Surgeons at sea : professional identities and medical practice in naval surgeons’ journals, 1793–1815

Abstract

This thesis examines the medical practices and professional identities of British naval surgeons during a period of professional transformation, bureaucratic reform, and sustained global warfare. It uses the collection of medical logbooks held at the National Archives at Kew (ADM 101), containing the records of medical practice for over one hundred Royal Navy ship services during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815). This thesis analyses the ways in which naval surgeons negotiated their ambiguous status and purview to fulfil, and even extend, their professional roles. Instead of a top-down bureaucratic account of naval medicine in the period, or an account drawn from the idealised prescriptions of published manuals and treatises, this thesis uses the descriptive records of actual shipboard medical practice. It reveals the ways that naval surgeons constructed their professional identities during a period of transformation within the naval medical bureaucracy and the British medical community.

Alongside their prescribed use for data collection and information management, naval surgeons used these journals as tools for professional and scholarly communication. The journals reveal how they operated as stakeholders and negotiators in health management and order within the ship œconomy, naval medical bureaucracy, and the Royal Navy. Some surgeons cultivated an identity as ‘medical philosophers’, operating as knowledge brokers, connecting and performing their medical identities within various overlapping imperial and domestic medical communities. As a collective class, naval surgeons defied traditional professional boundaries, operating as hybrid practitioners. The ways in which they negotiated their professional roles and medical identities underscore the agency and autonomy that these medical professionals could wield within an increasingly bureaucratic state institution. This thesis reveals how the professional identity of a collective class of medical practitioners was cultivated, contested, and performed during a significant moment in professional identity creation within the British medical community.