Volume 2

An exposition of the case of the assistant-surgeons of the Royal Navy / By a naval medical officer [i.e. J.O. McWilliam].

  • McWilliam, J. O. (James Ormiston), 1807-1861 or 1862.
Date:
1849
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An exposition of the case of the assistant-surgeons of the Royal Navy / By a naval medical officer [i.e. J.O. McWilliam]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    those who minister to his wants during sickness. It was one of the subjects of petition by the seamen, during the mutiny of 1797, that “they should have better attendance when sick and wounded in action.” Dr. Lind, and the other illus¬ trious men whose names have been already men¬ tioned, struggled hard about this time to effect some improvements in the Medical Department of the Navy, and they were not wholly unsuccessful.* Still so late as 1798, we find the celebrated sur¬ geon, John Bell, in a Memoir addressed to Earl Spencer, then First Lord of the Admiralty, de¬ ploring “the very inadequate encouragement held out to the Naval Surgeons of that day, and the consequent difficulty of obtaining men of competent education for this branch of the public service.! He says, “ Perhaps in a whole fleet there are few Surgeons' Mates, not one may be, who are able to perform the greater operations of surgery. It has happened, after the most earnest entreaties of the officers, of the surgeon, and of every one concerned, a ship of the line has gone into battle without one assistant on board: no, not one to screw a tourni¬ quet, to tie an artery, to hold a shattered stump, to put a piece of lint on a bleeding wound.”]; * Some time after Lord Howe’s action of, the 1st of June, 1794, the half-pay of the Surgeons was increased, as was also the full pay of the Surgeon’s Mates; if the first Mate was in possession of a case of in¬ struments, he was decreed to receive 51. per month.—Trotter’s Medicina Nautica, p. 17. t Outlines of Military Surgery, by Sir George Ballingall, p. 24. | Bell, although not a Naval Surgeon, had ample opportunities of knowing the actual condition of the Naval Medical Staff. He says in his Memoir : “ I have studied Naval Surgery with particular care. I have bestowed upon it of money, of time, of labour, more than I am entitled to bestow. I have followed your victorious fleet, and attended your pensioners and your wounded, as if I had been attached to Govern¬ ment by old services and high rewards.”—Letter to Lord Spencer. “ I myself have been in action several times with only one Assistant in a line-of-battle ship, and he not a very well qualified one.”—Sir W. Burnett before Commissioners, 1840. §§ 2571-2625.