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  • Doctors at Sea: Emigrant Voyages to Colonial Australia
  • Peter Stanley
Robin Haines . Doctors at Sea: Emigrant Voyages to Colonial Australia. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. x + 248 pp. Ill. $69.95 (ISBN-10: 1-4039-8685-1; ISBN-13: 978-1-4039-8685-6).

Between 1831 and 1900, about 750,000 free immigrants reached the Australian colonies from Britain under various colonial emigration schemes. They endured long voyages, passing from the temperate north through the tropics, often sailing across the cold Southern Ocean. Seeking a new chance in life, they risked a relatively small chance of death en route. The great majority of the ships' passengers—98 percent—arrived and survived. A tiny proportion of them died on the way or—even more poignantly—shortly after reaching their destinations. Some died in harbor or in quarantine camps, with surgeons, emigration commissioners, and colonial governments wrangling over whether a diphtheria or typhoid victim should be regarded a casualty of the voyage and a charge on the authorities. [End Page 462]

Even more tragically, most of the dead were children under the age of ten. Three quarters of the 2 percent were under six, and half were infants under a year old. They generally died of communicable diseases of childhood that, as Australian scholar Robin Haines writes, "crept up the gangplank" (p. 7) with the hopeful emigrants.

In Doctors at Sea, Robin Haines has narrowed the focus from her earlier studies, Emigration and the Labouring Poor (London: Macmillan, 1997) and Life and Death in the Age of Sail (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003). This book examines what emigrants caught and died of and, more particularly, those charged with their well-being.

Haines bases her examination on prodigious research involving British and Australian sources. She draws on both the large-scale evidence susceptible to statistical analysis (techniques with which she is fully conversant, and to good effect), with the small-scale anecdotal evidence of surgeons' reports and the accounts of particular voyages used equally effectively. We see the fruits of a scholar utterly in command of the relevant literature, the mass of the evidence, and the detail of the historical experience of hundreds and thousands of people.

The context of Haines's examination is, of course, the public health movement that so transformed the lives of the British people in the nineteenth century. This movement arguably began at sea. Haines traces how from the late eighteenth century the medical superintendence of sailors, slaves, soldiers in transports, and convicts produced a growing body of literature and knowledge on which emigrant surgeons drew and developed. Colonial emigrant vessels were, she writes, "closely scrutinized floating laboratories" (p. 22), and the degree of scrutiny gives her a mass of original evidence to work through.

In contrast to the notorious "coffin ships" of the trans-Atlantic run, antipodean emigrants traveled under a regime of humane, rational, and markedly successful care. Haines studies the exceptions to the generally healthy shiploads the superintending surgeons delivered to Sydney, Melbourne, and other ports as a way of understanding the dysfunctional elements in a generally effective maritime public health regime. (About one in twelve ships arrived without losing any passengers, a tribute to the surgeons' diligence and discipline.)

She subjects these voyages to a searching and illuminating analysis of seasonality, size of ship, ratio of tonnage to bodies, number and character of passengers, and the understandings and actions of the superintending surgeons. While impressively authoritative (she discloses that the worst times to sail were midwinter and—more surprisingly, perhaps—midsummer), the bulk of the book is appropriately concerned with the dynamic human elements of the character, ideas, and practices of the surgeons and their dealings with the working-class emigrants for whom they were responsible. She authoritatively traces the war they waged on ignorance, indifference, and even superstition, and, above all, on diseases that surgeons could sometimes prevent but not always cure in order to bring their charges safely into port.

Peter Stanley
National Museum of Australia
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