The Dramatic Introduction of Dr. Moore Agar

Fictional case.

In the Sherlock Holmes stories

Untold Story

• Dr. Watson mentioned that in March 1897 Dr. Moore Agar of Harley Street, whose dramatic introduction to Holmes could have been recount, gave positive injunctions that Sherlock Holmes lay aside all his cases and surrender himself to complete rest if he wished to avert an absolute breakdown. (DEVI, 8)

« It was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes's iron constitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of constant hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps, by occasional indiscretions of his own. In March of that year Dr Moore Agar, of Harley Street, whose dramatic introduction to Holmes I may some day recount, gave positive injunctions that the famous private agent would lay aside all his cases and surrender himself to complete rest if he wished to avert an absolute breakdown. The state of his health was not a matter in which he himself took the faintest interest, for his mental detachment was absolute, but he was induced at last, on the threat of being permanently disqualified from work, to give himself a complete change of scene and air. Thus it was that in the early spring of that year we found ourselves together in a small cottage near Poldhu Bay, at the further extremity of the Cornish peninsula. » — Dr. Watson.