Dr. John Watson

The profile

John H. Watson, M.D., late of the Army Medical Department, came home from the Afghan campaign with a damaged shoulder (or leg — his own records disagree) and no reason to get up in the morning until a mutual friend introduced him to a stranger in a hospital laboratory. He has been getting up ever since: as flatmate, biographer, medical opinion, revolver arm, and the one person whose company Holmes never tires of.

Watson is not the fool adaptations sometimes make him. He is a competent doctor, a reliable shot, and an observant man by any standard but one; his real gift is moral — he is the fixed point of decency by which the reader, and Holmes, navigate. He married (at least once), buried his wife, returned to Baker Street, and wrote sixty accounts that made his friend immortal while modestly hiding how much of the work was his own steadiness.