Health medicine and the sea by Katherine Foxhall, Paperback | Indigo Chapters

Health, medicine, and the sea explores how convicts, emigrants and the surgeons responsible for their welfare created medical knowledge at sea in the first half of the nineteenth century. What was it like for Eliza Baldwinson, a young London thief, to experience (and survive) cholera, fever and scurvy as she sailed through strange oceans? Why did Henry Wellings, a young father from North West England, trace his family's voyage - and his son's illness - on a hand-drawn map of the world? What possessed Charles Cameron, an eager naval surgeon, to pillage his ship's gunpowder stores in an attempt to cure scurvy? Arguing that it was their time at sea that turned ordinary people from Britain and Ireland into Australia's colonists, this lively and carefully researched book focuses on individual stories to offer a new framework for understanding the centrality of health to the history of colonial settlement. It follows the voyage route from the ports of Britain and Ireland, around Africa, through the Atlantic and southern hemisphere oceans, to the shores of the Australian colonies. Touching on themes such as environmental knowledge, invalidity, epidemics, penal reform, sailor's culture, working-class mistrust of medical men and their experiments, and the politics of immigration, Katherine Foxhall offers a fresh and engaging approach to the fascinating social and cultural history of colonial voyaging. This is an important contribution to the histories of medicine, colonialism and migration which will appeal to students and researchers alike. | Health medicine and the sea by Katherine Foxhall, Paperback | Indigo Chapters