Rough Medicine: Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail

by Joan Druett

Book Overview

Using diaries, journals, and correspondences, Druett recounts the daily grind surgeons on nineteenth-century whaling ships faced: the rudimentary tools they used, the treatments they had at their disposal, the sorts of people they encountered in their travels, and the dangers they faced under the harsh conditions of life at sea.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415924510
• ISBN13: 9780415924511
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

`As long as men and women have gone to sea, doctors have accompanied them.'

What inspired doctors to sign up for journeys that could involve spending three years away from home? What surgical tools and medicines did doctors have available at sea in the age of sail? In this interesting book, Ms Druett provides a history of the role of physicians in the closed society of a ship of sea in the age of sail. This was the time in which many lengthy voyages of discovery were undertaken and considerable periods were spent out of the sight of land and far away from home. Ms Druett is a maritime historian rather than a physician, and her perspective is fascinating. It may be that a physician will one day tackle this subject from a purely medical perspective but such an approach is unlikely to include the life and colour of Ms Druett's account. So, why did doctors undertake long voyages at sea? The answers are many and varied. Some did it for the adventure and others because of their desire to practice medicine at sea. Others were escaping their pasts and in some cases it is not at all clear. What is very clear, though, is that travellers in the age of sail were brave and the doctors who tended them did so with very limited tools and medicines. I would recommend this book to anyone who want to know more about maritime history. Jennifer Cameron-Smith

A Hard Life Aboard Ship

A thoroughly engaging presentation of nautical history on the lives and times of the early ship's surgeons on British and American naval and whaling vessels. The drawings of the early surgeon's tools, the descriptions of the surgical procedures and the stories of illness and injury makes one wonder why did anyone sign on as a ship's surgeon? Very informative and highly recommended.

Medics to the explorers

My angle on this book is from an avid adventure & exploration reader's perspective. I enjoy reading the exploits of Franklin, Shackleton, Cooke, and such sea borne explorers.One of the constants of all of the fantastic voyages of exploration is the inclusion of a physician / scientist. Almost in cliche style these doctors play a major role in the direction and guidance of the expedition. (If you will pardon the comparison, most ships doctors seem just like Bones on Star Trek.) This book gathers together the biographies, anecdotes and histories of many of these physicians into a conherent historical theme. Great book!! (Very readable and accessible.)

Best Medicine

Medicine has long been an adventurous and rewarding profession - but these days we count those adventures in the halls of hospitals and rewards range from fat grants to the Nobel Prize. No modern physician, however, can tell the tale of being lionized by South Sea cannibals, tattooed from neck to toe, and then living to profit from several hit books about the experience.That's just one of the unlikely thrillers found in the pages of Joan Druett's engaging and well-documented book Rough Medicine, a sweeping account of the lives of ships' physicians during the rough-and-ready times of the tall ship whalers. Armed with only a whiff of what would become modern medical knowledge and a sizeable chest of surgical tools, chemical cures, and organic nostrums they dealt with scurvy, malaria, yellow fever, bloody accidents and war wounds in ways the medical profession had never before dreamed. Indeed, if the surgeon was absent, the captain could fill in, administering a bit of bottle #6 with unguent #23 according to a book of symptoms and hope for the best!What was so revolutionary about this? Everything. When the great sea trade routes were first established in the late Renaissance, medicine on shore was a bureaucratic tangle of licensed and often unionized doctors, surgeons, physicians, and pharmacists, all with their own conflicting turf, still mostly leaning on the antiquated texts of Galen to mete out their medical attentions.That worked badly enough on shore, but at sea it was more or less useless. Starting with Dr. James Woodall's first all-in-one medicine-to-go sea chest in 1619, all the competing parts of the profession were packed into a single box and shipped off to sea under the command of one ship's surgeon. It was the ancestor of the modern emergency medical kit you now find in a paramedic's vehicle - designed to cut to the chase and get the job done, using whichever medical approach seemed to fit the emergency.Ships doctors, along the way, turned into keen scientific observers of the societies and medicines of the seven seas and often doubled as accountants and journal-keepers (they could read and write) and even found themselves in command of the quarterdeck when the captain was busy in a whaleboat with a harpoon in his hand.Some got rich, some came back in rags, some never came back at all. But all found the necessity to turn the medical profession into a personal unified vision of problems, symptoms, and remedies, judged less by dated physical concepts and more by immediate physical necessity. In doing so, they presaged the modern emergency room, where quick common sense and triage ruled the day, along with a large dose of human understanding and compassion.This could have been a windy, scholarly tome on medical history as it evolved upon the waves, but under Druett's skillful hand it is a page-turner, backed with what is clearly the understanding and background of a world-class maritime scholar. I read it straight through at one sitting,