 As a teenager, Watson suffered a serious injury to his knee in a cricket match, and never recovered full movement in the joint again.Watson's mother had attempted to distract him from family tensions by sending him to work with the family's gardener, and it was after her death that his obsession with botany began.While training for the legal profession in Liverpool, Watson became interested in phrenology and decided to study medicine and natural history at Edinburgh University (from 1828 to 1832).