The Royal Hospital School, Gifford Sherman Reade, and the Great War

The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord

In 1900, the Royal Navy instituted formal advanced instruction for selected officers to better prepare them for higher rank and professional demands. The war course represented a concession to pressure for a staff or war college comparable to other navies and armies. During the tenure of its first director, Henry May, curriculum content and delivery focused on subjects appropriate to practitioners interested in contemporary naval affairs. This article reassesses objectively the war course’s efficacy leading to eventual establishment of the Royal Naval War College. En 1900, la Marine Royale a institué une instruction formelle avancée pour certains officiers afin de mieux les préparer aux exigences professionnelles et aux grades supérieurs. Le cours de guerre représentait une concession à la pression pour obtenir un état-major ou un collège de guerre comparable à d’autres marines et armées. Pendant le mandate de son premier directeur, HenryMay, le contenu et la prestation du programme...

This is a brief history of the three full-scale land-based model training ships, which were used by Greenwich Royal Hospital School for the training of its boys before they embarked upon a seafaring career. Mention is also made of their much smaller successors, contained in the school's seamanship room, and the ​ Prince of Wales 22-gun miniature corvette, that was sailed and exercised in bombardment, upon the Serpentine in Hyde Park by boys of the school during the Great Exhibition of 1851.

This dissertation analyses the work of female nurses in military and naval hospitals from the mid-eighteenth century until the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century. Nursing history has primarily forgotten these women, or when they do enter into historical narratives, it is often as a foil when compared to the medical practitioner. Pre-Nightingale nurses are often framed by nursing historians as ineffective, ignorant drunkards, the embodiment of the Dickensian Sairey Gamp stereotype. By examining why medical practitioners and naval and military administrators decided to hire female nurses, it is possible to explore two frameworks of investigation in this dissertation. First, the importance of nurses to eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century military and naval clinical hospitals​ was shown in official correspondence, regulations, and medical treatises. Examining the crucial role of nurses in maintaining a healthy healing environment through cleanliness and ventilation reintegrates nurses into a previously male medical practitioner dominated narrative. In Britain, both patient care and domestic duties were viewed, societally, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as distinctly female skills. At West Indian stations, the ideal nurses were also female. Yet, the additional layer of race and accompanying theories of racialized immunity to tropical diseases, combined with the stratified labour market of the islands, meant that Black women were considered by medical practitioners to be the best nurses. These considerations resulted in the employment of enslaved women at the Bermuda Naval Hospital. Second, I counter historiographical preconceptions about pre-Nightingale nursing through a detailed prosopographical analysis of the nursing workforce at Plymouth Naval Hospitals, in conjunction with the nursing regulations for military and naval medical systems of care. As the experiences of nurses of Plymouth Naval Hospital show, the physical stability of naval hospitals allowed for nurses to develop healing and care skills over a period of longstanding employment. These nurses were not, as the historiographical prejudice contends, primarily thieves and drunkards. Furthermore, a comparison of military and naval regulations demonstrates that the regulatory structure of naval hospitals, and the position of nurses in them, cannot be explained merely by the permanence of their institutions. Nursing and nurses were part of a broader professionalization of healing practices in the second half of the eighteenth century. As complex institutions, naval hospitals only functioned when everyone’s role in the hospital was clear. In the army, by contrast, the role of nurses was less explicit and not carefully delineated. When recollecting the pre-Nightingale period of nursing, it is often the military nurses who are recalled by nursing historians – women seen even at the time as replaceable, untrained, and unnecessary. Reconfiguring our view to include the naval nurse – valued, crucial to hospital operation, and with a defined role – complicates the long-standing progressivist account of nursing after Nightingale to illustrate continuity between the two periods.

Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 2010

This paper assesses the reputation of British military medical staff in the 18th century, focusing on the character and professionalism ofregimental surgeons and mates who served at the time of the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). Examining the careers and contributions of men such as Thomas Dickson Reide, Robert Jackson, and Robert Hamilton reveals that—in contrast to charges of ineptitude, laziness anddishonesty among military surgeons—the British army could count on a cadre of military medical men who were devoted both to their patientsand to the advancement of their profession.

The Journal of the Orders and Medals Research Society, 2011

BMJ, 1893

Papers of The Bibliographical Society of Canada

An analysis of published and unpublished materials generated by the Canadian Army Medical Corps during the First World War demonstrates that Canadian doctors and nurses serving in France created a narrative of the Great War that was more optimistic in its message than the canonical war books written in the 1920s and 1930s and more internationalist in orientation than the dominant narrative of the war created in Canada after the war.

The Ulster medical journal, 2016

Social History of Medicine, 2021

Summary Seen as a crucial historical step in the development of ‘modern’ institutional healthcare, eighteenth-century British naval medicine has traditionally been studied from the point of view of the state and of physicians and surgeons: naval sailors’ attitudes towards health, medicine and their own bodies remain virtually unexplored. Using official and personal sources, this article sketches a ‘patient’s history’ of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British ratings. Aiming to counterbalance Foucauldian interpretations, it highlights some of the ways in which individuals, even when apparently most powerless, confined in ships far from home, and controlled by rigidly disciplined institutions, could take responsibility for their health, successfully or otherwise, within, against or alongside the system. If the unprecedented administrative requirements of the French Wars strengthened and standardised top-down medical authority, they also brought opportunities for evasion...

The Northern Mariner / Le marin du nord

This research note uses new methodologies to investigate the presence of women nurses and other labourers on British hospital ships during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Using pay lists, musters, and log book records, it is possible to track the work of women labourers throughout the naval medical system of care. The work of women on these ships challenges our previous assumptions concerning medical care in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Cette note de recherche fait appel à de nouvelles methodologies pour enquêter sur la présence des infirmières et des autres ouvrières sur les navires hospitaliers britanniques pendant les guerres révolutionnaires et napoléoniennes. À l’aide de listes de paye, de listes des membres d’équipage et de registres des journaux de bord, il est possible de suivre le travail des femmes dans tout le système de soins médicaux de la marine. Le travail des femmes sur ces navires nous oblige à revoir nos suppositions antérieures concer...

British Military and Naval Medicine, 1600-1830, ed. Geoffrey L. Hudson, 2007

The walls separating medicine from society break down in this examination of early-British hospital architecture, which stresses the similarities and continuities between the civilian and the military. The hospitals examined include those for sick and wounded in the Empire, and later at home and those built for long-term chronic cases. Stevenson considers how matters of state, as well as medical theory and its changes, affected architecture.

2019

1969

Geoffrey L. Hudson’s edited volume collectively examines the development of disease control and therapeutic experimentation in the British military and navy during the “long eighteenth century” (ca. 1660-1830), one of the most crucial periods of British colonial expansion. This periodwitnessed both a growing interest in the physical needs of an imperial state and the development of large bureaucratic institutions to manage a growing domestic and colonial population (often referred to as the British “fiscal-military state”).[1] “British” is a complex term. “Britain” refers to England, Wales, and Scotland, an area controlled by the British government based in London after the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707. In this review, I use the term “British” to refer to the forces controlled by this government. The 1801 Act of Union with Ireland was not complete, especially with respect to the governance of armed forces. I therefore refer to Britain and Ireland separately. All aspects of the...