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builds character posted:When they are chewed with a little lime they sharpen the mind to a wonderful degree, they induce a sense of well-being and they abolish both hunger and fatigue. That's a small faction of what cocaine does.  The Encyclopedia of Addictive Drugs by Richard Lawrence Miller I think the first sentence is the important one: Maturin (and like him millions of people every day) is basically drinking beer compared to Cocaine's Everclear.
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Oct 23, 2017 13:30
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:Well top it the proverbial nob, I didn't recall that Stephen performed skull surgery on (at least) two sailors. (M+C, and Mauritius). Which apparently wasn't an uncommon ailment to cure for a good ship surgeon then, with all the stuff that could fall down on a ship and the many chances to fall down somewhere. It was also one of the more actually helpful things a surgeon could do before the modern time, when a surgeon/doctor killed fewer people than he saved on average. One reason why we not only have trepanation instruments dating back to early Aztec, Inca, Chinese and Roman times, but a surprising amount of trepanned skulls from the Neolithic era.
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Dec 13, 2017 13:28
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Lockback posted:
Post Captain is the hardest to get through, but arguably the most important book of the whole series, setting up all the domestic parts for the rest of the series. It's also the most masterfully written in my opinion, full of subtleties and nuances and a series that's already so perfectly written. But Jack behaving like a scrub the whole book and Stephen's resentment and depression makes it very hard to read or re-read. Them being on the worst ship ever built with a crew that's not very happy for most of the book parts on sea (not many in the first place) doesn't help either. Decius fucked around with this message at 08:49 on Mar 12, 2018 |
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Mar 12, 2018 08:41
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I think you are all far too morbid. Trepanation was something very successfully used to cure people since the stone age (and with a apparently surprisingly high success rate even back then). Someone famous for curing many people with this technique hardly would mean it as a threat to his wife but most likely and earnestly used it to heal her/thinks he healed her from her ailment.
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Jun 16, 2018 06:37
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Murgos posted:So, by the end of the series Pullings is a post-captain and must be pretty well off financially even only getting a fraction of an eighth for most of Aubrey’s prizes (the cruise in the pacific as surprises captain must have been really lucrative) and also only in his early to mid-30s since we meet him as a gangly teenager in 1801 and the books never make it much past 1815. 1813 lasts for several years, as evidenced by the children getting older - and Jack and Stephen seem firmly in their late forties by the end of the series, when starting in their early Twenties in 1801.
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Sep 30, 2018 08:19
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Bloody Hedgehog posted:Didn't even know this thread existed. I reread them very regularly or listen to the audiobooks. It has become my comfort reading over the many years, returning to good friends and wonderful writing.
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Nov 1, 2018 10:26
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:There's actually a few fairly strong -- subtle, but present -- implications in the early books that Diana and Stephen's relationship is . . .consummated . . . before Jack gets involved. She invites him to her bedroom, etc. It's just that Jack is a potential husband catch and Maturin isn't. Women regularly entertained people and whole soirées in their bedrooms in the Regency era. A woman's bedroom was very much a private social room for her too, without any sexual overtones. Calling it a room is pretty wrong in the first place, because in the strata Diana moves in it's usually really a whole suit of rooms. I think that's reading too much into it, extrapolating a sexual relationship out of Stephen being invited into her bedroom.
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Apr 27, 2019 11:27
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