During the recent Nautical Bloghop, my post on Sarah Gray and the cask with her husband's corpse was hugely popular.If you remember, it was the story of what she did with the body of her beloved (and foul-mouthed) husband Slumon after he expired in the tropical Pacific ... how the ship was captured by the Confederate raider Shenandoah, corpse in a cask and all, and how she got the body back to Connecticut.
Accordingly, I have decided to run an incidental series called ...
ROUGH MEDICINE
Being stories from the world of whalemen and merchantmen, and how they coped with illness and accident at sea.
On whaleships, the situation was particularly precarious.
The
skipper and crew — and the captain’s wife, if there — were a long, long way
from any kind of educated help, as American ships did not carry a surgeon. Indeed, if the ship displaced less than 150
tons and the crew numbered no more than six, there was not even a requirement
to carry a medical chest, meaning that the skipper—the man in charge of shipboard
health—did his best by improvising from the pantry, his wife’s sewing box, and
the carpenter’s tool chest.
On whalers—which by definition
were over-manned, six men being necessary to crew each boat, and at least four
men having to stay on board to keep the ship while the whaleboats were in the
chase—a medicine chest was standard, along with a little medical guide. Whether the medical guide was consulted very
deeply is debateable, however, because it was a most unusual whaling master who
did not have his own pet remedies, which he used in preference to anything
thought up by a so-called professional.
“Remedy
for Piles,” wrote the master of the Good Return in 1844: “take twice a day 20 drops of Balsam Copavia
on sugar and a light dose of salts daily and use mercurial ointment on the
fundamental extremity”—and signed it “John Swift, MD when necessary.”
And how did skippers like "John Swift, MD when necessary" cope with challenges like amputation?
Follow the unfolding story of ROUGH MEDICINE to find out.
