Master and Commander

[chickenfeet]

I finally got around to watching Master and Commander yesterday. I think this is the way to get one's Patrick O'Brian fix. One gets the plot (usually stolen from real life e.g. Thomas Cochrane's memoirs) and the character development (O'Brian's strongpoint) without the author's rather leaden prose.

The movie is well acted and well photographed; the cinematographer and director give us credit for not needing MTV style cuts every half second (unlike Peter Jackson!) and the visuals are quite lush in places. As a bit of a naval history buff I was impressed by the attention to detail. Both HMS Surprise and Acheron look like what they are supposed to be and some of the details of ship handling and gunnery are impressive in their accuracy. I don't ever recall seeing stunsails set before and its rare to see the great guns fired (correctly) by flintlock.

There are some very good scenes of Dr. Maturin operating; one where he is trepanning a depressed skull fracture and another where he extracts a bullet from his own ribcage. I can't comment on the authenticity of the procedures (oursin?) but they are fun to watch. There are also so some great scenes of Galapagos wildlife.

Definitely worth a look.

Comments

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Early C19th naval surgery is so an area into which I'd rather not go. However, there's been a fairly recent book by Peter Stanley, For fear of pain, British surgery, 1790-1850 which argues (I haven't read the whole thing, but have heard Stanley talk about his research) that pre-aseptic, pre-anaesthesia surgery was not the bloody butchery that it's usually depicted as, and had reached a stage of considerable sophistication by the time antisepsis and anaesthesia enabled surgeons to boldly go where no surgeon had ever been before. Conditions on shipboard during battle would have been far from optimum, but people did survive.

The self-operation business is not beyond the realms of possibility, I suspect. Trepanning for head injuries has a fairly long history. It was one of the things that surgeons could do effectively. And at the period in question there were probably generally more things that surgeons could do effectively than physicians could, if only because the physicians were working from current learned theories about bodily functioning, whereas surgery was hands-on and empirical.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

pre-aseptic, pre-anaesthesia surgery was not the bloody butchery that it's usually depicted as

That would be my a priori assumption at least in cases where a competent surgeon was available (by no means always the case in the navy). If one looks at the advances in say surgery for gall stones between the c17 and c19 there is a huge improvement in technique and outcomes. If one thinks about wound surgery, the nature of the wounds can't have changed much in that period because combat techniques and weapons systems stayed much the same. One might therefore expect some empirical improvement in technique.

Did physicians achieve much of anything before the pharmaceutical revolution of the 1960's?

[oursin.livejournal.com]

There were advances from the late C19th, but these were made in the laboratory and applied by physicians - chemotherapies such as salvarsan, immunisation against various endemic infectious diseases, hormone therapy (e.g. thyroid extract). Historians of medicine have suggested that being an elite physician continued to be about bedside manner and social poise well into the C20th, rather than being cutting-edge as regarded latest scientific developments.