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

Joan Druett (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 4, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0415924510 | ISBN-13: 978-0415924511 | Edition: 1

Using diaries, journals, and correspondences, Druett recounts the daily grind surgeons on nineteenth-century whaling ships faced: the rudimentary tools they used, the treatments they had at their disposal, the sorts of people they encountered in their travels, and the dangers they faced under the harsh conditions of life at sea.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Why would a medical doctor put himself on a whaling vessel in the age of sail? The pay was not tremendous, the company less than stimulating and the danger of disaster significant. Having sketched the origins of doctoring at sea, highlighting John Woodall (1569-1643), "the Father of Sea Surgery," Druett for the most part follows a group of British doctors who shipped out in the 1830s to find adventure and fortune in exotic waters such as the Celebes Sea. Also included is an account of one distinguished New York surgeon, John B. King, who sailed at the same time on a Nantucket whaler. None did amazingly well, nor did any do especially badly, but their collective experience will be of special interest to readers who enjoy the literature of sailing ships. Druett showcases excellent research with generous quotations of primary documentsAsome of which are reproduced along with paintings, etchings, photographs and drawings. One of the three appendices compares what Dr. Woodall's and Dr. King's medical chests contained, demonstrating that the herbal treatments used during the 17th century had been replaced by more purely chemical remedies in the 19th. The pursuit of adventure seems to have been these generally well-educated gentlemen's motivation, but Druett's writing does not conform to the fast-paced style of adventure narrative. Those who enjoyed Patrick O'Brian's eye for historical detail will delight in Druett, a dedicated historian, but they will not find the same talent for drama. (Dec.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

New Zealander Druett, who has written on women at sea, here considers 11 male professional seafarers, surgeons on whaling ships during 1823-43, on voyages that took them to the South Seas, south and east of China, and lasted from two to four years. Druett has read and absorbed the men's journals, which range in manner from cool and scientific in the notes of an amateur biologist to newsy and illustrated in those of a particularly attentive observer. She opens the book with an account of the first surgeon general of the East India Company and his medical sea chest, and continues with English whaling ship surgeons because England required whalers to carry a surgeon (the U.S. didn't, and a captain often had to perform as one). Filled with accounts of the drama and tedium of whaling, exciting battles with whales, and the occasional gruesome medical event, the book should please sailing buffs, history buffs, and fans of the well-told, lively story. William Beatty
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 270 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (October 4, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415924510
• ISBN-13: 978-0415924511
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,496,763 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Back in the year 1984, on the picture-poster tropical island of Rarotonga, I literally fell into whaling history when I tumbled into a grave. A great tree had been felled by a recent hurricane, exposing a gravestone that had been hidden for more than one and a half centuries. It was the memorial to a young whaling wife, who had sailed with her husband on the New Bedford ship Harrison in the year 1845. And so my fascination with maritime history was triggered ... resulting in 18 books (so far). The latest -- number nineteen -- is a biography of a truly extraordinary man, Tupaia, star navigator and creator of amazing art.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Medicine, November 25, 2000

By 

John Townley (Sea Cliff, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rough Medicine: Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail (Hardcover)

Medicine has long been an adventurous and rewarding profession - but these days we count those adventures in the halls of hospitals and rewards range from fat grants to the Nobel Prize. No modern physician, however, can tell the tale of being lionized by South Sea cannibals, tattooed from neck to toe, and then living to profit from several hit books about the experience.

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

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Medics to the explorers, January 6, 2001

By 

"puppypokey" (Northcountry) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rough Medicine: Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail (Hardcover)

My angle on this book is from an avid adventure & exploration reader's perspective. I enjoy reading the exploits of Franklin, Shackleton, Cooke, and such sea borne explorers.

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.)

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Rough Medicine takes a new look at sea history, March 9, 2001

By 

Doug Kelley (Pocola, OK United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rough Medicine: Surgeons at Sea in the Age of Sail (Hardcover)

In "Rough Medicine," Joan Druett continues the excellence of such previous works as "Hen Frigates" and "She Captains" in bringing to her audience everday life upon the sea when ships under sail roamed the oceans. Where these other books focus on women who found themselves on long voyages, usually with their husbands who captained the ships, this new volume of easy to read history looks at life on the whaling ships of the early 1800s. These ships left port in search of whales and did not return until the holds were full of their valuable oil. If the captain and crew were lucky, it only took a year or two. To be gone four years or even five was not out of the question. Ms. Druett tells this story through the surviving diaries and journals of surgeons who accompanied the crews on these long and hazardous voyages. Along with extraordinary eye-witness accounts of whaling methods, the reader is shown that to be put under the knife in those days of rough medical techniques was scarcely less dangerous than battling whales in tiny boats. A main requirement to be a surgeon, it seems, was to be strong enough to hold down the unwilling patient. Reading "Rough Medicine" will leave you thankful to be living in our modern age, while at the same time make you wonder how archaic our methods of medicince will seem a hundred years from now. In the meantime, sit back with this good read of a life at sea, as so many of us have often wished to experience. And be glad you have all your arms and legs, and that no well-intentioned sea surgeon has hacked them off. -Doug Kelley