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  • Ship’s Surgeons of the Dutch East India Company: Commerce and the Progress of Medicine in the Eighteenth Century
  • Erica Charters
Ship’s Surgeons of the Dutch East India Company: Commerce and the Progress of Medicine in the Eighteenth Century. By Iris Bruijn (Leiden, Leiden University Press, 2009) 388 pp. $39.95

Bruijn’s book is a welcome addition to research about eighteenthcentury imperial science and medicine, especially for the Dutch seaborne empire, which remains mostly inaccessible to non-Dutch readers. Bruijn’s research indicates that, as in the case of the English East India Company and Royal Navy, the practice of medicine in the Dutch East India Company (voc) was the model for medical care in the Dutch Admiralties, and, more generally, shaped the nature of modern scientific medicine. Indeed, Bruijn is eager to trace the roots of modern medicine—including its use of empiricism, the rise of modern hospitals, and surgery’s move into medical practice and away from barbers—to the voc surgeons’ experience of caring for hundreds of men on ships sent to Asia for commercial gain.

Unlike Cook’s analysis of the role of Dutch imperial commerce in the scientific revolution, Bruijn focuses on details of the everyday lives of the surgeons.1 She uses databases compiled from a number of archives to refute contemporary and present-day generalizations about poorly trained, ill-paid, and ineffective surgeons on voc vessels. As Bruijn states at the outset, “Present medical history no longer belongs to the discipline of medicine, but to that of social history” (19). As a result, the study has more in common with social histories of sailors, such as Rodger’s early works, than cultural histories of medicine and ideas, with [End Page 653] muster rolls of surgeons forming the basis of the archival research.2 Bruijn painstakingly traced nearly 3,000 surgeons, representing between 25 to 33 percent of all surgeons who sailed during the 200-year operation of the voc, not only forward through their careers or to their deaths but also backward to their places of origin and training.

The picture that emerges is one of experienced and trained surgeons, mostly Dutch petty bourgeoisie who were financially successful. The conditions onboard and the experience of foreign climates resulted in high mortality; one-third of the sampled surgeons died within their first five years of sailing. Surprisingly, Bruijn notes that mortality rates did not decline after this initial exposure, suggesting that the traditional narrative of “seasoning” is inaccurate (198–201). Bruijn is careful to point out, however, that life expectancy rates in Amsterdam were similar if not lower, albeit due to high infant mortality. On a happier note, Bruijn’s research clearly demonstrates that being a voc surgeon presented prospects for respectability, thanks to medical experience that was appreciated by contemporaries, as well as opportunities for economic advancement, especially through trading on the side.

Bruijn’s detailed study is not concerned with conceptual shifts; instead, it rounds out a portrayal of imperial commercial medicine that is not often closely examined. Nevertheless, conceptual shifts are contained within the data. The decline in experienced surgeons from the Dutch Republic mirrors the decline of the voc, and the Dutch Empire in general. By the same token, the ability of voc surgeons to rise within their various career paths, and the social standing of those who offered their services, suggests that medical experience overseas was widely respected. Surgeons acted as experts—eighteenth-century intermediaries between abstract knowledge and policy.3 Although Bruijn’s statistical data provide rich insights into the social lives of surgeons, it would be fruitful to apply her evidence to broader issues in the history of science and to the decline of the Dutch Republic.

Erica Charters
Wolfson College, University of Oxford

Footnotes

1. Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (London, 2007).

2. See, for example, Nicholas A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London, 1986).

3. See the edition of Osiris on “Expertise,” XXV (2010), especially William J. Ashworth, “Quality and the Roots of Manufacturing ‘Expertise’ in Eighteenth Century Britain,” 231–254.

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