Historical and Scientific References
Dr Amos Jacob brings aboard a preserved hand exhibiting what is described as palmar aponeurosis - and now known as Dupuytren's contracture, named for distinguished surgeon and Stephen's friend Baron Guillaume Dupuytren, a hand with the fingers bent inwards and the fingernails growing through the flesh of the palm. Stephen Maturin also brings aboard a narwhal tusk from a previous Baltic voyage.
The superstitious seamen accept one as a Hand of Glory and the other as a unicorn's horn, and regard them as good luck charms. The Marine Captain's dog, Naseby, eats the hand, and an emetic only recovers the bones, while the narwhal tusk is broken when a drunken Killick and an even more drunken ship's boy play around with it - something that makes the domineering Killick suddenly very unpopular with his shipmates. A measure of goodwill is restored on the ship when Stephen wires the bones together to make a skeletal hand - even more sinister looking, which pleases the crew, and an old marine engineer, Mr. Wright (a cousin of Christine Hatherleigh) manages to glue the horn back together.
Read more about this topic: The Hundred Days (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or scientific:
“The proverbial notion of historical distance consists in our having lost ninety-five of every hundred original facts, so the remaining ones can be arranged however one likes.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)