes' abilities; the story is set in 1881, the same year as A Study in Scarlet so it can be assumed that he is still in the first year of working with Holmes. He is a skilled gunman and is loyal, if often irritated, by Holmes' methods.




In the TV series, Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century, although Watson is long dead, Holmes acquires a 'new' Watson in the form of a robot. Originally, the robot is the property of Inspector Lestrade's descendant, which downloaded all the Sherlock Holmes stories into its database when instructed by Lestrade to read up on Holmes. The robot believes itself to be Watson, and Holmes goes on to treat it as such, concluding that the "spirit" is Watson though the "body" is not.

In the 2010– BBC television show Sherlock, actor Martin Freeman portrays an ex-army Doctor Watson who reins in the brilliant but rude and eccentric Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and strikes an uneasy yet intense friendship with him. The adaptation is set in contemporary London. As with the original character, Watson served in the British Army in Afghanistan.



Prose and radio[edit]






In popular culture[edit]

  • Watson (computer), an artificially intelligent computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci.

See also[edit]


  1. ^ Also known as a Jazail, 'Jazair or Janjal, a Jezail was a very large flintlock or matchlock musket, with a barrel up to 8 feet (2 m) long. They often fired a .50 or .75 caliber bullet weighing up to 2 ounces (57 g).see Butalia (1998), p.52. They were accurate at long range and often used as a sniper's weapon in warfare. Watson's wound was sometimes described as being in his leg.


  11. ^ A Study in Scarlet
  12. ^ The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton

External links[edit]