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Nelson's Surgeon - William Beatty, Naval Medicine, and the Battle of Trafalgar (Paperback)
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Nelson's Surgeon - William Beatty, Naval Medicine, and the Battle of Trafalgar (Paperback)
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Despite the significant role played by the health and fitness of
the British crews in Nelson's defeat of the Combined Fleet in 1805,
little has been written hitherto about the naval surgeon in the era
of the long war against France. This book is intended to fill the
gap. Sir William Beatty (1773-1842) was surgeon of the Victory at
Trafalgar. An Ulsterman from Londonderry, he had joined the navy in
1791. Before being warranted to Nelson's flagship, Beatty had
served upon ten other warships, and survived a yellow fever
epidemic, court martial, and shipwreck to share in the capture of a
Spanish treasure ship. After Trafalgar, he became Physician of the
Channel Fleet, based at Plymouth, and eventually Physician to
Greenwich Hospital, where he served until his retirement in 1838.
As the book makes clear in drawing upon an extensive
prosopographical database, Beatty's career until 1805 was
representative of the experience of the approximately 2,000 naval
surgeons who joined the navy in the course of the war.
The first part of the biography provides a detailed and scholarly
introduction to the professional education, training, and work of
the naval surgeon. But after 1805 Beatty became a member of the
service elite, and his career becomes interesting for other
reasons. In the final decades of his life, Beatty was far more than
a senior naval physician. As a Fellow of the Royal Society,
director of the Clerical and Medical Insurance Company, and
director of the London to Greenwich Railway, he was a prominent
figure in London's business and scientific community, who used his
growing wealth to build a large collection of books and
manuscripts. His later life is testimony to the much
widercontribution that some naval and army medical officers made to
the development of the new Britain of the nineteenth century. In
Beatty's case, too, the contribution was original. By publishing in
1807 his carefully crafted Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord
Nelson, he was instrumental in forging the myth of the hero's last
hours, which has become a part of the national consciousness and
has helped to define for generations the concept of Britishness.
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