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.

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    ber 5, 1832, two years before Blane. During the years succeeding his retirement from the Navy his pen was constantly at work on such various subjects as “A View of the Nervous Temperament” (1807,13 d Edition, 1812, pages 378), “ A Proposal for Destroying the a] Fire and Choak-damp of Coaf-mines” (1805), “The Noble Found¬ ling, or the Hermit of the Tweed, a Tragedy in Five Acts” (1812), “A Practical Plan for Manning the Navy and Preserving our Maritime Supremacy without Impressment” (1819), and “Sea¬ weeds, Poems Written on Various Occasions Chiefly During a Naval Life” (1829), with a rather long autobiographical introduction and a line engraving by Lizars representing the author at the age of 37. This (Fig. 1) was presumed by Laughton to be after a portrait by D. Orme, but it differs considerably from a stippled engraving (Fig. 2) by Orme, of which there are three copies in the Royal Society of Medicine, two in the collection of the Royal College of Physicians, and one in the British Museum, published on May 1, 1796, when Trotter was in his thirty-sixth or thirty-seventh year. For this copy I am indebted to my friend Arnold Chaplin, Harveian Li¬ brarian at the Royal College of Physicians. The representation in “Seaweeds” is the more attractive of the two, and, as it apparently shows the author in a uniform which was not given to medical officers of the Navy until 1805, (6) it seems not unlikely that it was, if based on Orme’s portrait of 1796, modified at the sitter’s direc¬ tion in various ways before it met the public eye in “Seaweeds.” But although some time has been spent in attempting to clear up the minor questions raised by these two portraits no definite conclusion is perhaps justified. As already shown, Trotter was a prolific writer in a wide field of subjects; but although several of his works, “Medicina Nautica,” “A View of the Nervous Temperament,” “Observations on Scurvy,” and his graduation thesis “On Drunkenness,” passed into a second edition, they are not easy to obtain. Out of the thirteen books and pamphlets mentioned in Laughton’s biography in the Dictionary of National Biography, which omits the “Remarks on Naval Hos¬ pitals and Sick Quarters with Hints for their Improvement” (1795), there are eight in the British Museum, while the London Library, The Admiralty Library and the Medical Libraries in London contain as a rule one each, the library at Haslar has two and the
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