Abstract Recently uncovered documents from the Spanish 1779 ship Perla, traveling from Lima to Cádiz, reveal new perspectives on shipboard health conditions in the Pacific, and on their cures or treatments in the Spanish colonial context. An exchange of medical information took place through correspondence across the seas, including the smuggling of medicinal and botanical remedies. Eighteenth-century missionaries and doctors considered uses for and experiments with local cures and healing practices on both sides of the Pacific. Finally, I will study the case study of doctor Pedro de Vicuña, explaining his use of herbal remedies, such as the Pepita de Catbalogan, and describing how he concocted recipes against ailments important to Spanish colonial interests, such as scurvy, pulmonary disease, gastric illnesses, and infertility. Despite the confrontation with European medical principles, or a clash of medical cultures on religious grounds, we see a sustained eighteenth-century empirical and practical interest in “non-European” forms of medicine overseas.
Abstract In this article, I will examine maritime medical praxes during the latter half of the eighteenth century, reconfigured in Steven Weaver's terms as an “era of disclosure” (as opposed to discovery). With reference to the Wallis and Cook exploratory expeditions to the Pacific Ocean between 1766 and 1779, and moving away from a conventional focus on the considerable advances in the battle against scurvy and the improvement of hygiene onboard the ships, I will consider archival sources that record medical encounters, as well as widely studied cultural crashes, between peoples. During these contacts, I will argue that shipboard surgeons, doctors, and even captains engaged in “zones of experiential learning,” tending to the health of their crews, which was essential to survival on ships as they crossed the huge expanse of oceans with no or few landfalls.
Abstract Falconbridge's book, Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa, was published in 1788 after Falconbridge had met Thomas Clarkson, and left the slave trade. The account became so influential in the abolitionist milieux in England that Falconbridge and his wife, Anna-Marie, were later sent by the Anti-Slavery Society to “Freetown,” the settlement for freed slaves established by the Sierra Leone Company. In this article, I revist the Account, focusing on Falconbridge's medical perspective, and on his approach to the conditions of enslaved people. He was well aware of the larger communities and environmental constraints that determined slave voyages. Not only were medical men in charge of caring for the confined crew, they were also closer to the enslaved people's bodies, as agents of control and perpetrators of violence. Falconbridge's profession as sea surgeon, and his medical background will be presented in this paper as providing a specific—and ambivalent—insight into racial violence.
Abstract My study of the conduct of hydrographic survey in support of frontline operations of the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars and their tumultuous aftermath (1793–1823) amassed the records of over 350 mainstream officers and sailing masters. Such samples of seafaring personnel, backed up by detailed examination of records and correspondence, are rare. In this instance, they faced the same perils of conflict as their counterparts, but also acted as pathfinders in all the oceans of the world, braving waters where others might fear to venture. This latter aspect of their work was vital, for twice as many British warships were lost to shipwreck in the period than to enemy action. This article uses the original records, and other published sources, to assess how this sample of the mariners of the Royal Navy can throw light on the impact of mortality, injury, or disease on the seafaring world of the day, and particularly on fighting navies.
Abstract Surgeon Claude Roblet kept an official record of his cures for thirteen months of a two-year voyage round the world in the Solide, captained by Etienne Marchand, from December 1790 to August 1792. He recorded his consultations in two journals: the first was a highly simplified document, in the form of a table, the “Journal des maladies” (Sick List), where the pharmacopoeia Roblet had recourse to is duly noted. The second was a narrative rendition titled Journal historique. In these journals, two episodes are worthy of note: a cure for scurvy and an unavoidable death after a stroke. Remarkably, this was the only death in a crew of fifty during an eighteen-month circumnavigation. Roblet takes care in terms of hygiene onboard ship, in keeping with the captain and the shipowners’ recommendations, which reflected the prophylactic instructions of the time. The journals can also be compared with the medical treatises of the period, which systematically describe diseases with pedagogical and scholarly aims. Roblet's short treatise on tetanus, for example, demonstrates his skills, but seems irrelevant to the voyage. He adopts the same tone as in René-Primevère's Lesson on the Coquille in 1829 when he warns his readers that he would avoid “quotations or discussions on such and such medical theories or on questions still in dispute. This book, written at sea, is only what it is intended to be, a truthful and simple report of the circumstances that accompanied a long navigation.” This apparent opposition, particularly apparent at the end of the eighteenth century, between the theoretical identification of diseases and the treatment of patients may be understood in Foucault's terms from Naissance de la clinique (1963). It may be argued then that Roblet dissociates his own knowledge (and ignorance) of theory from his empirical and often efficient day-to-day practice of medicine and surgery onboard ship. This may illustrate the split, characteristic of the time, between the intellectualization of medicine and the advancement of knowledge.
