Thomas Trotter, M.D / by Sir Humphry Rolleston.

  • Humphry Rolleston
Date:
[1919?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Thomas Trotter, M.D / by Sir Humphry Rolleston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/20 page 161
    Of his numerous works much the largest is “Medicina Nautica, ” in three volumes with over 1400 pages in all, which came out in 1791, 1799, and 1803, and passed into a second edition in 1804; in 1798 the first volume was translated by Warner into German, with a preface by Hufeland, who, while faintly commending it, reserves most of his praise for the translator on account of the unusual difficulties he had to encounter in the author’s style, which is said to be often obscure and abounding with “many almost incomprehensible nautico-technical expressions.” It is a collection of articles on naval medicine, parts of which recall the works of Lind and Blane. Thus it contains the medical history of the Fleet from January, 1794, to the termination of the war in April, 1802, and so resembles Blane’s “Observations on the Diseases of Seamen,” based on a detailed account of the health and diseases of the Fleet from 1780 to 1783. Trotter also describes various diseases, especially fevers and scurvy, in a text-book manner, thus again resembling Lind’s and Blane’s books. In addition he introduces into the second and third volumes cases by naval surgeons, so that to some extent these volumes resemble the proceedings of a medical society in which the president does most of the talking. Incidentally it contains items of autobiography, such as a list of the sixty-eight subscribers to a massy urn with a Latin inscription presented to him by naval surgeons on his retirement in 1802. These volumes perhaps natu¬ rally repeat a good deal of what he had previously written in scat¬ tered publications. The two following clinical cases may perhaps be quoted: In “a case of supposed phthisis from swallowing a plum-stone,” (10) vig¬ orous treatment with digitalis caused violent vomiting and the expulsion of a plum-stone, which had presumably induced purulent bronchiectasis; and from this time the patient previously regarded as certain to die stead¬ ily recovered. Digitalis was thought to have rendered the most prominent features of the disease stationary, but in the light of the present day it did good by its emetic effects which led to the removal of the plum- stone. In the “Medical and Chemical Essays” (1795) he describes the case of a blue boy who died in Haslar apparently with ante-mortem clot in the right auricle, “two vesicles like hydatids near the opening of the pulmonary artery, each about the size of a large oval bean,” pulmonary
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