Abstract In this article, I will examine maritime medical praxes during the latter half of the eighteenth century, reconfigured in Steven Weaver's terms as an “era of disclosure” (as opposed to discovery). With reference to the Wallis and Cook exploratory expeditions to the Pacific Ocean between 1766 and 1779, and moving away from a conventional focus on the considerable advances in the battle against scurvy and the improvement of hygiene onboard the ships, I will consider archival sources that record medical encounters, as well as widely studied cultural crashes, between peoples. During these contacts, I will argue that shipboard surgeons, doctors, and even captains engaged in “zones of experiential learning,” tending to the health of their crews, which was essential to survival on ships as they crossed the huge expanse of oceans with no or few landfalls.
Sandhya Patel (Wed,) studied this question.