Mental Health and the 17th-Century Ship’s Doctor

In September 1649 ship’s surgeon John Conny was deeply relieved and praised God that ‘all our men [are] in reasonable good health’. This emotive entry in his daily journal aboard the Peregrine, a merchant ship voyaging in the Mediterranean, marked the end of a particularly bad bout of fever among the crew. For about a month the ship had been plagued by illness and Conny detailed the worsening condition of the sailors under his care – and his therapeutic attempts, including medicines and bloodletting, to restore their health. Conny himself had suffered, and as his own strength deteriorated and fever peaked, his handwriting in the journal becomes noticeably more incoherent.

Elsewhere in his four-year narrative of working life at sea, Conny recorded the emotional states of his shipboard patients suffering from injury, illness, and what we might understand as psychological distress. Seafarer John Goddard was ‘in extreme torment’ with ‘torsions and griping of his whole body’. Robert Allen ‘was almost frantic’ with ‘violent pains in his head’. The surgeon reported that ‘he was much better in a short time’ after bloodletting. The master of the Peregrine had ‘a great chillness and coldness of his body with indisposition to anything and a great dolor’ (which likely indicated sorrow, grief, or distress). By contrast, Captain John Wadsworth was ‘pretty cheery’ after an enema treatment that emptied his bowels following an acute illness.

Ships’ surgeons were in demand from the turn of the 17th century. This was an era of huge commercial growth, mercantile exploration, and naval warfare and expansion. Prospective ships’ surgeons served apprenticeships to master practitioners to gain experience – often this was at sea, or else young men were apprenticed ashore and joined ships after their training. Surgeons on merchant and naval ships had varied responsibilities and essentially worked as physician, apothecary, and surgeon all in one. In other words, sea surgeons dealt with internal and external medical conditions, prepared and dispensed medicines, and carried out operative surgical procedures. Surgeon and patient were living in close proximity on cramped ships, and this likely fostered an intimacy that was distinct from the therapeutic relationship on land.

In the popular imagination there has long been a stereotype of the emotionally detached ‘sawbones’, mechanically amputating limbs in the midst of bloody shipboard chaos. John Woodall, first surgeon-general of the East India Company, warned sea surgeons in the early 17th century of the potential for ‘Butcher-like’ reputations. In his scathing satire of the Royal Navy, The Wooden World Dissected (1706), Ned Ward wrote of the ship’s surgeon who ‘knows not how to sympathise with any man’s wounds whatever’. Yet accounts authored by ships’ surgeons themselves, such as Conny’s, present a more nuanced picture.

James Yonge detailed in his journal the miseries endured as a youthful surgeon’s mate to the Montague from May 1660. Yonge’s master was unkind, he was saddled with too much labour, and ‘in the whole voyage did all the drudgery’, including emptying stool buckets. Such were Yonge’s formative experiences at sea that he ‘often wished himself dead’. He was also ‘much terrified’ by the frequent storms that ‘threatened to swallow us up’. Fear was expressed too by experienced surgeons. Richard Wiseman, in his printed Chirurgicall Treatises (a compilation of patient case-studies), described how:

In [the] heat of [a] Fight at Sea … I ought to have cut off this man’s arm presently: But a sudden cry that our Ship was on Fire put me in such disorder, that I rather thought of saving myself than dressing my Patients.

In addition to recording their own responses, sea surgeons also recounted the feelings of their patients. John Looker, surgeon of the Blackham Galley, noted how an Irish crewman who worked the mast remained ‘very hopeful’ and ‘very cheerful’ until about a quarter of an hour before he died of a fever. Surgeon Hugh Ryder wrote of a sailor whose arm was ‘shattered all in pieces from the elbow to the wrist’ by a great shot and was said to be exceptionally fearful at the thought of surgery. Only when the ‘cadaverous smell’ of the limb became overwhelming did the man finally consent to an amputation.

In a printed guide for inexperienced sea surgeons, Chirurgus Marinus: or, The Sea-Chirurgion (1693), seasoned practitioner John Moyle was concerned with ‘inward distempers’ – by which he probably meant an internal disturbance of the ‘humours’, which was understood to cause emotional disorder. Moyle vividly describes distorted perceptions of reality, states in which sailors believe the sea: 

to be a Meadow, and will endeavour to go into it. I have known some at Sea, who when their Mess-mates (who looked after them) have but turn’d their back, have got out of the Gun-ports into the Sea.

As a highly experienced ship’s surgeon, Moyle was well aware of the full range of shipboard suffering that young practitioners would likely encounter.

Emotions are challenging territory for historians. Affective (emotional) language might not map neatly onto interior feelings. Moreover, these are emotional states recorded by medical practitioners. Nevertheless, there is an emotional dimension to ships’ surgeons’ own writings, an awareness of both their own and their patients’ feelings. The stereotype of the dispassionate surgeon fails to capture the richness of these first-person narratives, and the fullness of their lives at sea.

Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin is Lecturer in Early Modern History at Cardiff University. She is the author of Crafting Identities: Artisan Culture in London, c.1550-1640 (Manchester University Press, 2021).