“Blood letting, tobacco smoke blown into the lungs, rum rubs and even the sight of Australia were some of the treatments used – with varying degrees of success – by surgeons of Britain’s Royal Navy to treat patients from the late 1700s to the late 1800s, government records released Friday show.
Britain’s National Archives has cataloged and made available to the public journals and diaries from surgeons who served on ships and in shore installations from 1793 to 1880. The archive represents “probably the most significant collection of records for the study of health and medicine at sea for the 19th century,” said Bruno Pappalardo, naval records specialist at the National Archives.
Rum was the treatment of choice aboard HMS Arab during a voyage to the West Indies in 1799 and 1800. A surgeon writes that “application of rum” to the area of a scorpion or centipede bite helps prevent paralysis. The same surgeon mixed rum with oil to treat a tarantula bite.
Aboard HMS Princess Royal in 1801, tobacco was thought to have curative properties. A man who had fallen overboard and was submerged for 12 minutes was brought back aboard the Princess Royal with the appearance of a corpse, surgeon Ben Lara wrote. The victim was dried and warmed by hot water bottles and then tobacco smoke was pumped into his lungs through a tube. After almost an hour of treatment, a pulse was detected and the man lived, according to the journal.
Aboard the convict ship Albion in 1828, surgeon Thomas Logan wrote that the spirits of the convicts when they catch first sight of their destination in New South Wales, Australia, is lifted so much that “the horde of trifling cases which were used daily to assail us has disappeared. They seem to have left off getting sick, or are become indifferent about being cured!””
Read more at CNN (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
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Arriving in a foreign land for the first time by sea is absolutely the best way and lifts everyone’s spirits. It’s not the instant gratification we’re so used to in the Internet age but seeing the land on the horizon for the first time and then stepping ashore hours later is just magical – especially after weeks at sea. It’s like life intensidied; everything looks so colourful and everybody is so interesting. For the weeks beforehand your existent has been contained to the few people you are with and the limited bounds of your vessel.
Naval surgeons used to have to function alone with precious little real resource so it’s no surprise they came up with these kind of solutions. Today many of them cut their teeth in the bloody wards of Camp Bastion hospital – so in the case of your experiencing real trauma – they are great to have around.