ABSTRACT
According to the Admiralty Regulations [1], each surgeon was ‘to keep a daybook of his practice, noting therein the names of the men that come under his care, their hurts or distempers, the day when they were taken ill, the day of their recovery, removal or death, together with his prescriptions and methods of treatment while under his care.’ Many thousands of these journals must have been written and collected at the Admiralty, but only about 100 or so have survived from this period, mostly in the Adm 101 series in the Public Record Office. They were evidently weeded in the nineteenth century, and only the ones which were regarded as important at the time have been kept. All those relating to Nelson’s service after 1793, beginning with the Agamemnon and ending with the Victory, have been kept for obvious reasons. The others may have been kept because they contain interesting cases, or useful comments by the surgeons who wrote them. All date from the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars except for those of Leonard Gillespie, quoted below [42].
