Interest in Sherlock Holmes has sky rocketed since Guy Ritchie’s movie series was released, as well as the second series of the TV adaptation of Holmes — set in the present day and starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the detective and Martin Freeman as his medical friend.
Freeman’s Dr Watson refers to his experiences in Afghanistan where, 130 years on, British forces are once again fighting a savage war on the same ground.
The British entered Afghanistan in 1878 to install a British-friendly regime across the border from India. At first things went well. The British-Indian army defeated the Afghans and a treaty was signed granting the British the right to trade with them and to send an envoy to Kabul.
A young doctor, Arthur Conan Doyle, who set up practice in 1882, began writing detective stories to boost his finances.
A Study in Scarlet, the first story to feature his detective Sherlock Holmes, was published in 1887.
Among those wounded at Maiwand was an army doctor, Surgeon-Major Alexander Francis Preston. His experiences so closely mirror those of Dr Watson, he is thought to be the model for Holmes’s sidekick.
You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ Sherlock Holmes’ first words to Dr Watson in A Study In Scarlet are among the most famous introductory lines in literature.
They are spoken to Dr John Watson, the narrator of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories. Watson is baffled as to how Holmes, who has never met him, could have known he had just returned from Afghanistan, where he was wounded in the Battle of Maiwand in 1880.
Holmes later explained: ‘Here is a gentleman of medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an Army doctor then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair.
‘He has undergone hardships and sickness as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured . . . Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.’
Maiwand, a pivotal battle of Britain’s Second Afghan War, was one of the worst defeats ever suffered by a British Army
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2095088/The-REAL-Dr-Watson-The-Victorian-army-medic-inspiration-Sherlocks-trusty-sidekick.html#ixzz1lCT3ig7u
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