140 Health & History, 2014. 16/2 Exhibition Reviews Becalmed in Port Adelaide Rough Medicine: Life and Death in the Age of Sail. An exhibition at the South Australian Maritime Museum, Lipson Street, Port Adelaide, South Australia. 30 May – 30 November 2014. http://maritime.historysa.com.au/events/2014/rough-medicine-life-death-agesail Visited 5 September 2014. Location, location, location! This exhibition is appropriately situated in the near perfect surroundings of the South Australian Maritime Museum. On entering the main space of the museum, the freedom to explore a life size sailing ketch with its dark hold, cramped sleeping quarters and tiny kitchen galley, transports the visitor straight back to the age of sail and evokes emotions which serve to enhance and enrich the exhibition, Rough Medicine: Life and Death in the Age of Sail. The exhibition deftly presents the medical horrors of sea voyages undertaken by immigrants and convicts travelling to Australia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The usual illnesses familiar to historians of medicine are on display: scurvy, pox and plague, smallpox, typhus, dysentery, cholera, amputations, fractures, and rotten teeth. Familiar therapies on show include herbal remedies, mercury treatments, and bloodletting paraphernalia, not to mention plump leeches closely coiled in the corner of a fish tank. Medical instruments such as the bistoury, the proband, and the triple hook chain are presented, their unusual names and uses detailed in chilling clarity. In addition, a variety of interesting documents and texts contribute to a wide-ranging medical compilation, sourced from libraries and museums around Australia. The emphasis of the exhibition is on the long sea voyage and the health problems generated by its harsh confines. Surprisingly, out of 853 ships chartered by the Emigration Commission before 1872, only two were shipwrecked. Ship travel did, however, intensify the effects of disease and test the limits of endurance of long-suffering passengers and crew. The dire predicaments faced by travellers forced changes that revolutionised aspects of medical practice. For example, innovations in hygiene and behaviour on board, developed Health & History ● 16/2 ● 2014 141 for convicts in 1814 by Dr. William Redfern, eventually helped to decrease passenger mortality. Medical practice at sea, therefore, made significant contributions to medicine in general. The exhibition gives a comprehensive range of perspectives from all types of people who travelled by sea. Apart from pirates, ships’ surgeons,andsailorswhosufferedfromscurvy,pox,andthecato’nine tails, a number of exhibits from women passengers provide an extra air of poignancy. Painstaking embroidery featuring sewn messages that ask for God’s mercy, well-thumbed prayer books, and letters and diaries lamenting the deaths of beloved children, all combine to deepen an awareness of the risks involved in undertaking sea travel in past centuries. For women, the risk associated with giving birth at sea was particularly great and ships’ casualty lists were pitifully filled with children. Being in close confines below deck increased the heartache that bereaved family members endured. There is enough in Rough Medicine to interest everyone. Accompanying me to the exhibition were my husband and fifteenyear -old son. My son particularly liked a logbook from the East India Image 1: Rough Medicine. Life and Death in the Age of Sail explores the immigrant voyages that are part of the family history of millions of Australians. 142 EXHIBITION REVIEWS Company, a company he was familiar with from reading the Sharpe’s novels by Bernard Cornwell, which are set in the Napoleonic era. He was also drawn to a ‘pomander’ where he could sample the smell of stale body exudates that might typically occur below decks. However, he wished for direction on how to progress through what he felt was a slightly disjointed display with too much writing. My husband thought the arrangement of the exhibits suited the chaotic nature of medicine in an era that searched haphazardly for anything with which to combat illness. My own feeling was a desire to browse the pages of a number of noteworthy manuscripts, encased in glass and untouchable, which included John Woodall’s The Surgeon’s Mate (1617) and a pristine-looking first edition of John Gerard’s The Great Herball (1636), which was on loan from the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. Numerous thought-provoking...