"The Real Dr. Watson." Topic

"How are you? 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…"
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Amicalement
Armand

He was described like that, however his behaviour in the stories, or at least how Holmes treated him, made him seem like a gun toting neanderthal that could barely form coherent words. You wondered how he could get any of it down on paper outside of the most primitive of stick drawings.

Ha the real Doctor Watson is here:

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I don't care if she have every been to Afghanistan but Hong Kong is a different story!

VR
James Mattes

What, Jane Watson and Monk in a Deerstalker you mean.

And in one of the early stories Watson explains that he deliberately underplays his part as they are the Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes, not of Dr John Watson, although it is clear from the narratives that Watson is an invaluable ally to the great Holmes.

IIRC Doyle wrote Watson as being far more clever than some of the film portrayals mske him.