I stopped reading novels some time ago. It's not that I think fiction is worthless, but as I've got older I find it hard to keep faith with an author, and usually stop after a chapter or two. The exceptions were Kate Atkinson ("Life After Life") and Michael Chabon ("Yiddish Policeman's Union.")
But now I've stumbled onto Patrick O'Brian and his series of 20 books about the British Navy captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and ship's doctor, Stephen Maturin.
Maturin is a competent surgeon and a physician, two very different things in the early 19th century. As he remarks, he can cut on your arm, or cut it off; he can do almost nothing about cancer, lupus , melanoma or pneumonia. He is gratifyingly, and accurately, modest about what any medical practitioner of that era can offer a patient.
Many, if not most of the things he has to offer likely do more harm than good. Makes me wonder what we'll think of doctors of today, when we look back from 100 years hence. Even now, we look at the way we once treated cancer by poisoning cells ("pushing poisons" as we said at Memorial Sloan Kettering in the 1970's) where now we intervene on a molecular level, understanding how the melanoma's genes use proteins to thrive.
So that's Maturin's day job. His true love, apart from Diana Villiers, is his world of the naturalist. His travels allow him to identify and describe new creatures from all over the world, from a Galapagos beetle to an interesting sort of bee.
His good friend, the Captain, tolerates his bee hives but in "HMS Surprise," the doctor brings on board a sloth, who takes one look at Captain Aubrey and wails and sobs. Aubrey has no idea how the sloth intuitively understood the Captain's dislike for him. Aubrey had mistaken the sloth for some sort of vampire animal, but as the two get to know each other things progress and eventually, Aubrey offers the sloth a piece of cake soaked in grog, and the sloth is his.
This has all been set up in a previous book when the crew got a gibbon drunk. The gibbon, acquired on a trip to the Philippines, had been hanging about the topsails. The gibbon falls to the deck, injuring itself, and when examined by the doctor, the diagnosis of drunkenness provokes the doctor to investigate who has got the gibbon drunk and agitates to deny those crew members their rightful share of grog and rum and the Captain has a near mutiny on his hands.
Stephen clearly loves animals more than men.
But when the good doctor discovers his beloved sloth is not just besot with the Captain but drunk, he confronts the Captain: "You have debauched my sloth!"
Crew members also run afoul of the doctor when, in his absence, they cannot resist cooking up his rats. He has been experimenting on the rats with a concoction he thinks may strengthen their bones, so he was intending to sacrifice them eventually, and he is not too put out to find them missing.
But one conscience stricken midshipman admits to having participated in the rat feast because he could not resist the smell of the meat cooking in onions. The midshipman admits to this out of unbearable guilt, though he thinks it will cause him to be cashiered and cost him his commission. The doctor shrugs it off, but asks many questions about the nature of the bones, which the midshipman allows were much tougher to masticate than normal rat bones.
The doctor is smitten with Diana Villiers, who has told him he is not good looking enough to tempt her into an ongoing affair and not rich enough to marry, although he is clearly one of the few men who is her intellectual equal. It's pretty clear there can be no other woman for the doctor. Whether Diana will ever come around is in doubt. She tells him her fortune is her face, meaning she is beautiful now, but on the verge of losing that and she has to sell that face; it's her only path to fortune.
She is the most honest of women.
But that is no help to Stephen, and in fact once she starts bedding Captain Jack for sport, it causes a rift between Stephen and his best friend which is only healed after they survive a near death experience and get back out to sea where men can be free of the Siren call of women.
Sloths are enjoying a moment in the sun and the renewed push for independence in Catalonia (which also figures in O'Brian's tales) along with commentary on the state of the medical art make these books seem more current than Twitter.
But now I've stumbled onto Patrick O'Brian and his series of 20 books about the British Navy captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and ship's doctor, Stephen Maturin.
Maturin is a competent surgeon and a physician, two very different things in the early 19th century. As he remarks, he can cut on your arm, or cut it off; he can do almost nothing about cancer, lupus , melanoma or pneumonia. He is gratifyingly, and accurately, modest about what any medical practitioner of that era can offer a patient.
Many, if not most of the things he has to offer likely do more harm than good. Makes me wonder what we'll think of doctors of today, when we look back from 100 years hence. Even now, we look at the way we once treated cancer by poisoning cells ("pushing poisons" as we said at Memorial Sloan Kettering in the 1970's) where now we intervene on a molecular level, understanding how the melanoma's genes use proteins to thrive.
So that's Maturin's day job. His true love, apart from Diana Villiers, is his world of the naturalist. His travels allow him to identify and describe new creatures from all over the world, from a Galapagos beetle to an interesting sort of bee.
His good friend, the Captain, tolerates his bee hives but in "HMS Surprise," the doctor brings on board a sloth, who takes one look at Captain Aubrey and wails and sobs. Aubrey has no idea how the sloth intuitively understood the Captain's dislike for him. Aubrey had mistaken the sloth for some sort of vampire animal, but as the two get to know each other things progress and eventually, Aubrey offers the sloth a piece of cake soaked in grog, and the sloth is his.
This has all been set up in a previous book when the crew got a gibbon drunk. The gibbon, acquired on a trip to the Philippines, had been hanging about the topsails. The gibbon falls to the deck, injuring itself, and when examined by the doctor, the diagnosis of drunkenness provokes the doctor to investigate who has got the gibbon drunk and agitates to deny those crew members their rightful share of grog and rum and the Captain has a near mutiny on his hands.
Stephen clearly loves animals more than men.
But when the good doctor discovers his beloved sloth is not just besot with the Captain but drunk, he confronts the Captain: "You have debauched my sloth!"
Crew members also run afoul of the doctor when, in his absence, they cannot resist cooking up his rats. He has been experimenting on the rats with a concoction he thinks may strengthen their bones, so he was intending to sacrifice them eventually, and he is not too put out to find them missing.
But one conscience stricken midshipman admits to having participated in the rat feast because he could not resist the smell of the meat cooking in onions. The midshipman admits to this out of unbearable guilt, though he thinks it will cause him to be cashiered and cost him his commission. The doctor shrugs it off, but asks many questions about the nature of the bones, which the midshipman allows were much tougher to masticate than normal rat bones.
The doctor is smitten with Diana Villiers, who has told him he is not good looking enough to tempt her into an ongoing affair and not rich enough to marry, although he is clearly one of the few men who is her intellectual equal. It's pretty clear there can be no other woman for the doctor. Whether Diana will ever come around is in doubt. She tells him her fortune is her face, meaning she is beautiful now, but on the verge of losing that and she has to sell that face; it's her only path to fortune.
She is the most honest of women.
But that is no help to Stephen, and in fact once she starts bedding Captain Jack for sport, it causes a rift between Stephen and his best friend which is only healed after they survive a near death experience and get back out to sea where men can be free of the Siren call of women.
Sloths are enjoying a moment in the sun and the renewed push for independence in Catalonia (which also figures in O'Brian's tales) along with commentary on the state of the medical art make these books seem more current than Twitter.
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