The Trafalgar Chronicle: Dedicated to Naval History in the Nelson Era: New Series 7 by Judith Pearson & John Rodgaard

Author:Judith Pearson & John Rodgaard [Judith Pearson & John Rodgaard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781399090476
Google: W-yKEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Seaforth Publishing
Published: 2023-02-15T21:00:00+00:00

William Smellie’s forceps. Before Smellie, the use of forceps was a guarded secret. (Wikimedia Commons)

Yet there was progress in naval healthcare during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and some attempt at improving treatments by the scientific process of observation and controlled trials. William Smellie (1697–1763), a Scottish naval surgeon aboard Second Rate HMS Sandwich (90) for two years, retired to establish his own medical practice specialising in obstetrics. Smellie improved the obstetric forceps in use at the time, reducing infant mortality rates. The travelling Englishwoman Lady Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) was among those who promoted the practice of smallpox inoculation as used in Asia. By the end of the century, British physician and scientist Edward Jenner (1749–1823) discovered a less threatening procedure using a similar, less virulent virus, cowpox. Jenner’s paper describing his experiment and twelve subsequent trials was rejected by the Royal Society, but Parliament later rewarded him with a large purse. American Thomas Jefferson wrote to Jenner in 1806, ‘You have erased from the calendar of human afflictions one of its greatest.’² Yet global eradication would take another 169 years.

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