Doctors at Sea: Emigrant Voyages to Colonial Australia
Australian History Biography Colonial History Maritime History Medical History Emigration & Migration Studies 19th-Century History
Doctors at Sea: Emigrant Voyages to Colonial Australia is the hard-to-find hardcover that maritime-history and Australian-genealogy hunters keep on their permanent “want” lists. In 248 illustrated pages Robin Haines follows the ship-board surgeons who accompanied 19th-century emigrant vessels to South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales, turning what could have been a dry medical log into a riveting human story of scalpels, storms and salvation on the long voyage south. Readers discover how one man with a battered medicine chest and a handful of surgical instruments was often the only barrier between a migrant family and catastrophe, and why the success of these floating clinics became a selling-point that lured thousands more Britons to book passage.
What makes this copy especially appealing to collectors is its immaculate, tightly-bound condition and the presence of the original dust-jacket—an outer wrapper that is almost always lost on the second-hand market. Inside, the pages are clean and unmarked save for a neat previous-owner name on the front pastedown; there are no dog-eared corners, no underlining, and no ex-library stamps to detract value. Because the book was never reprinted in cloth, acquiring a jacketed first edition in “very good” state is becoming increasingly difficult, particularly in North America where the title was only briefly distributed.
Beyond scarcity, the content itself is gold for family historians. Haines mined surgeons’ journals, passenger lists and colonial hospital records to reconstruct individual voyages, naming emigrants who later became prominent settlers and identifying the medical crises—typhus, scurvy, childbirth—that shaped their new lives. If your ancestors sailed in the 1830s-60s, the detailed appendices and port-by-port case studies can confirm which ship they were on and what medical care they received. For anyone fascinated by Australia’s colonial era, maritime medicine, or the social history of migration, this book is both an authoritative reference and a page-turning narrative—an essential addition to an Australiana or medical-history shelf.
Refer to our eBay listing for a full condition report and many more high-quality pictures of this item.
Buy Now