What person in history was Jamie Fraser based on?
And are the medical practices Claire uses truly accurate?
Pearl-clutchers, this is for you.
Here's what Outlander gets wrong, and all it gets right, too.
So after you found out Jamie survived the battle of Culloden, you might have been skeptical.
Showrunners spent the entirety of the first two seasons convincing you that if Jamie and
Claire failed to stop the Jacobite rebellion, it would mean the end of their romance.
Never mind that everyone knew there was a third season coming.
Jamie's survival isn't actually all that unusual, especially when you consider that there was
a real person who survived the battle of Culloden in much the same way.
According to Parade, author Diana Gabaldon based Jamie's character on a Jacobite officer
who survived the battle along with 18 other wounded officers.
Just like the fictional Jamie, the officer was called Fraser, and he narrowly escaped
execution after he was discovered hiding in a farmhouse with the other men.
That's pretty much where the similarities end, though.
Sadly, history does not remember how old or dashingly handsome the real Officer Fraser
was or whether he was married to a time-traveling World War II combat nurse.
But hey, anything's possible.
After the battle of Culloden, Jamie hides
in a cave, puts on some kind of weird floppy French beret thingy, and slowly transforms
into the Dunbonnet, which is kind of somewhere between a Geico caveman and a bohemian folk
musician.
This, too, actually happened.
According to Radio Times, the Dunbonnet was a Jacobite soldier who hid out in a cave for
seven lonely years following the Battle of Culloden.
The locals fed him and named him after his hat so none of the local British troops would
know what they were gossiping about.
Not only was the Dunbonnet a real person, but they kind of sort of know where his cave
was.
Or at least they know of a cave that could pass for the Dunbonnet's cave well enough
that they can charge people admission to see it.
Oh and also, the identity of the real Dunbonnet is known — he was the chief of the Fraser
clan, and his name was Jamie Fraser.
No kidding.
"Not my own sister!"
"Put him in the irons."
"How could you?!"
"This is your own fault!
You brought this on yourself!"
Outlander includes some other real people too, though liberties have been taken with
things like relationships and who got along with whom.
Jamie's grandfather in the show is Lord Lovat of the '45, also known as "The Old Fox," who
in reality probably did not have a grandson named Jamie.
According to the Scotsman, the show did a pretty good job portraying Lord Lovat as history
remembers him.
Just like in the show, the historical Lovat was loyal mostly to himself, so loyal that
he sent his own son into the service of Charles Stuart and the Jacobites rather than putting
himself in harm's way.
According to writer Catherine Curzon, the real "Old Fox" was executed by the British
for his support of the Jacobite cause and was actually the last person to be beheaded
in Britain.
It makes sense because his execution did not go at all the way that the British wanted
it to.
For a start, Lord Lovat wasn't distressed or remorseful during his execution.
In fact, just before the executioner did his work, a huge crowd of onlookers tried to climb
the scaffolding and it collapsed under their weight, killing 20 people and sending Lovat
into fits of hysterical laughter.
The accident didn't save him, but it might have made the British think twice about the
wisdom of public beheadings.
Historical fiction doesn't always do the best job with costumes, mostly because modern viewers
prefer costumes that are elaborate and…low-cut.
Let's take for example the costumes in History's Vikings, which were essentially a cross between
leather biker wear and a post-apocalyptic steampunk Mad Max.
For the most part, the costume designs in Outlander are much more historically accurate,
with a couple of notable exceptions.
A lot of viewers have complained that Claire doesn't dress in a strictly 18th-century style,
but that's by design.
According to the Scotsman, in 18th-century Scotland, women wore embroidered dresses and
tight corsets, and costume designers did stick to that baseline.
Claire isn't an 18th-century woman, though, and since clothing in those days had to be
tailored for each individual, you wouldn't really expect Claire to adopt a strictly 18th-century
style.
Instead, her outfits are just a little quirky, just a bit modern.
Big, bold floral patterns weren't really a thing in 18th-century France, but let's not
forget that combat nurses from the mid-20th century weren't really a thing, either.
"Won't this kill him?"
"No, but the pressure on his brain will if I don't release it."
There's some controversy about exactly how the whole tartan thing came to be and if it
was even a big deal in 18th-century Scotland.
According to Elle, costume designer Terry Dresbach says she figured she'd be getting
angry letters no matter what she did, so she just went down the path that made the most
sense to her.
She chose to dress the Frasers in a dull, grayish tartan because she figured that brilliantly
colored dyes were probably hard to come by in the damp, cold Scottish highlands, and
may have even been too expensive for most ordinary Scots.
She even thought this through to a granular level.
She asked herself what dye-making materials would be easiest to obtain in that part of
Scotland, and then designed everyone's kilts under the assumption that everyone in the
neighborhood would have been using those dyes.
In other words, not only is there a method to the "Outlander" kilt design, but it's kind
of possible that the costume designers got it right.
In Scotland in the 18th century, people probably wouldn't have spoken a lot of English.
For a start, the language of the time was Scots Gaelic, and there really wouldn't have
been any reason to speak any other language unless you were in the presence of people
who couldn't speak Gaelic.
In the show, the Scots characters do speak Gaelic, but they don't seem to speak it a
lot.
This is both for Claire's benefit and for the audience's since there would have to be
subtitles, and traditionally there's only so much subtitling that the average American
can tolerate.
Also, despite the fact there were plenty of Scottish actors on the show, only one actor
knew more than a word or two of Gaelic, and ironically, it was Claire herself.
According to the Glasgow Times, everyone else had to take a five-week crash course in Gaelic
led by a coach who did not let any of them get away with so much as an incorrect inflection.
This means the Gaelic you hear on the show is accurate both in word and accent.
And in case you're wondering, it's not subtitled because showrunners wanted the audience to
experience Gaelic the way Claire does: like lovely but totally nonsensical linguistic
music.
[speaks in Gaelic]
In the 11th episode of Season 1, Clare gets tried for witchcraft because, as everyone
who has ever watched a period drama knows, hundreds of years ago women who had healing
skills at times got tried as witches.
Anyway, it's the 1740s and Claire saves a boy from poisoning by doing what any 20th-century
nurse would do — she gives him an antidote.
This doesn't go over well with the village priest, who was trying to perform an exorcism
on the poor kid.
It makes for exciting television, but it's not historically accurate.
Witchcraft trials were not happening anymore by the 1740s.
In fact, writer Diana Gabaldon even told National Geographic that she was fully aware the last
witch trial in Scotland happened 20 years before Claire's arrival, but she went ahead
and put one in the story anyway.
Her reasoning: Who's to say that there wasn't a witch trial somewhere in Scotland that people
just forgot to write down?
Outlander is so universally appealing that even the Journal of the Medical Library Association
wanted to get in on the action.
In 2020 they published a paper entitled "Claire Fraser, RN, MD, OMG."
If you don't have a medical background, you've probably wondered just how accurate all the
medical practices are in the show.
Does raw honey really work as an antibiotic ointment?
Can you sterilize surgical tools with whiskey?
Well, according to the author of the 2020 paper, not only are both of those things totally
plausible, but so are most of the rest of Claire's 18th-century versions of 20th-century
medicine.
The one exception is the "penicillin" she makes out of Roquefort cheese.
Although Roquefort does contain a mold that is related to penicillin, you couldn't use
it to make actual penicillin.
The author of the Journal of the Medical Library Association paper doesn't say how useful the
resulting product might actually be, other than just noting that "it couldn't hurt."
Other critics have been less generous about it.
Fansided, for example, commented that the way Claire was growing the mold was all wrong
because it should have been done in the open air rather than under jars.
Evidently, this is a detail that Diana Gabaldon raised with showrunners, but they went ahead
and used jars anyway.
Sure, he was called "Bonnie Prince Charlie," and everyone knows "Bonnie" is a girl's name,
and also the word Scots use to complement feminine beauty.
He must therefore have been weak and ineffective, right?
Not so fast.
The prince's reputation as a weakling originated in 18th-century propaganda, so you have to
take most remembrances about the personalities of monarchs with a grain of salt, especially
when they're monarchs that ended up on the losing side.
The 1745 Association, which is a group of historians specifically interested in the
Jacobite period, called the portrayal of the prince in Outlander, quote, "a hangover from
the 18th century."
According to modern research, Prince Charles was an active participant in the Jacobite
cause.
He marched with his army over sometimes-difficult terrain and enjoyed broad support in Scotland,
which would have been difficult to muster if he spent most of his time just sitting
around looking "Bonnie."
On the other hand, it's true that Bonnie Prince Charlie wasn't a very effective leader.
According to IGN, this was a hard pill for actor Sam Heughan, who played Jamie, to swallow.
In Scotland, the prince is romanticized as a national hero.
But the show could have portrayed this side of the prince without using the very outdated
and offensive trope that effeminate equals ineffective.
"Tell me, what of the state of affairs in Scotland?"
In the show, Jamie and Claire eventually end up in 18th-century North Carolina.
According to the National, both lowland and highland Scots really did settle in the area
around Wilmington and Cape Fear, North Carolina, during that time period.
Some of them may have even been Jacobites, as evidenced by the fact that British loyalists
accused the Scot governor of North Carolina of encouraging former Jacobites to move to
the area.
In the fourth and fifth seasons of Outlander, the audience is introduced to the Regulators,
which you may remember as the settlers who opposed British authority and over-taxation.
In the show, one of their leaders is Murtagh Fraser, Jamie's godfather and former Jacobite.
In reality, the Regulators were sometimes accused of being Jacobites but probably weren't.
Also, most of the Regulators were Scots-Irish, not highlanders.
Still, Scots did play a part in the American Revolution, but the National says that most
of the Jacobites were probably fighting for the British — surprising, considering that
those were the folks they'd fought against at Culloden.
Almost no Hollywood production featuring white, colonial protagonists has managed to not screw
up their portrayal of people of color.
Outlander, sadly, is not an exception.
In Season 4, we meet the Fraser's Indigenous neighbors, and stereotypes ensue.
As far as accuracy goes, well, Outlander does get one thing right: European colonists showed
up and took over native lands.
Yeah, that happened.
Also, none of the actors playing Indigenous characters were Cherokee or Mohawk, the two
groups depicted, though to be fair, that's hardly the fault of showrunners.
According to Town and Country, actors' guild rules barred them from hiring Americans, and
no one is as American as an Indigenous Americans.
Still, they were able to hire Canadian First Nation actors instead.
To their credit, they did also make an effort to get costumes right, although there's only
so much they could have done given that not much was written down about what the Mohawks
and the Cherokee were wearing back in the mid-1700s.
A lot of the Indigenous costumes you see on the show are based on guesswork, which means
there's no way to know for sure if they're accurate.
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