Royal Navy Medical Officer journals

15 Dec 2008

A few weeks ago I visited The National Archives for their Cataloguing Awareness Day. I was really impressed with the variety of projects underway, from the records of Victorian women prisoners, to 'Bread or Blood', describing political agitation for electoral reform in the early 1830s. I thought I'd mention the most relevant connected with maritime research.

Bruno Pappalardo, from the Advice and Records Knowledge team, gave an interesting overview of a project to catalogue and digitise a series of Royal Navy Medical Officers journals, from 1793-1880, though the series itself runs up to approximately 1960. The project is being funded by the Wellcome Trust and aims to catalogue over a thousand medical officer's journals. The series includes convict and emigrant ships as well as the ships of the Royal Navy.

Bruno showed how these journals provide a wealth of information for medical historians, as they include detailed information on diseases and injuries, treatments and living conditions at sea. Surgeons were often fascinated with the natural world and frequently recorded their impressions with far more detail than the terse entries in the Captain's log, leaving a series of records replete with watercolour illustrations, hand-drawn maps, and pictures of local flora, fauna, people and animals.

We have one or two examples in our manuscript collections, including the medical journal of La Seine kept by Surgeon John Martin off the coast of Africa and West Indies between 1799-1800 (ref: MLN/12) and the papers of Surgeon Vice Admiral Sir James Porter, (1851-1935) who amongst other things was principal medical officer to the Naval brigades during the Boer War (collection ref: PTR).

We also have a few examples of the standard surgeon's reference books, such as Buchan's Domestic medicine of 1779 and William Turnbull's The Naval Surgeon of 1806. The ship's copy of Buchan's book was taken by the mutineers from HMS Bounty in 1787, showing just how important the information these books contained was.

So whilst these journals could be invaluable for comparing how the treatment of wounds and diseases, fevers and injuries changed over time, they are also of great potential value to family historians and other researchers. Of real value to family history research, it was pointed out, the medical journals go back further than the records of individual naval ratings (which don't start until 1853). In other words it's a way of finding information about ratings, of which there are virtually no record beyond a mention in a ship's crew list. And the best news is that the new catalogue entries will be fully searchable by name; a wonderful tool for tracing naval ancestors.

Now that I've sung the project's praises, you can have a look for yourself at:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/partnerprojects/officer-journal.htm

Or you can search the TNA catalogue for details of these records at:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue

Martin (Manuscripts Cataloguer)