author
William Beatty
1773–1842
Best remembered as the naval surgeon who attended Lord Nelson after the fatal shot at Trafalgar, he turned firsthand experience into one of the battle’s most enduring medical accounts. His life combined frontline service, professional ambition, and a close view of one of Britain’s most famous wartime moments.
1 Audiobook
Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson
by William Beatty
About the author
Born in Derry in April 1773, William Beatty was an Irish surgeon who joined the Royal Navy as a surgeon’s mate in 1791 while still very young. He served through the wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and built a reputation in naval medicine through years at sea.
He is most closely associated with HMS Victory and the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, where he was the ship’s surgeon and attended the mortally wounded Admiral Horatio Nelson. Beatty later wrote an account of Nelson’s final hours and the battle, helping to shape how that episode was remembered by later generations.
Beatty’s career continued after Trafalgar, and he was eventually honored as Sir William Beatty and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He died on March 25, 1842, leaving behind a legacy tied both to naval medicine and to one of the best-known scenes in British naval history.