Naval Surgeons Research Articles

Innovative learning - key question in teaching naval surgery

Simulation training plays an important role in the preparation of future naval surgeons. In this regard, nowadays in the department of naval surgery there is a training simulator, modernized on the model of the most modern diesel submarine. In contrast to the previous simulator it contains necessary devices for solving situational tasks with the use of telemedicine technologies. The simulator is equipped with sanitary stretchers and a tripod with medical melts. It allows to organize a military medical game with the introductory on transporting conditionally sick and injured both inside and outside the ship that improves the quality of preparing future naval surgeons.

Buchan’s Domestic Medicine and Thomas Huggan, drunken surgeon of the Bounty

The sixth-edition copy (1779) of William Buchan's Domestic Medicine that belonged to Thomas Huggan, surgeon of the Bounty (d.1788 at Tahiti), has been in the National Maritime Museum since 1963. This research note comments on the implications of annotations in it, briefly considers its owner in the context of the status of naval surgeons at the time, and provides hitherto unpublished information on his prior career history and connections.

Material memories of travel: the albums of a Victorian naval surgeon

This paper considers the visual archives of maritime scientific exploration, from coastal sketches to ethnographic observation. It focuses on seven albums of John Linton Palmer, a British naval surgeon who served in the Pacific in the 1850s and 1860s, which are today part of the collections of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers). Through their drawing, recording and collecting, naval surgeons like Linton Palmer played a significant role in the development of natural history and ethnography during the nineteenth century. The paper discusses the historical significance and potential contemporary uses of the Linton Palmer albums in the context of three forms of memory-making: firstly, the documentation of topographic, antiquarian, ethnographic, microscopic and other field observations by means of drawing; secondly, the assembling of such materials into personalised albums, part of a distinctive nineteenth-century naval tradition by which the experience of travel was re-collected (in the case of Linton Palmer within the scientific culture of late-Victorian Liverpool); and thirdly, the contemporary uses of such forms of visual heritage in a variety of contexts from family history to Indigenous land claims.

Robert McCormick's geological collections from Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, 1839–1843

Robert McCormick (1800–1890) took part in three mid-nineteenth-century British Polar expeditions, two to the Arctic and one to the Antarctic. The latter, from 1839 to 1843 and led by James Clark Ross, is the best known. McCormick served as senior surgeon on HMS Erebus and was responsible for the collection of zoological and geological specimens. Despite the novelty and potential scientific importance of these early geological collections from Antarctica and remote islands in the Southern Ocean, they received surprisingly little attention at the time. Ross deposited an official collection with the British Museum in 1844, soon after the expedition's return, and this was supplemented by McCormick's personal collection, bequeathed in 1890. McCormick had contributed brief and idiosyncratic geological notes to the expedition report published by Ross in 1847, but it was not until 1899 that an informed description of the Antarctic rocks was published, and only in 1921 were McCormick's palaeobotanical specimens from Kerguelen examined. His material from other Southern Ocean islands received even less attention; had it been utilized at the time it would have supplemented the better-known collections made by the likes of Charles Darwin. In later life, McCormick became increasingly embittered over the lack of recognition afforded to him for his work in the Polar regions. Despite that contemporary neglect, his collections from the Ross Antarctic expedition provide unique insight into the geological work of nineteenth-century British naval surgeons.

CONTRIBUTION GENERAL-MAJOR OF MEDICAL SERVICE M. A. LUSCHITSKY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NAVAL SURGERY (TO THE 100 ANNIVERSARY FROM THE BIRTHDAY)

The article is devoted to the outstanding naval surgeon professor Mikhail Luschitsky, head of the department of naval and hospital surgery of the Military medical Academy. S. M. Kirov (1973–1986 biennium), general-major of the medical service. Mikhail Alekseevich graduated from the Naval medical Academy in 1941 and was sent to the Pacific fleet. For participation in the war with militaristic Japan will be awarded the order of the red Star. From 1951 to 1958 he served in the Kronstadt naval hospital as head of the surgical Department. Kronstadska school of naval surgeons laid the future surgeon general of the navy and head of the department of naval and hospital surgery professor, the general-major of medical service M. A. Luschitsky to go the fundamental basis of his future scientific and pedagogical activity. In the period from 1958 to 1961, he, being an adjunct of the department of naval surgery, prepared his thesis «Surgical treatment of frostbite 3–4 degrees, combined with radiation sickness», for the scientific value of which the Scientific Council of the Academy awarded him the degree of doctor of medical Sciences. From 1973 to 1986 Mikhail Alekseevich was the head of the department of naval and hospital surgery, where his talent of a great teacher, surgeon and organizer was fully manifested. He created his own unique school of naval surgeons. Mikhail Alekseevich is the author of 146 scientific works, he was twice elected Chairman of the Surgical society of Pirogov. Under his leadership, 7 doctoral and 18 master’s theses were prepared and defended. He retired in 1986. Mikhail Alekseevich died on March 10, 1999.

INTRODUCTION OF LAPAROSCOPIC OPERATIONS BY THE SHIPS OF NAVY OF RUSSIA DURING LONG CAMPAIGNS

Experience of the Russian naval surgeons on uses of endovideo surgical operative measures at long campaigns is shown in this article. Use of low-invasive technologies allows to increase the level of rendering the surgical help to patients and victims in the sea. The case of performance of laparoscopic endovideo surgical appendectomy by team of surgeons on the Russian aircraft carrier «Admiral Kuznetsov» is described during a fi ghting campaign in January, 2017. Modern low-invasive technologies considerably increase the level of rendering the surgical help in the sea, improve quality of treatment, promote bystreyshy recovery of seamen and their return to execution of the official duties. Constant improvement of skills of regular doctors of the ship and the affiliated surgeons from military hospitals is necessary.

Medical collecting on the frontiers of natural history: the rise and fall of Haslar Hospital Museum (1827–1855)

Very little is known about the Royal Navy’s Haslar Hospital Museum, located in Gosport, near Portsmouth, and yet the now defunct institution was one of the nineteenth century’s principal sites of medical, natural history and ethnographic investigation. Here, imperial specimens were collected, studied and used as tools in the education of generations of Naval surgeons, servicemen and scientific explorers, most notably Thomas Henry Huxley. Although principally a Naval and medical institution, Haslar Hospital Museum both assisted and challenged Britain’s best-known scientific collections, in particular the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the British Museum. This paper presents the first history of the museum’s growth and decline, between 1827 and 1855. Particular attention is paid to the agency of Naval surgeons in developing new imperial knowledge, and so to the museum’s success in carving out a privileged space for object-based science at the intersection of medicine and natural history.

Convict Transportation to New South Wales, 1787–1849: Mortality Rates Reconsidered

Previous research into Australian convict transportation has concluded that a significant downturn in mortality rates occurred with the appointment of naval surgeons as superintendents in 1815. Statistical analysis of convict ships sent to New South Wales between 1787 and 1849 shows a more significant downturn occurred in 1800, following the introduction of closer supervision of ships' surgeons. The contracting system established by the Navy Board in 1786 for the transportation of convicts to New South Wales could be made to work as long as government maintained an effective system of inspection and supervision.

The Demography of Royal Navy Surgeons: Some Views on the Process of Prosopography

This study is a brief social biography and demography of British naval doctors during the nineteenth century, asking why Scottish-educated surgeons were so prominent. Understanding the demography and changing dynamics of naval surgeons’ labor illuminates the complex relationship among the military, discrimination, and nationalism that shaped this influential labor market. This study reviews how to collect demographic information from multiple types of sources: university archives, matriculation records, digitized medical journals, and student rolls. It also uses chi-square tests to show the significance of the demographic information collected. The results show us the entangled relationship between database conceptualization, data collection, and data analysis.

The Royal Naval surgeons in the battle of Coronel

The Royal Naval surgeons in the battle of Coronel

French naval physicians, surgeons, and pharmacists in the history of the thermal spas of Réunion

Navy physicians, surgeons, and pharmacists, because of their knowledge of balneology and hydrotherapeutics in metropolitan France, played a key role in the history of the thermal waters of Reunion, discovered in the 19(th) century in Mafate, Cilaos, and Salazie.

Katherine Foxhall, Health, Medicine and the Sea: Australian Voyages, c. 1815-1860

In Health, Medicine and the Sea, Katherine Foxhall has contributed an insightful and richly detailed study of health and medicine on emigrant and convict ships travelling between the British Isles and Australia. Drawing on naval surgeons' official journals, newspapers, and the letters and diaries of emigrants, convicts and sailors, the six chapters and two short interludes of Health, Medicine and the Sea chart the way the experience and meaning of health, sickness and medical practices developed over the temporal and geographical course of Australian colonial voyages. As ships went to sea, sailed through the tropics, rounded southern Africa and arrived in Sydney, vaccination, sanitation, fever and the interior spaces and boundaries of ships could acquire new significance, transform or destabilise. Foxhall insists, and demonstrates, that these voyages should be seen not simply as liminal spaces but as complex and dynamic social ‘assemblages’ (p. 2), in which the physical forces of the sea itself actively shaped the journey. Winds and currents constrained travelling, whilst ship surgeons attuned to the dangers of damp and confined spaces fought constantly against the seawater pressing into the ship. Poor ventilation, foul odours, waste and the damp environment made time on deck desirable, yet the dangers of sunstroke and debility associated with the tropics presented new dilemmas. As Foxhall notes, this geography of health, itself produced within imperial discourses and networks, interacted dynamically with professional ambitions, colonial politics and contested medical knowledge. Surgeons' pay, for example, was conditional on their performance, leading many to shift the blame for sickness and mortality on the life histories of poor emigrants or the degrading conditions of British prisons. Wider social critiques thus shaped the framing of health at sea.

Brian Vale and Griffith Edwards, Physician to the Fleet: The Life and Times of Thomas Trotter, 1760–1832 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), pp. xii + 235, £60.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-84383-604-9.

Brian Vale and Griffith Edwards, Physician to the Fleet: The Life and Times of Thomas Trotter, 1760–1832 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), pp. xii + 235, £60.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-84383-604-9. - Volume 56 Issue 1

Health and Medicine at Sea, 1700-1900, ed. David Boyd Haycock and Sally Archer

This volume contains nine fascinating essays that were the subject of a lecture series at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in 2007. The first five are devoted to medicine and health in the Royal Navy, mostly, but not exclusively, devoted to the critical period of the wars with France from the mid-eighteenth century until 1815 when it was becoming increasingly clear that the health and fitness of the British navy played a critical role in sustaining fire-power in engagements, such as Cape St Vincent and Trafalgar. In the absence of any effective drugs, apart from cinchona bark to treat and prevent malaria, fruit juice to ward off scurvy and vaccination against smallpox, health depended crucially on high standards of cleanliness and the regular supply of clean water or beer and fresh meat, fruit and vegetables. As Erica Charters describes in the opening chapter, this was a challenge during the long blockade of Brest during the Seven Years War, which even ‘the intrepid Admiral Hawke recognized … [was] exceptional and unusually harsh’ (p. 27). This chapter is followed by a summary of a much larger project, with which this reviewer was involved, of a collective biography of Royal Naval Surgeons from 1793 to 1815 by John Cardwell. This confirms other findings which show that military surgeons during the French Wars were on the whole well qualified and competent, even if they could claim to come from backgrounds that were in some senses disadvantaged—confessionally, economically or socially. Michael Crumplin, himself a retired surgeon, reinforces this conclusion in his following chapter on surgery, in which he describes the often remarkable success rate which surgeons enjoyed in performing ‘capital’ operations in the cockpit during the most horrific actions. He compares the number of sailors in the British fleet killed (439) or wounded (1,213) at Trafalgar with the French and Spanish fleet's losses of 3,600 and 3,400, explaining this difference partly by the superior fire power of the British and partly by the large number of men who drowned (p. 88). Pat Crimmin reviews the performance of the Sick and Hurt Board which was responsible for the provision of naval medical services until it was summarily abolished in 1805 and its functions transferred to the Transport Board. The chapter unusually and interestingly includes a section on record-keeping, the functions of the clerks and finance (pp. 92–9). Such analysis is often overlooked in the study of warfare more broadly, but is of crucial importance for understanding why, for example, the Navy opted for the less expensive (but less effective) lime juice as a prophylactic against scurvy. The final chapter in this section is a tour de force by Mark Harrison in reviewing the health of the navy on the West Africa station in the half-century following the abolition of the slave trade. This was the white man's grave with a vengeance and was to lead to the disaster which befell the Niger Expedition in 1841–2, causing a public outcry in the press (pp. 115–16). During the expedition Dr T.R.H. Thomson experimented on himself with higher doses than recommended of the newly isolated quinine and kept himself free from ‘symptoms of fever’ (p. 117). Harrison argues compellingly that improvement in Naval health in the 1840s ‘was a direct result of widespread public concern created by public awareness of the plight of sailors in the West Africa Squadron’ (p. 126).

From Convicts to Colonists: The Health of Prisoners and the Voyage to Australia, 1823–53

From 1815, naval surgeons accompanied all convict voyages from Britain and Ireland to the Australian colonies. As their authority grew, naval surgeons on convict ships increasingly used their medical observations about the health of convicts to make pointed and sustained criticisms of British penal reforms. Beyond their authority at sea, surgeons' journals and correspondence brought debates about penal reform in Britain into direct conversation with debates about colonial transportation. In the 1830s, naval surgeons' claims brought them into conflict with their medical colleagues on land, as well as with the colonial governor, George Arthur. As the surgeons continued their attempts to combat scurvy, their rhetoric changed. By the late 1840s, as convicts' bodies betrayed the disturbing effects of separate confinement as they boarded the convict ships, surgeons could argue convincingly that the voyage itself was a space that could medically, physically and spiritually reform convicts. By the mid-1840s, surgeons took the role of key arbiters of convicts' potential contribution to the Australian colonies.

John Kirkup, The evolution of surgical instruments: an illustrated history from ancient times to the twentieth century, Novato, CA, Norman Publishing, 2006, pp. xviii, 510, 30 colour illus., 527 black and white illus., $275.00 (hardback 0-930405-86-2). - John Kirkup, A history of limb amputation, Heidelberg, Springer, 2007, pp vii,184, illus., £100.00, €149.95, $169.00 (hardback 978-1-84628-443-4).

John Kirkup, The evolution of surgical instruments: an illustrated history from ancient times to the twentieth century, Novato, CA, Norman Publishing, 2006, pp. xviii, 510, 30 colour illus., 527 black and white illus., $275.00 (hardback 0-930405-86-2). - John Kirkup, A history of limb amputation, Heidelberg, Springer, 2007, pp vii,184, illus., £100.00, €149.95, $169.00 (hardback 978-1-84628-443-4).

Nelson’s Surgeon William Beatty, Naval Medicine and the Battle of Trafalgar

In the lead-up to the bicentenary of Trafalgar a number of important new studies have been published about the life of Nelson and his defeat of the Combined Fleet in 1805. Despite the significant role played by the health and fitness of the British crews in securing the victory, little has been written hitherto about the naval surgeon in the era of the long war against France. This book is intended to fill the gap. Sir William Beatty (1773-1842) was surgeon of the Victory at Trafalgar. An Ulsterman from Londonderry, he had joined the navy in 1791. Before being warranted to Nelson's flagship, Beatty had served upon ten other warships, and survived a yellow fever epidemic, court martial, and shipwreck to share in the capture of a Spanish treasure ship. After Trafalgar, he became Physician of the Channel Fleet, based at Plymouth, and eventually Physician to Greenwich Hospital, where he served until his retirement in 1838. As the book makes clear in drawing upon an extensive prosopographical database, Beatty's career until 1805 was representative of the experience of the approximately 2,000 naval surgeons who joined the navy in the course of the war. The first part of the biography provides a detailed and scholarly introduction to the professional education, training, and work of the naval surgeon. But after 1805 Beatty became a member of the service elite, and his career becomes interesting for other reasons. In the final decades of his life, Beatty was far more than a senior naval physician. As a Fellow of the Royal Society, director of the Clerical and Medical Insurance Company, and director of the London to Greenwich Railway, he was a prominent figure in London's business and scientific community, who used his growing wealth to build a large collection of books and manuscripts. His later life is testimony to the much wider contribution that some naval and army medical officers made to the development of the new Britain of the nineteenth century. In Beatty's case, too, the contribution was original. By publishing in 1807 his carefully crafted Authentic Narrative of the Death of Lord Nelson, he was instrumental in forging the myth of the hero's last hours, which has become a part of the national consciousness and has helped to define for generations the concept of Britishness.

Rationales for therapeutic apheresis

Bloodletting seems to have held tremendous appeal for practitioners of the past. It was a treatment favored by barbers, physicians and naval surgeons from medieval times through the Renaissance, through the Enlightenment and well into the 19 century. It’s likely that the trust and confidence it inspired were based in part on its compelling rationale (the depletion of evil humors), while additional support may have come from its obvious effects on complexion and vital signs, plus a generous amount of placebo value. The advent of the scientific method exposed the theoretical basis for bloodletting for what it was / preposterous / and revealed that, with a very few exceptions, the benefits attributed to it for centuries were pure fiction. There are lessons here for contemporary physicians; namely to be clear about reasons for implementing a therapy and cautious about claims for clinical benefit. Therapeutic apheresis may be fairly described as the modern descendant of bloodletting. Providers of this service/treatment often encounter expectations among patients and other physicians that differ very little from those associated with bloodletting in the past; i.e.; they expect that ‘‘cleaning the blood’’ in some vaguely understood manner will be good for what ails them. Such expectations are sometimes met in individual patients, resulting in case reports suggesting efficacy, but many of these claims have not stood the test of time.

El tratado de las enfermedades del pecho de D. Antonio Corbella y Fondebila

The need to publish monographs on diseases affecting the diverse systems of the human body clearly dates from the second half of the 19th century, when medical and surgical specialties were beginning to develop. In pneumology, the 17th and 18th century literature was dominated by phthisiological treatises because of the high mortality due to the terrible spread of tuberculosis, which upstaged all other diseases of the era. Such treatises therefore did not cover the full scope of respiratory disease. An exception was R.T.H. Laennec s first 1819 edition of Traite de l auscultation mediate et des maladies des poumons et de cœur (Treatise on mediate auscultation and diseases of the lungs and heart), considered the first serious attempt to deal with the subspecialty of cardiopulmonology as a whole. Few, however, are familiar with the 1795 Madrid publication of what was probably the first Spanish monograph on specifically thoracic diseases and one of the first in world medical literature. I refer to the Treatise on Common Chest Diseases, Acute and Chronic by Don Antonio Corbella y Fondebila (Figure 1). Accordingly, the purpose of the present paper is to bring to light the most important aspects of this treatise. Little has been published about Corbella y Fondebila. Seemingly he came from Barcelona and was a student at the Royal College of Naval Surgeons in Cadiz, entering in 1767. He was posted to America as a lieutenant protomedico — a title referring to his appointment to the King s own staff of physicians — in the provinces of the Rio de la Plata, Paraguay, and Tucuman. In 1794 he published Disertacion medico quirugica (Dissertation on Medicine and Surgery). 2 His 1795 Treatise on Chest Diseases, the subject of this paper, was dedicated to Francisco Martinez Sobral, chief physician to the King of Spain. In the introduction to this work, Corbella y Fondebila addresses the public to explain what motivated him to write the book:

From oranges and lemons to glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate: clinical observations stimulate basic research.

Over the long history of the medical profession, physicians seeking answers to questions raised by their clinical observations have had a central role in stimulating research that has improved the prevention and treatment of disease1. In the last fifty years, the increasing cost and complexity of scientific investigation have helped to make basic biomedical research an enterprise of its own, increasingly separated from physicians who are skilled and experienced in medical practice. This change has occurred to the extent that expert clinicians who participate in basic scientific investigations have become scarce2. Some outstanding scientists currently believe that biomedical science has advanced to the point that there is little need for investing in basic research that is stimulated or guided by clinical observations or for testing the value of basic research against clinical experience. At the same time, some prominent clinicians believe that asking fundamental questions about their clinical practice accomplishes little and that they can rely on pharmaceutical, medical-implant, and technology companies to provide the information and innovations that improve patient care. Should these views go unchallenged? A little more than 250 years ago, James Lind (1716-1794), a British naval surgeon, designed and conducted the first controlled, prospective clinical experiment1,3,4. Like other naval surgeons, he observed that debilitating and often fatal scurvy occurred only during long voyages. Eighteenth-century physicians used a variety of methods to prevent and treat the disease, but Lind, on the basis of his clinical experience, believed that eating oranges and lemons produced the best results. On May 20, 1747, while serving as the HMS Salisbury’s senior surgeon, Lind selected twelve sailors suffering from advanced scurvy, choosing them so that “their cases were as similar as I could …