Nelson's Surgeon: William Beatty, Naval Medicine, and the Battle of Trafalgar (review)

The division of labor between the three authors of this work is not explained, but what is clear is that it is essentially three books, just as its subtitle indicates: (1) It is a biography of William Beatty, the Ulster doctor who made a successful career in the Royal Navy, served as the Victory's surgeon at the battle of Trafalgar, and finished with a knighthood as Physician of Greenwich Hospital. (2) It is a study of British naval surgeons in the period of the French Wars, as a body. This part of the book draws on a research project (evidently not yet complete when it went to press) that has constructed a prosopographical database of almost a thousand British naval and military surgeons of the period. The project is to be published in a book specifically about the Army Medical Corps, and the naval side of the study has found a home under Beatty's roof. (3) Finally, this is a study in historiography, namely in the form and composition of Beatty's Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson, which has from its first publication in 1807 constituted a key element in the Nelson myth-history. All three elements—biography, prosopography, and historiography—are scholarly and well worth reading, but they are likely to appeal to different readerships, and the attempt to combine them is not an unqualified success. The book works well as a brief narrative of Beatty's professional life (which was successful, but rather ordinary apart from Trafalgar), and as a partial description of the naval medical world of his day. The analysis of the Authentic Narrative is valuable, but it has almost nothing to do with naval medicine, and those who would be interested in it are not very likely to pick up this book.

Considered as medical history, Nelson's Surgeon has the merit of revealing, and describing, a part of the medical profession that has not been much studied, even though naval (and military) doctors formed a significant sector of the medical world of their day and contributed out of proportion to their numbers to its evolution. Those who are already familiar with the subject, however, may feel that the treatment is surprisingly unsophisticated and old-fashioned for a team of scholars from leading universities. The days are long past when medical history was usually written by retired doctors in a simple, positivist framework in which medical heroes fought and overcame the demons of reaction to lead society forward to the sunlit uplands of progress. In such books the doctors occupied center stage, with the patients dimly visible in the background, the diseases (classified always according to modern diagnostic categories) as part of the scenery, and the general history of society nowhere. Eighteenth-century naval medicine has been understood in quite different terms in recent years: as an early chapter in the history of public health, in which the decisions that mattered were taken by admirals and naval administrators, and the doctors occupied a marginal and largely powerless position, offering advice that was often irrelevant, misguided, and ignored—though not ignored as often as modern knowledge suggests it should have been. In this book there is no trace of that interpretation, and in the bibliography no mention of those who have put it forward. The biographical approach naturally tends to generate a naval medical hero in the old style (though there is no suggestion that Beatty was responsible for any significant medical advances), while the prosopographical underlay implicitly assumes that medical men said and did everything that mattered in naval...