The ship captain’s medical guide

Description

A merchant ship carried no physician, so the master was the physician: he set the fractures, dressed the burns, judged the fevers and decided who was fit to work. Harry Leach, medical officer of the Port of London, compiled this guide so that decision would rest on something better than folklore.It is written for a man with a medicine chest, a rolling deck and no one to ask — which produces a prose of great plainness: what you will see, what to do first, what not to do at all. Beyond its practical history, it is a portrait of shipboard life from below decks, since a book of injuries is a record of how people were actually working. This guide has been reissued by the British authorities ever since; here is the state of it in 1874.This is a faithful print-on-demand facsimile of the 1874 London edition, reproduced in full from a library copy. The historical text is reproduced without modification; only the format, margins and legibility have been reset for modern printing.