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Nelson's Surgeon - William Beatty, Naval Medicine, and the Battle of Trafalgar (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R1,861
Discovery Miles 18 610
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Nelson's Surgeon - William Beatty, Naval Medicine, and the Battle of Trafalgar (Hardcover, New)
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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In the lead-up to the bicentenary of Trafalgar a number of
important new studies have been published about the life of Nelson
and his defeat of the Combined Fleet in 1805. Despite the
significant role played by the health and fitness of the British
crews in securing the victory, 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 andscientific community, who used his
growing wealth to build a large collection of books and
manuscripts. His later life is testimony to the much wider
contribution 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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