Darlene's Digest

I was asked about my research on cross-dressing women sailors during our Sizzling Book Club chat of Sea Change last night at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.  It was co-sponsored by All Romance eBooks and we had a lot of fun, so I want to thank Sarah at Smart Bitches and the folks at All Romance for pulling it together.  If you missed the chat, click on the link and you can replay it at your leisure. First of all, I owe a debt to Suzanne Stark for her wonderful history, Female Tars .  It is fascinating and entertaining.  As I point out in the introduction to Sea Change , Stark says there were 20 known cases of women serving in the Royal Navy and Marines at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.  There were likely more whose identities were never discovered. One of those women was the seaman known as "William Brown", a black woman who served for at least 12 years during the Napoleonic Wars.  According to Stark, a London newspaper account...

Cover via Amazon I am not a doctor, nor do I play one on television. I am fascinated by the history of modern medicine. My most recent manuscript, Sea Change , featured a surgeon aboard an American privateer. My WIP (work in progress) features a secondary character from Sea Change, Dr. Alexander Murray. Dr. Murray is a phlegmatic (at least until he meets the heroine) scientist, a surgeon in the Royal Navy who's devoted his life to trying to keep people alive under the most trying of circumstances. Researching this new book has reminded me all over again why I find this study fascinating. For example, I needed to know when the stethoscope was invented, and serendipitously, it's credited to Dr. Rene Laennec in 1816, putting it right into my era. I was also researching in the book Medical Firsts by Robert E. Adler and found this passage on the germ theory of disease: "Germs cause disease. This simple idea is so much a part of our thinking that it seems as self-evident...

I'm reading another amazing history, The War for All the Oceans. I'm enjoying it so much I think I'll buy myself a copy, since the public library is rather sticky about people keeping their books for years on end. I have to say that one of the best perks of being a published author is getting to write research books off of my taxes. My naval history shelves have grown tremendously, and I enjoy having the freedom to pull a book off my shelf instead of waiting for it to show up again at the library.