Dr. Watson

John H. Watson, known as Dr. Watson, is a fictional character in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Watson is Sherlock Holmes' friend, assistant and sometime flatmate, and the first person narrator of all but four of these stories. He is described as the typical Victorian-era gentleman, unlike the more eccentric Holmes. He is astute, although he can never match his friend's deductive skills.

Watson has been adapted in various films, television series, video games, comics, and radio, retaining his role as Holmes' friend and confidant.

Character creation

In Conan Doyle's early rough plot outlines, Sherlock Holmes' sidekick was named "Ormond Sacker" before Conan Doyle finally settled on "John Watson".

In the words of William L. De Andrea,

Fictional character biography

Dr. Watson's first name is mentioned on only four occasions. Part one of the very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, is subtitled Being a reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., Late of the Army Medical Department. The preface of the collection His Last Bow is signed 'John H. Watson, M.D', and in "The Problem of Thor Bridge", Watson says that his dispatch box is labeled 'John H. Watson, M.D'. His wife Mary Watson calls him 'James' in "The Man with the Twisted Lip"; Dorothy L. Sayers speculates that Mary may be referring to his middle name Hamish (an Anglicisation of 'Sheumais', the vocative form of 'Seumas', the Scottish Gaelic for James), though Doyle himself never addresses this beyond including the initial.

Dr. Watson (debugger)

Dr. Watson is an application debugger included with the Microsoft Windows operating system. It may be named drwatson.exe, drwtsn32.exe or dwwin.exe, depending on the version of Windows. It is named after Doctor Watson of Sherlock Holmes fame, the idea being that it would collect error information (symptoms) following a program crash. The use of the word "Watson" has since been expanded to include general end-user feedback services. The original name of this diagnostic tool was "Sherlock".

The information obtained and logged by Dr. Watson is the information needed by technical support personnel to diagnose a program error for a computer running Windows. A text file (usually drwtsn32.log) is created whenever an error is detected, and can be delivered to support personnel by the method they prefer. A crash dump file can also be created, which is a binary file that a programmer can load into a debugger. Dr. Watson can be made to generate more exacting information for debugging purposes if the appropriate symbol files are installed and the symbol search path (environment variable) is set.

Dr. Watson (disambiguation)

Dr. Watson may refer to: