Rough Medicine: Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail [Paperback]

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, including the complete listed contents of two period sea medicine chests, much of which can be found today in an alternative medicine store. What goes around, comes around - thousands of years of hands-on medicine still has a lot to say to us. In Ms. Druett's wonderful book, it has surely found home port.

-- John Townley

Renaissance astrologer/physician to Capt. George Salley, 1985 Godspeed recreation Jamestown voyage,

Founder, The Confederate Naval Historical Society

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.)