“Watson’s report here of a wounded shoulder contradicts his testimony—in The Sign of Four and elsewhere—of a wounded leg. … W. B. Hepburn, in ‘The Jezail Bullet,’ reaches the logical conclusion that Watson was wounded twice, but many other scholars ingeniously attempt to explain how two wounds could have been caused by one bullet only.”
Note in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Novels, edited by Leslie S. Klinger
LOLSCHOLARS
(via novazembla)
I’d like to hear their reasoning. I can fanwank anything. How does one do it professionally.
(via turnabout)
This is how it continues:
“Alvin Rodin and Jack Key, in Medical Casebook of Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle, suggest that Watson may have been bent over a patient when shot, with the bullet passing through Watson’s shoulder and leg. Similarly, Peter Brain [!] proposes that Watson was shot from below while squatting over a cliff to answer a call of nature. Others hypothesise that a single bullet may have ricocheted off the bone, grazed the artery, left the body at an acute angle, and then entered the leg, while several physician-scholars point out that the bullet may have passed along the subclavian artery and lodged in a place remote from the entry wound. Julian Wolff, however, concludes that Watson deliberately misrepresented the site of the wound so as to avoid mentioning the actual, embarrassing site: his groin.”
HIS GROIN. (But how does that explain the shoulder?)
(via novazembla)
The last one is definitely the best wank, as the others defy the laws of physics. I don’t think bullets and guns from that period were so advanced that they could go through the body multiple times, and when they ricochet, they lose speed and momentum, making it harder to then reenter the body and do more damage. The last one works, because it explains why Watson would randomly lie about where he was injured.
Though now there’s an opening for hurt/comfort fic about how he can’t maintain an erection because his dick almost got shot off.
(via turnabout)
OH. MY. YES THERE IS.
My question is why the hell would you squat over a cliff to do your business? That just seems rude, and precarious. There could be a totally innocent buzzard hanging around below that cliff, and as much as we all love John Watson, there’s no textual indication that this buzzard is into scat. Rude.
(via novazembla)
“The last one is definitely the best wank, as the others defy the laws of physics. I don’t think bullets and guns from that period were so advanced that they could go through the body multiple times, and when they ricochet, they lose speed and momentum, making it harder to then reenter the body and do more damage.”
Although this is true, they don’t lose nearly as much speed as you might think. I’ve been watching Mythbusters like a madwoman lately, and I just saw an episode where their experiment involves a dude in the Civil War getting shot through the leg into the testicles, and the bullet continuing on into the uterus of a woman 150 feet behind him, impregnating her. While the myth itself turns out to be false, it’s false because the bullet was still too hot after leaving the testicles to carry living sperm, and shockingly, SHOCKINGLY, not because such a shot was impossible. They actually execute the shot with ballistic gel and bone models, and their expert sharpshooter gets it in on the first try with a period weapon, and the bullet goes through the tibia, through the, *ahem* sac, and about halfway through the far-off woman. Science is CRAZY.
