A project to improve access to the journals of Royal Navy Medical Officers is under way, made possible by funding from the Wellcome Trust.
The National Archives was awarded a grant in June 2008 under the Wellcome Trust's Research Resources in Medical History programme, which provides funding for high quality projects to catalogue and preserve significant history of medicine collections.
The two-year project will fully catalogue over a thousand journals prepared by medical officers of the Royal Navy between 1793 and 1880, held by The National Archives in the record series ADM 101.
Enhanced entries are being uploaded to the Catalogue on an ongoing basis. See an example by browsing the Catalogue from ADM 101/148
For medical historians and researchers
The journals relate to Royal Navy, convict and emigrant ships and provide detailed information on diseases, patients, injuries, treatments and living conditions on board. The goal is to create fully searchable material within The National Archives' Catalogue, enabling medical historians to define and pursue lines of enquiry, test hypotheses and explore the practical application of the theories of the period's great health reformers.
Medical researchers will be able to track cases to compare the treatment regimes - and relative success - of different medical officers; to examine the prevalence and persistence of particular diseases; to see which factors affected health; and to study how factors such as conditions onboard, the route followed and the countries visited impacted on sickness rates.
For family historians
Family historians will be able to search by name, tracking ancestors who came into contact with the surgeons during this period - whether they served on board ship, were emigrating to start a new life or were being transported.
Rich content revealed
The cataloguing will help to reveal some of the other extraordinary material contained in the journals. These include watercolour illustrations, hand-drawn maps, pictures of local flora and fauna, charts showing details of climate, details of the layout of vessels and details of the countries visited and people encountered.
