"I am a brain, Watson"

In the Adventure of the Mazarin Stone, Sherlock Holmes declares "I am a brain, Watson.  The rest of me is mere appendix."  This is, evidently, the great detective's resolution of his own mind-body problem.  Yet the body of Sherlock Holmes proves significant in a great many stories.  As we are moving through the historical "reality" of Victorian literature and not in some realm of steampunk fantasy, he must of course be "embodied" -- but he uses that body in fascinating ways.

In The Adventure of the Dying Detective, Holmes deceives even Watson, faking his own illness in order to lay a trap for a criminal.  In the process we hear his delightful attempt to feign delirium.  Without any reason for doing so, he announces, "Indeed, I cannot think why the whole bed of the ocean is not one solid mass of oysters, so prolific the creatures seem!"  In The Reigate Puzzle, we learn Holmes is susceptible to ailments, as "Even his iron constitution... had broken down under the strain of an investigation which had extended over two months during which period he... had more than once... kept to his task for five days at a stretch."  Yet there, too, Holmes tricks people into thinking he is ill, in order to divert attention during a vital conversation.

I suppose that most people keep mind and body in an existential alliance, rarely allowing too much separation tween their consciousness and the physical vessel that fuels and mediates it.  Holmes, though, seems to use his body as a tool of his will, casually pushing it to its uttermost limits and frequently ignoring its demands.  Thus (somewhere or other!) he tells Watson that he cannot spare time for digestion because he is devoted to contemplating a problem.  Yet Holmes, when he wishes to be, is as acutely aware of his own body as of all those he observes with such calculating fervor -- thus his success not only in creating ordinary disguises, but in creating and manipulating false ailments.

Holmes is famous for his logic -- for his mind.  It would be interesting to speculate on whether that mind felt "at home" within his body, or whether, perhaps like T.E. Lawrence, he struggled in frustration against the weakness, strangeness, and imperfections of his actual substance -- tugging with impatience at his only anchor in the material world.  Yet, in the middle of an engaging mystery, perhaps it hardly mattered.