Of all the surgeons who served with the Royal Navy in the long eighteenth century, none is better known to medical historians than Thomas Trotter, who played a major part in the defeat of scurvy in the 1790s. Yet this is the first proper biography. The two authors pay due attention to Trotter’s career outside the Navy – the year he spent on the notorious slave ship, the Brookes, in 1783–4 and his long after-life as a physician in private practice in Newcastle. However the meat of the book, as is understandable, deals with his service in the Navy as surgeon’s mate on the Berwick, and other vessels during the War of American Independence, then in the years 1789–1802 as surgeon afloat, assistant physician at Haslar, and for eight years physician to the Channel Fleet, where he chose to be based on the hospital ship Charon rather than with the admiral, until forced on shore by injury. Trotter in the 1790s is depicted as an energetic, determined but cantankerous reformer, anxious to tackle all manner of naval scourges, including drunkenness, through hygiene and regulation as much as the discovery of effective therapies. His specific role in the introduction of citrus fruits to combat scurvy is carefully reconstructed from the missives that he fired off to the Admiralty and honestly assessed. Trotter’s importance, the authors conclude, should not be exaggerated. He was pushing at an open door in that a number of serving officers, if not the naval medical establishment, were already convinced of the efficacy of limes and lemons. Moreover, Trotter, unlike his allies amongst the naval commanders, never championed the use of citrus fruits as a prophylactic, only as a cure.
This is a well-written and well-paced book that is essential reading for any historian of Nelson’s Navy. Some of the scene setting – such as the account at the beginning of the book of the intellectual life of Edinburgh at the time Trotter studied there – suggests limited acquaintance with the secondary literature, but this does not detract from the book’s overall impact. If the book has limitations as a biography, it is that Trotter as a private man lies largely hidden from view.What we chiefly learn about are the ideas he chose to place in print: his early medical works; his three-volume Medicina nautica(1797–1803), built around his surgeon’s logs; his works on drunkenness (1804–5); his 1807 study of nervous diseases; his play, The Noble Foundling, performed at Newcastle in 1813; and his poetry (published at the end of his life with the wonderful title of Sea Weeds). This is an impressive publication list for a busy professional man, and the authors demonstrate that his collected works repay close reading: his study of alcoholism was pioneering. But beyond a picture of a man who was appalled by his experience on the Brookes (as evidenced by his testimony before a select committee of the House of Commons in 1790) and quick to take offence with superiors as well as colleagues, the book offers no insights into what made Trotter tick. This is not the authors’ fault: Trotter left no diary or private letters, and the information about his naval career contained in the Admiralty series of the National Archive primarily reveals his public face. The present reviewer found a similar problem in co-writing the life of Nelson’s surgeon, William Beatty, for the Trafalgar bicentenary, and Beatty only left one publication. It remains unclear, therefore, how exceptional Trotter’s experiences in and out of the Senior Service, as an author, reformer and doctor, actually were. This will hopefully become a little clearer when this reviewer and his colleagues, Professor Moss and Dr Cardwell, finally complete their ongoing prosopographical study of naval surgeons during theFrench Wars.
