⚗️ St Bartholomew's Hospital
The London teaching hospital where, in a chemical laboratory on New Year's Day of the saga, young Stamford introduced a wounded army doctor to a stranger beating corpses to study bruising. "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."
“You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.”
Where the partnership began
In a chemical laboratory at 'Barts', a young man named Stamford brings a wounded, penniless army surgeon looking for lodgings to meet an acquaintance who is also hunting a flatmate. The acquaintance, beating a corpse in the far corner to study how bruises form after death, turns and greets the stranger with an impossible fact about Afghanistan. Nothing in fiction is quite the same afterwards.
The first deduction, and the first monograph
Holmes is at Barts perfecting a reagent precipitated by haemoglobin and nothing else — an infallible test for bloodstains, he crows, that would have hanged dozens. The scene establishes him at a stroke: a scientist of crime, delighted by his own methods, and in want of exactly the steady companion Fate has just walked through the door.