The Autobiography of Sherlock Holmes Read Online Free PDF Page B

after a brief period of Army Medical Department training at Netley.
    During the battle of Maiwand, 27 July 1880, whilst attached to the 66 th (Berkshire) Regiment of Foot, upon transiting a dry river bed, Watson sustained simultaneous wounds to his shoulder and leg fired from Jezail muskets by a sniper party of Afghans in ambush within a depression in the elevated river bank. He was sent to the rear to a field hospital where his wounds were cared for and then to England where he was convalesced through the autumn of 1881. He was given a medical retirement due to his injuries and debilitation along with a small wound pension insufficient for independent living and lasting only nine months. Soon after, on 15 January 1881, Watson and I would be acquainted and would begin on a long association together.
    Watson’s constancy with me in our adventures together belied his essential peripatetic nature. It is not a disservice to say that, while competent as a doctor, medicine was not Watson’s passion; indeed, it can be said that his later literary endeavours, the extensive body of published works retailing the cases that came our way, was a passion greater than his chosen profession. Watson, to my certain knowledge, never achieved significant financial success as a doctor. He set up or purchased three practices and earned a fair living, but he was not of the cut to become a Harley Street name and earn a large income. His practice in Paddington began in mid-1888 and he was back in residence in Montague Street in late 1889. The second practice was located in Kensington beginning in late 1890 and continued until he sold it in mid-1893. During these years, he continued to share rooms with me, as the small practice consisted of an examining room and waiting room only with no lodgings above. His final practice was in Queen Anne Street from 1902 through 1905. Again, he continued in residence in Montague Street during these years. The only years when Watson maintained his residence elsewhere during our long association of forty-eight years, from 1881 until his death this year, were the fourteen months in 1888-1889 when he resided in Paddington and the three years following on the Moriarty business when I was in absentia .
    It is not entirely accurate to say that Watson and I shared the same rooms all those years. When he began his final practice in 1902, we had the third floor converted to private rooms for Watson. The larger bedroom became a sitting-room and he moved his sleeping and dressing room to the smaller bedroom. Over the course of the years 1905-1929, Watson and I lived together, but apart, much as lodgers in separate rooms in the same house. There were months—indeed, years—when we did not see each other, only hearing the other come and go on our vastly different timetables. Even during Watson’s return to the Army Medical Department from 1913 through 1918, he remained in his rooms, as his duties were those of Senior Medical Officer at the London Recruitment Centre that processed young men joining the army and the navy to fight in the Great War.
    Watson married in 1888, just a month before he began his Paddington practice. His wife was, in his words, ‘An intoxicating, wild Welsh girl with a voice like a golden harp.’ Her name was Tegan Astley, from Llanwddyn, Montgomeryshire. She was a cytologist who prepared and interpreted microscopic tissue specimens at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. Watson had made her acquaintance when he was a resident surgeon in 1879 and they walked out together for several years after his military service prior to their becoming engaged in 1886 and, subsequently, wedded on Saturday, 18 June 1888, on an auspicious, symbolic full moon that was to be of short duration. Watson asked me to be his Best Man and, of course, I agreed. The wedding supper was at Simpson’s and the next day Watson and his bride left for a week in Wales. Upon their return, he set up his practice in Paddington in a modest house