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This isn't a question aimed at any book of mine, but something that occurred to me as I am rereading Patrick O'Brian. In Desolation Island, my latest voyage, the horrible old Leopard has been brought low by an epidemic of 'gaol-fever', which Wikipedia informs me is actually Murine Typhus, and very susceptible to treatment with Antibiotics.
I'm peering over the shoulder of Doctor Maturin as he grapples with the outbreak, and, as ever, I put the book down every now and again to consider how a time-traveller might be able to help him out. Would it be possible to manufacture efficacious antibiotics on board ship, or given a convenient port? I guess you could let the soft tack go mouldy and hope for penicillin, but I suspect you'd be as likely to get ergot. Lavender? Tea Tree? Colloidal silver? The kinds of websites my idle Googling is throwing up are pretty much even splits between herb lore and batty survivalist forums, so I'm asking here out of curiosity.
I also start to wonder, in SF terms, about the sort of database that would be useful for a time-traveller. There was that amusing qwantz T-shirt/poster from a while back with, among other things, some interesting info on how to spot Penicillium mould, but it's pretty brief; what would be perfect would be some kind of version of Wikipedia which is organised almost like a "Civilization" tech tree. To make gunpowder you need x and y, and to get x you need z, and so on. You could click back through the dependencies until you found something you wouldn't need to invent.
Or, what would be the ideal accomplishments of the time-traveller flung back into the past to some uncertain date? If you had to pick a PhD - Chemistry?
I'm peering over the shoulder of Doctor Maturin as he grapples with the outbreak, and, as ever, I put the book down every now and again to consider how a time-traveller might be able to help him out. Would it be possible to manufacture efficacious antibiotics on board ship, or given a convenient port? I guess you could let the soft tack go mouldy and hope for penicillin, but I suspect you'd be as likely to get ergot. Lavender? Tea Tree? Colloidal silver? The kinds of websites my idle Googling is throwing up are pretty much even splits between herb lore and batty survivalist forums, so I'm asking here out of curiosity.
I also start to wonder, in SF terms, about the sort of database that would be useful for a time-traveller. There was that amusing qwantz T-shirt/poster from a while back with, among other things, some interesting info on how to spot Penicillium mould, but it's pretty brief; what would be perfect would be some kind of version of Wikipedia which is organised almost like a "Civilization" tech tree. To make gunpowder you need x and y, and to get x you need z, and so on. You could click back through the dependencies until you found something you wouldn't need to invent.
Or, what would be the ideal accomplishments of the time-traveller flung back into the past to some uncertain date? If you had to pick a PhD - Chemistry?