Vhanja wrote:

Liberty wrote:

He wouldn't be able to just go into GP work, though, unless he'd qualified as a GP.   If he could work as a civilian GP, then surely he could have worked as an army GP rather than being discharged? 

Wouldn't you have to be a GP to be surgeon, though? I thought surgeon was kind of like a specialst, with GP as the basis education.

As Besleybean says, they are both specialists in a way, with different training routes and exams.   It might be possible for John to have qualified in both (e.g. trained as a surgeon, then changed his mind and gone back to train as a GP), but it would have been a lot of training.   What puzzles me is why John would have trained as a GP in the first place (when he's clearly not interested in general practice).  I think there's another thread about his medical background.  It's quite complicated to get it to fit with the bits of evidence (the footage we're shown, the claim that he was an "army doctor", the fact that he's a GP, etc.).

However ... If you have been assuming that being a GP doesn't need special training, then it's quite possible that lots of people do, including the writers.  I wonder if they just didn't really get very far with thinking it through.   Watson in the books worked in general practice after the army, so they just made the same thing happen for John.  To be honest, I think that's the most likely explanation and does away with all the complications of trying to make things fit! 
 

I've read that one, and it's quite good.  But it's complicated getting something that explains all the anomalies (his GP training, his rank, his odd CV, the army footage, the fact that he says he was an army doctor, etc.).  Given that what we see of him at work isn't very true to life at all, I honestly think that Moftiss were just following what Watson did in the ACD books (rather than implying a complicated backstory). 

ukaunz wrote:

But that's what the Sherlockian Game is all about, right? Pretending SH and JW were real people? (but I agree with you, Liberty)

 
Sherlock and John aren't real? 

LOL! 

Seriously, it helps for us fanfiction writers to be able to come up with plausible in-universe explanations for why different scenarios happen on the show (John's shoulder, etc.).  Wellingtongoose has worked very hard to do just that on her tumblr and LiveJournal accounts.  I like to think that John started off as a general practitioner (or family doctor, as he would be called here in America), and then changed his mind and decided that he would rather train as a surgeon, at which point he also decided to join the army.  (Wellingtongoose has stated that it was easier, when John graduated from medical school, to change one's specialty from GP to surgeon than it would be now.)  Now, personally, I would like to see a plausible in-universe explanation as to why John was assigned to an army unit (the now-nonexistent Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers), instead of Camp Bastion!
 

Last edited by kgreen20 (December 8, 2015 1:05 am)

We do have John's CV (from TBB), that contains quite a bit, doesn't it?