Imagine you are at sea facing a violent battle with an enemy ship. The experienced 17th-century surgeon John Moyle asked his reader to do just that. In his printed guide of recommended practice, the reader was compelled to put themselves in the place of a ship’s surgeon in the thick of battle: “You have another wounded Man brought down, having a Musket bullet penetrated into the thick of his Groin, and lodging there, and the great Vessels wounded, and bleeding lamentably.”
For sailors facing injury, accident, or illness at sea in the 16th and 17th centuries, the ship’s surgeon was the only professional medical help. And yet we know relatively about the experiences and lives of shipboard surgeons.
My research explores texts written by British ship surgeons to get a deeper understanding of medical care at sea, and the emotional and psychological challenges of shipboard life for surgeon and crew.
