Patrick O'Brian

While en route to Tonga to restore order, the crew of the British ship Surprise discovers a beautiful woman aboard who could identify a British double agent in the employ of Napoleon.

The Truelove (Vol. Book 15) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)

The fifteenth Aubrey-Maturin novel in which Jack finds himself re-united with the Surprise, but dangerously out of touch with his crew All the elements that have made Patrick O'Brian's astonishing series one of the most highly praised works in contemporary fiction are here in Clarissa Oakes -- the narrative grip, the impeccable ear for dialogue, the humour and the unsurpassed capacity to create and recreate a rich and true friendship between two men in the late eighteenth-century.

Clarissa Oakes

Gavin

worse than that for our purposes was his case-book showing long-drawn-out histories of general bilious indisposition, melancholy, taedium vitae sometimes reaching mere despair, extreme irascibility: all this with no known agent, though autopsy showed an enlarged quadrate lobe studded with yellow nodules the size of a pea. He calls it Botany Bay liver, and it is this or some one of the other New Holland diseases that I fear our patient may have caught. The vexation and more than vexation of spirit is certainly present.'
   'It is deeply saddening to see what disease can do to a whole cast of mind, to a settled character,' said Martin. 'And sometimes our remedies are just as bad. How it appears to draw in the boundaries of free-will.’


—


  'I am told he has not cruised before; and is a somewhat philosophical, theoretical gent.'
   'Then the sooner his capers are cut short the better. Let us have no benevolent revolutions, no humanitarians, no Goddamned systems, no panaceas. Look at that wicked fellow Cromwell, and those vile Whigs in poor King James's time, a fine seaman as he was, too.'


— 


  “A man could not speak chuff to such a girl, without he was a very mere Goth. Old Jarvey could not speak chuff to such a girl.'
   'It is my belief, brother, that your misogyny is largely theoretical.'
   'Ay,' said Jack, shaking his head. 'I love a wench, it is true; but a wench in her right place”


— 


  At different times I had tried to explain the violent male desire for exclusive possession—the standard by which a wide variety of partners if not promiscuity is laudable in oneself, vile in women—the want of sequence or even common honesty of mind coupled with unshakable conviction—the unreasonable yet very strong and very painful emotions that arise from jealousy (a feeling to which she is almost entirely a stranger)—and the very great force of rivalry.


—


  When the cutter was within hail a man stood up, fell down, stood up again holding the coxswain's shoulder and called 'What ship is that?' in an approximately American voice, drawing his face in a sideways contortion to do so.


—

I catch Maturin in some more bullshit:

  ‘Do I agree? I do not. Your premises are mistaken and so necessarily is your conclusion.’


(That’s not how logic works.)

This is one of the great ironies of the series: Stephen and his colleagues, so enormously educated, so vastly respected are not doing much for their patients, except when they whack off something gangrenous. The most celebrated of Stephen’s surgeries, trepanation, is no treatment at all for head trauma (except maybe for extracting shards). He constantly lets blood. He pours mercury into syphilitics. Regression to the mean and placebo can explain all of his middling success. In this book at least we see a little bit of the truth, therapeutic nihilism:

  We swim in ignorance. Where these diseases are not wholly characteristic, sharply marked and obvious, they are difficult to detect; and when we have detected them there is still little we can really do. Apart from general care our only real resource is mercury in its various forms, and sometimes the remedy is worse than the disease.

But in general he has a doctor’s arrogance without a modern doctor’s powers. When was the turning point, when a visit to the doctor became more likely than not to improve your health? 1940?

The Truelove (Vol. Book 15) (Aubrey/Maturin Novels)

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