Sherlock Holmes's Resume Looked Like This

by Scott Monty July 22, 2014

"my professional qualifications" [ENGR]

A Douglas West watercolour of Holmes meeting an inspector at the rail station

Would you hire Sherlock Holmes if you had the chance? Okay, but what if you weren't familiar with him through the 60 stories that make up the Canon? What if you had to simply look at his qualifications jotted down on a single piece of paper?

Think about that for a moment.

Professionals are often faced with making judgments based on having only cursory information rather than the whole picture. This applies to things that require immediate action as well as some others where, even if we're given more time, we simply don't have access to the same information as someone who might be more intimately familiar with a person or situation.

For example, Watson made up a list based on his first few weeks with Holmes. It went something like this:

SHERLOCK HOLMES - his limits

Knowledge of Literature. - Nil.
Knowledge of Philosophy. - Nil.
Knowledge of Astronomy. - Nil.
Knowledge of Politics. - Feeble.
Knowledge of Botany. - Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally. Knows nothing of practical gardening.
Knowledge of Geology. - Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.
Knowledge of Chemistry. - Profound.
Knowledge of Anatomy. - Accurate, but unsystematic.
Knowledge of Sensational Literature. - Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.
Plays the violin well.
Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.
Has a good practical knowledge of British law.

So if one were to sum up these and some other time-based activities of Sherlock Holmes and made a visual representation of the same - an infographic, for example - it might look something like this: