Health at Sea: Knowledge and Care: French Medical Men at Sea in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract Surgeon Claude Roblet kept an official record of his cures for thirteen months of a two-year voyage round the world in the Solide, captained by Etienne Marchand, from December 1790 to August 1792. He recorded his consultations in two journals: the first was a highly simplified document, in the form of a table, the “Journal des maladies” (Sick List), where the pharmacopoeia Roblet had recourse to is duly noted. The second was a narrative rendition titled Journal historique. In these journals, two episodes are worthy of note: a cure for scurvy and an unavoidable death after a stroke. Remarkably, this was the only death in a crew of fifty during an eighteen-month circumnavigation. Roblet takes care in terms of hygiene onboard ship, in keeping with the captain and the shipowners’ recommendations, which reflected the prophylactic instructions of the time. The journals can also be compared with the medical treatises of the period, which systematically describe diseases with pedagogical and scholarly aims. Roblet's short treatise on tetanus, for example, demonstrates his skills, but seems irrelevant to the voyage. He adopts the same tone as in René-Primevère's Lesson on the Coquille in 1829 when he warns his readers that he would avoid “quotations or discussions on such and such medical theories or on questions still in dispute. This book, written at sea, is only what it is intended to be, a truthful and simple report of the circumstances that accompanied a long navigation.” This apparent opposition, particularly apparent at the end of the eighteenth century, between the theoretical identification of diseases and the treatment of patients may be understood in Foucault's terms from Naissance de la clinique (1963). It may be argued then that Roblet dissociates his own knowledge (and ignorance) of theory from his empirical and often efficient day-to-day practice of medicine and surgery onboard ship. This may illustrate the split, characteristic of the time, between the intellectualization of medicine and the advancement of knowledge.