… is the title of a chapter in Sudden Deaths. My apothecary needed a to be familiar with both medicine and surgery in order to help Ben with his investigations. He also needed to have a motive to kill his benefactors – [SPOILER, he didn’t actually kill them]. So he demanded a backstory to explain all this and I had to research the situation of Protestants in Early Modern France and also some basics of the Thirty Years war, which gave him his field experience of surgery.

So I ended up reading something over 25,000 words in order to write maybe 1,000. Hey ho!