Link to the related website that has useful info: the Age of Nelson.

This forum is devoted to the Royal Navy during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793 - 1815).
And why not the other navies of the period?
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Naval Medical Records
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PMarione
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Joined: 26 Mar 2007
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Post Posted: Wed Jun 20, 2007 2:15 pm    Post subject: Naval Medical Records Reply with quote

Quote:
I wondered whether anyone knew if the NA held any medical records / injury info for royal navy servicemen.


Medical records of the period are scarse.

Naval surgeons were obliged to provide both the Admiralty and the College of Surgeons with a detailed medical journal of every voyage. There are few of these left, and so they are not a good tool for genealogical research.

At TNA there are 121 bundles in ADM 101 dating from the period 1793 to 1815.
The bundles are labelled alphabetically with the name of the first ship. The journals follow a standard layout; most begin with the name of the ship, where it was stationed, and the time period (in general 1 year) covered by the journal.

The pages are divided vertically into six sections headed:
    Mens Names, Ages and Qualities,
    When and Where put on the Sick List,
    Statement of the Case when put on the List,
    Symptoms and Treatment while under Cure,
    When discharged to Duty, Died or sent to the Hospital,
    Remarks.

At the end of most journals, a summary is given with the total number of patients sorted by complaints.

The records give a first hand account of contemporary naval medical practice that has not been well exploited up to now, but if you are looking for your ancestor, it would be pure luck to find him there, and there is no index.
By comparison there are more than 27,500 volumes of musters kept from 1688 till 1842!

@+P
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PMarione
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Post Posted: Fri May 13, 2011 1:19 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Here is an interesting talk about the Naval medical officers' journals and the history of medicine by Daniel Gilfoyle :

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/podcasts/naval-medical-officers-journals.htm
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brian



Joined: 15 Jan 2011
Posts: 14

Post Posted: Mon May 16, 2011 6:15 pm    Post subject: Medical Records in the NA Reply with quote

A small amplification.

The quantity and detail to be found in of Surgeons' Journals/Reports lodged in the NA depends upon the date. The last two thirds of the 19thC saw both the expansion of Britain into an imperial power in which tropical diseases became important and rapid advances in scientific curiosity and discovery. In these circumstances naval surgeons found themselves operating as the equivalent of a government scientific service (TE Huxley for example started out as a naval surgeon) which began producing reports of great detail and importance. This is presumably why the NA podcast on the subject is done by D Gilfoyle who - as he explains - is actually a Colonial and not a Naval Historian - whose comments are dominated by these 19thC circumstances. Before the 1820's this was not the case, and surgeons' Journals were narrowly concerned with the health of particular ships.

Likewise, before the 1830's when the Admiralty became all powerful and the Navy Board and its subsidiary boards were abolished, Surgeons were appointed by, and were responsible to, the Sick and Hurt Board. At this time, as is made clear in the Regulations and Instructions (that for 1808 for example is available on the web), they were required to send their Medical/Surgical Journals, written to a formula laid down in the R and I's to the Commissioners of Sick and Hurt and not to the Admiralty or any outside body like the College of Surgeons. This is why the contents of ADM 101 are so sparse: Admiralty documents were Crown property and were carefully preserved ; those of the Sick and Hurt Board (what we would call today an administrative 'quango') were not and were regularly 'weeded'.

Lits of wounded men were however regularly submitted the Admiralty with Captains' reports. This was because (unlike the Surgeons' Journals) they had financial implications on pay.

Brian
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brian



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Post Posted: Tue May 17, 2011 9:10 am    Post subject: Medical Records PS Reply with quote

Until recently when naval medicine began to attract serious research, the subject was bedevilled by generalisations. Alas, my own contribution of yesterday – which was intended to describe the situation during the bulk of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars ie the period covered by Adm 101 - suffers from the same fault. Readers of his site deserve a lttle more precision, so here it is!
1.During most of the 18th century, the Sick and Hurt Board which, under Admiralty and Navy Board upervision was in charge of medical services, was a purely administrative body staffed by a handful of laymen.
2.The ‘original’ 1731 Regulations and Instruction required Surgeons to submit two reports to the Sick and Hurt Board at the end of each voyage: one on general medical matters which, (if professional comment as needed) was sent to the Physician of Greenwich Hospital) and the second on surgical cases which likewise went to the College of Surgeons.
3. Revisions to the R and I’s made during the 18th C repeated the same wording as the earlier versions, including those issued as late as 1790. Whether all the procedures laid down continued to be followed in practice is however open to question since some of the regulations had by the end of the century become anachronistic. The R and Is of 1790, for example, still referred to the Navy’s having only 9 admirals of the red, white and blue though by that time there were over 50; and the recently created rank of commander was not even mentioned.
4, In 1793, former naval surgeons were appointed for the first time to the Sick and Hurt Board and within three years, three of the four commissioners were ‘doctors’ - that is university trained physicians. The result was that the Board was keen to take control of professional matters and diminish the roles of outside bodies like the Colleges of Surgeons and of Apothecaries. The Instructions to surgeons were re-written with this in mind and there were improvements in pay and conditions.
5 Lord Barham’s 1806 revision of the increasingly anachronistic R and I’s incorporated these changes, including the requirement that surgeons were now to write only one combined medical/surgical report per voyage and submit it to the Sick and Hurt Board.
6. In 1832, as a result of the new ‘Reform’ Government’s policy of administrative efficiency and cuts (familiar?) the Sick and Hurt and all similar civil naval boards were abolished and their powers vested in an expanded Admiralty, to which of course surgeons’ reports were from then on addressed.

Brian
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