Laurence Brockliss's Books

Nelson's Surgeon

William Beatty, Naval Medicine, and the Battle of Trafalgar

By: Laurence Brockliss,John Cardwell,Michael S. Moss

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Nelson's Surgeon

William Beatty, Naval Medicine, and the Battle of Trafalgar

By: Laurence Brockliss,John Cardwell,Michael S. Moss

In the lead-up to the bicentenary of Trafalgar a number of important new studies have been published about the life of Nelson and his defeat of the Combined Fleet in 1805. Despite the significant role played by the health and fitness of the British crews in securing the victory, little has been written hitherto about the naval surgeon in the era of the long war against France. This book is intended to fill the gap. Sir William Beatty (1773-1842) was surgeon of the Victory atTrafalgar. An Ulsterman from Londonderry, he had joined the navy in 1791. Before being warranted to Nelson's flagship, Beatty had served upon ten other warships, and survived a yellow fever epidemic, court martial, and shipwreck to share in the capture of a Spanish treasure ship. After Trafalgar, hebecame Physician of the Channel Fleet, based at Plymouth, and eventually Physician to Greenwich Hospital, where he served until his retirement in 1838. As the book makes clear in drawing upon an extensive prosopographical database, Beatty's career until 1805 was representative of the experience of the approximately 2,000 naval surgeons who joined the navy in the course of the war.The first part of the biography provides a detailed and scholarly introduction to the professional education, training, and work of the naval surgeon. But after 1805 Beatty became a member of the service elite, and his career becomes interesting for other reasons. In the final decades of his life, Beatty was far more than a senior naval physician. As a Fellow of the Royal Society, director of the Clerical and Medical Insurance Company, and director of the London to Greenwich Railway, he wasa prominent figure in London's business and scientific community, who used his growing wealth to build a large collection of books and manuscripts. His later life is testimony to the much wider contribution that some naval and army medical officers made to the development of the new Britain of thenineteenth century. In Beatty's case, too, the contribution was original. By publishing in 1807 his carefully crafted Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson, he was instrumental in forging the myth of the hero's last hours, which has become a part of the national consciousness and has helped to define for generations the concept of Britishness.

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Page Count

237

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199287422

ISBN 13

9780199287420

Advancing with the Army

Medicine, the Professions and Social Mobility in the British Isles 1790-1850

By: Marcus Ackroyd,Laurence Brockliss,Michael Moss,Kate Retford,John Stevenson

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Advancing with the Army

Medicine, the Professions and Social Mobility in the British Isles 1790-1850

By: Marcus Ackroyd,Laurence Brockliss,Michael Moss,Kate Retford,John Stevenson

Providing the first ever statistical study of a professional cohort in the era of the industrial revolution, this prosopographical study of some 450 surgeons who joined the army medical service during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, charts the background, education, military and civilian career, marriage, sons' occupations, wealth at death, and broader social and cultural interests of the members of the cohort. It reveals the role that could be played by the nascent professions in this period in promoting rapid social mobility. The group of medical practitioners selected for this analysis did not come from affluent or professional families but profited from their years in the army to build up a solid and sometimes spectacular fortune, marry into the professions, and place their sons in professional careers. The study contributes to our understanding of Britishness in the period, since the majority of the cohort came from small-town and rural Scotland and Ireland but seldom found their wives in the native country and frequently settled in London and other English cities, where they often became pillars of the community.

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Page Count

418

Publisher

OUP Oxford

Published Date

ISBN 10

0191514837

ISBN 13

9780191514838

Male Professionals in Nineteenth Century Britain

Families, Intergenerational Mobility, and the Rise of the Professions

By: Laurence Brockliss,Harry Smith

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Male Professionals in Nineteenth Century Britain

Families, Intergenerational Mobility, and the Rise of the Professions

By: Laurence Brockliss,Harry Smith

Male Professionals in Nineteenth-Century Britain is the first statistically-based social, cultural and familial history of a fast-growing and socially prominent section of the Victorian propertied classes. It is built around a representative cohort of 750 men who were recorded in the 1851 census as practising a profession in eight British provincial towns with distinctive economic and social profiles: Brighton, Bristol, Dundee, Greenock, Leeds, Merthyr Tydfil, Winchester, and the twin county town of Northumberland, Alnwick/Morpeth. The book provides a collective account of the cohort's lives and the lives of their families across four generations, starting with their parents and ending with their grandchildren. It touches on the history of 16,000 individuals. The book aims to throw light on the extent to which nineteenth-century professionals had a distinctive socio-cultural profile, as sociologists and some historians have claimed, or were largely indistinguishable from other members of propertied society, as most historians today assume without further investigation. In exploring this question, particular attention is paid to the cohort families' wealth, household size, education, occupational history, geographical mobility, and broader involvement in society measured by their members' choice of marriage partner, their kinship and friendship circles, their political allegiance and their leisure activities. The book demonstrates that male professionals in the Victorian era were far from being a homogenous group, but were divided in many ways. The most important was wealth which played a key role in the social and occupational fortunes of their descendants. These divisions largely explain why some professionals and some individual professions were much more likely to display endogenous characteristics than others. The book also demonstrates that even the most successful professional families got poorer over time, and reveals how easily in the age of industrialisation branches of families and sometimes complete families could drop out of the elite.

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Page Count

543

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198897677

ISBN 13

9780198897675

Magdalen College School

By: Laurence Brockliss

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Magdalen College School

By: Laurence Brockliss

Founded in the grounds of Magdalen College 500 years ago, Magdalen College School has been educating centuries of students. Originally intended to offer free tuition in grammar, it has attracted students from all walks of life and from all around the UK during its history. From a period of initial success, the fortunes of the school have waxed and waned over the centuries until modern times, where it has become one of the premier independent schools in the country. With former pupils including lord chancellors, film directors, Nobel Prize-winning scientists and noted composers, Magdalen College School has a rich and engaging history, which this book brings to life with colour illustrations and photographs.

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119

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1784421529

ISBN 13

9781784421526

Redefining Female Religious Life

French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism

By: Laurence Lux-Sterritt

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Redefining Female Religious Life

French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism

By: Laurence Lux-Sterritt

This short study offers a contribution to the flourishing debate on post-Reformation female piety. In an effort to avoid excessive polarization condemning conventual life as restrictive or hailing it as a privileged path towards spiritual perfection, it analyses the reasons which led early-modern women to found new congregations with active vocations. Were these novel communities born out of their founders' rejection of the conventual model? Through the comparative analysis of two congregations which became, in seventeenth-century France and England, the embodiment of women's efforts to become actively involved in the Catholic Reformation, this book offers a nuanced interpretation of female religious life and particularly of the relationship between cloistered tradition and aposotolic vocations. Despite the differences in their national political and religious backgrounds, both the French Ursulines and the Institute of English Ladies shared the same aim to revitalise the links between the Catholic faith and the people, reaching out of the cloister and into the world by educating girls who would later become wives and mothers. This study suggests that these pioneering Catholic women, though in breach of Tridentine decrees, did not turn their backs on contemplative piety: although both the French Ursulines and the English Ladies undertook work which had hitherto been the preserve religious men, they were motivated by their desire to help the Church rather than by a wish to liberate women from what eighteenth-century writers later perceived as the shackles of conventual obedience. It is argued that the founders of new, uncloistered congregations were embracing vocations which they construed as personals sacrifices; they followed the arduous path 'mixed life' in an act of self-abnegation and chose apostolic work as their early-modern reinterpretation of medieval asceticism.

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