Author Archives: Alison

Yellow fever, buccaneering doctors, surgical instruments from the Napoleonic War

A comment on the MARHST-L list, on which I quietly lurk, about yellow fever being a possible cause of ships found abandoned or with all crew deceased, sent me in search of confirmation via PubMed. Found a lead, via an article on illness aboard cruise ships, on a chapter in a history of naval medicine that looked promising according to the available snippets on Google Books. Further investigation will need to wait on a foray into a city with a good medical library. Along the way, I discovered an assortment of gems archived in PubMedCentral – the free archive of medical journals.

  • David Geggus considers how yellow fever, generally not a high fatality disease, caused devastating mortality in the British army in occupied Saint Domingue (Yellow Fever in the 1790s).
  • The Buccaneering Doctors (GM Longfield-Jones, 1992) who served aboard the seventeenth century privateers were valued members of the crew who could subsequently enjoy a respectable retirement or practice on land. Contemporary accounts, such as that of the wonderfully named Alexandre Oliver Esquemeling/Oexmelin (alias Henrik Barentzoon Smeeks) and William Dampier describe the hazards, hardships and medical practices of the times.
  • The successors of the buccaneers were physician-explorers such as Joseph Hooker. Botanical science was at the time an essential part of the practice of medicine, and Hooker traveled on expeditions to Antarctica and India, befriended to Charles Darwin, contributed his expertise in botany to Darwin’s developing theories, and presided at the first presentation of Darwin’s and Wallace’s work. (WE Swinton, Physicians as Explorers: Joseph Hooker, 1977, one of a series of articles).
  • JC Goddard unpacks The navy surgeon’s chest, from the time of the Napoleonic War. His conclusion: “the surgical armamentarium has changed remarkably little …”

Broken Islands trip page

Last month, I took a five day kayaking trip to the Broken Islands in Barklay Sound, off the west coast of Vancouver Island. It was something I’d been talking about for at least six years, despite the fact that I have only spent one night of my adult life under canvas. Since then I’ve been editing photos and working on and off on a trip report that just kept getting longer and longer as I remembered things and looked up details. It was just about an ideal trip. The setting was beautiful, ideal for kayaking, our guides were capable, mellow and entertaining, the group just gelled, and after the rain and wind of the first day, the weather was as good as it gets in September on the west coast. And everywhere we turned, we saw a whale. Here’s the full trip report: Broken Islands trip page.

And should anyone wonder: yes, my missing sock reappeared.

Voices on the BBC

I don’t know whether I agree with the boy who expressed a preference for radio “because the picture are better”, but the voices surely are. I’ve been delighting in the match of reader and text in the 1989 version of Mary Wesley’s The Camomile Lawn [link to page at the Guardian] over on BBC7, read by Sian Phillips, with full round tones and fine control of inflection and character. My only regret is that it’s an abridged version; the pacing at times seems a touch forced and the nuance lost.

In complete contrast of voice and subject, I’ve been tuning into “Old Harry’s Game”, also on BBC7, and wishing that I could accurately place Andy Hamilton’s accent, because I’m sure there’s a joke that I could be getting, if I could decode English accents. Hamilton, as writer and lead, plays Satan, the Prince of Darkness, etc, etc, in a clear, slightly nasal tenor, as a cocky young executive type who’s not quite as clever as he thinks he is. While he tries to solve the overcrowding problem in Hell by promoting virtue to humankind, there’s a newcomer down below with an eye on his job.

I missed mentioning “That Man Attlee” when it was on, but I’m sure it will come around again. It is one of Robin Glendenning’s political-historical plays, and I don’t mention it for the voice as much as for the writing, and in particular for the characterization of Attlee, the “little grey man” who was leader of the Labour party when it won its unexpected landslide victory in 1945. The play depicts the attempt of some of his ambitious colleagues to oust him from the leadership, and Attlee’s quietly expert re-channeling of those energies to best serve the Party’s vision. The play uses the same narrative frame as Glendenning’s play about Winston Churchill, “Playing for Time”, and I don’t think quite as effectively, but when the confrontation comes, it is riveting.

Importing posts

Been meaning for a while to collect posts from Reality Skimming that cover more general matters of writing, reading and life, and mirror them here. So have spent the evening doing so, despite Blogger’s lack of an export function. Since I wanted to maintain the chronology of the blog, I wanted to set the times to the original date, which was going to involve a lot of clicking on TypePad’s little pop-up box, so I created a .txt input file manually and uploaded it – after an initial boo-boo involving the 24 hour clock.