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.