A comment on the MARHST-L list, on which I quietly lurk, about yellow fever being a possible cause of ships found abandoned or with all crew deceased, sent me in search of confirmation via PubMed. Found a lead, via an article on illness aboard cruise ships, on a chapter in a history of naval medicine that looked promising according to the available snippets on Google Books. Further investigation will need to wait on a foray into a city with a good medical library. Along the way, I discovered an assortment of gems archived in PubMedCentral – the free archive of medical journals.

• David Geggus considers how yellow fever, generally not a high fatality disease, caused devastating mortality in the British army in occupied Saint Domingue (Yellow Fever in the 1790s).
• The Buccaneering Doctors (GM Longfield-Jones, 1992) who served aboard the seventeenth century privateers were valued members of the crew who could subsequently enjoy a respectable retirement or practice on land. Contemporary accounts, such as that of the wonderfully named Alexandre Oliver Esquemeling/Oexmelin (alias Henrik Barentzoon Smeeks) and William Dampier describe the hazards, hardships and medical practices of the times.
• The successors of the buccaneers were physician-explorers such as Joseph Hooker. Botanical science was at the time an essential part of the practice of medicine, and Hooker traveled on expeditions to Antarctica and India, befriended to Charles Darwin, contributed his expertise in botany to Darwin’s developing theories, and presided at the first presentation of Darwin’s and Wallace’s work. (WE Swinton, Physicians as Explorers: Joseph Hooker, 1977, one of a series of articles).
• JC Goddard unpacks The navy surgeon’s chest, from the time of the Napoleonic War. His conclusion: “the surgical armamentarium has changed remarkably little …”