administer treatment, claiming that he believed that the Admiral was beyond treatment. The admiral had expressed the wish to be buried in his native soil, rather than simply being thrown in the sea like other mariners of the time. Beatty had to preserve the admiral's body for the voyage back to Britain, and decided to place it in a barrel of brandy. Beatty relates how gases from the corpse caused the barrel lid to open on 28 October 1805, alarming the posted marine guard. On arrival at Gibraltar, the barrel had to be topped up with spirits of wine because it had filled the cavities in the body. This incident may have led to the legend that British seamen had drunk the brandy surrounding the body. As Victory approached the Nore, Beatty performed an autopsy, removing the fatal musket ball (now at Windsor Castle) and later writing a report A Concise History of the Wound. Beatty then attended Nelson's state funeral in London. Victory was decommissioned in January 1806, and Beatty was posted as surgeon-in-charge of Sussex, the former and now a hospital ship at Sheerness. There, he wrote his Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson, which was eventually published in early 1807. Physician of the fleet Beatty was appointed physician of the Channel Fleet on 25 September 1806, having received the necessary medical degree from the University of Aberdeen on 28 February 1806. His duties were shore-based and mostly administrative, though in 1807, number of other naval surgeons and he were active in promoting the new practice of vaccination against smallpox. Beatty served in this capacity until August 1815 and the end of the war. Later career Beatty returned to his medical studies in Edinburgh between 1815 and 1817, gaining a second medical degree from the University of St Andrews on 14 October 1817 and becoming a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians of London on 22 December 1817. He then served in civilian practice in Plymouth for the next five years. In April 1818 he was elected a member of the Linnean Society of London and was accepted as a Fellow of the Royal Society. In September 1822, Beatty was appointed Physician at Greenwich Hospital, London, remaining there for the next 17 years, while also being appointed Physician Extraordinary to King George IV in Scotland, and in 1827 Physician Extraordinary to the Duke of Clarence,