Research - Medical History

I'm in the middle of doing research for a future installment of my Night Watchman series. I wanted two of my characters to become nurses in training for a local doctor, so I am reading about the history of medicine.

It's fascinating stuff. It seems that medicine in the Western world was stalled, with some exceptions, until after World War I. One mighty example was the debate over cleanliness. Joseph Lister, building on work of others like Pasteur, proposed a system by which doctors would wash their hands and instruments before seeing patients.

This was pooh-poohed by many others in the medical field, leading to a raging debate. Some insisted that washing hands was actually unsafe - doctors needed to build up a "good layer of blood and pus" in order to give the benefit of their hard work to their patients. (Yeah, I don't get that either.)

It was attitudes like these that certainly killed President Garfield. Hit by an assassin's bullet, he would have easily recovered if the many doctors attending him had washed their scalpels before they began prodding the wound. Once doctor, in fact, came straight from a farm where he had been attending as a veterinarian. You can just imagine what was all over his hands - manure, in fact, was supposed to beneficial as well. Lovely.

When Garfield died of a raging fever, not from the bullet, the subsequent autopsy showed pockets of infection all through his body. The doctors were puzzled, since a build up of pus was supposed to be a good thing.

This attitude persisted into the 1900's. Perhaps part of the problem was the thriving business of medical training - schools sprang up all across the United States to train doctors. The business of training accounted for at least one fifth of income in most cities. The schools, however, consisted of little or no actual education, offering certificates to those who could come up with the several hundred dollars and a black bag with buckles.

I just can't wait to use some of this stuff in my new book (as soon as I finish editing the one I just wrote, The Lamplighter's Special.) That's one of the joys of writing - getting to showcase some new knowledge, in the supporting structure of fiction.

Diving In - the New Book

Soon it will be that time again. I've almost finished editing The Lamplighter's Special, and it will be going up on Kindle soon.

That means that in a few days I'll start a new book. That's a scary, frightening, magical thing. It's one thing to be in the middle of a project; it is another to face a blank page again.

Anything could happen there. Lately a few ideas have been nudging me, waiting to crystallize as written words. I've been thinking a lot about bathyspheres, about the history of medicine, and about some strange characters called Old Hundred Coats and Old Thousand Coats.

At the same time, I have to start from nothing. I will have to create a structure out of the aether, hoping that a few aeronauts will come and give me a little guidance. I will need a map, but no one is going to give me one - I'll have to draw that map myself before I can start that voyage.

I'll take that dive, along with a lot of other authors. They are out there now too, getting ready to listen to that singing voice, the muse, the constant urge to tell a story.