I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.

Spoken by Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson, the line encapsulates Holmes’s self-conception as an instrument of pure intellect. He reduces his identity to the operations of the mind—observation, inference, and analysis—treating the body as incidental “appendix.” The remark also signals a kind of ascetic detachment: Holmes values mental work over physical comfort, social convention, or emotional display, and he invites Watson (and the reader) to understand him as a specialist whose life is organized around reasoning. In the Holmes canon, this attitude helps explain both his brilliance and his eccentricities, including his impatience with ordinary concerns and his tendency to treat everyday life as subordinate to the life of thought.