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Laurence Brockliss, John Cardwell, and Michael Moss. Nelson's Surgeon: William Beatty, Naval Medicine, and the Battle of Trafalgar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. xviii + 216 pp. Ill. $90.00 (ISBN-10: 0-19-928742-2; ISBN-13: 978-0-19-928742- 0).
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...