Health, medicine, and the sea : Australian voyages, c.1815-1860 / Katherine Foxhall.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Foxhall, Katherine, author.

Series:

Manchester History of Medicine

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Penal transportation--Australia--History--19th century.

Penal transportation.

Prisoners--Transportation--Medical care--History--19th century.

Prisoners.

Convict ships--Health aspects.

Convict ships.

Prisoners--Health and hygiene.

Prisoners--Australia--History--19th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 250 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2012.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

During the nineteenth century, over 1.5 million migrants set sail from the British Isles to begin new lives in the Australian colonies. This book follows these people on a fascinating journey around half the globe to give a rich account of the creation of lay and professional medical knowledge in an ever-changing maritime environment. It shows how voyages to Australia partook of colonialism. On leaving the ports, estuaries, and harbours of Britain and Ireland, ships' captains negotiated the adverse winds of the English Channel and the Irish Sea before steering into the Atlantic and heading south-by-south west across the heavy swells of the Bay of Biscay. The book dwells in the tropics, where the experience of calms reinforced and extended preconceptions about the coast of West Africa. It discusses convicts, showing how scurvy became resurgent as British prison committees steadily reduced prison dietary rations during the 1820s and 1830s. Despite their frustrations, the isolation of the ocean and the vulnerability of convicts' bodies offered surgeons an invaluable opportunity for medical experimentation during the 1840s. The book also shows how a series of questions about authority, class, gender, and social status mediated medical relationships as the pressures of the voyage accumulated. Themes of mistrust, cooperation, and coercion emerged in many different ways during the voyage. Australia, where, as emigrants became immigrants, the uncertainties of government responsibility combined with a poisonous political atmosphere to raise questions about eligibility and the conditions of admittance to their new colonial society.

Contents:

1. Problems of departure

2. Steaming ships

Voyage I: Eliza Baldwinson (1832)

3. Geographies of the tropical Atlantic

4. "Such concentrated mischief": scurvy and imprisonment

5. Trust and authority below the hatches

Voyage II: Henry Wellings (1858)

6. From emigrants to immigrants: quarantine and the colony.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 10 Jul 2026).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Print version:

ISBN:

1-5261-3015-7

OCLC:

1408681788