ABSTRACT
The latter part of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries represent a period during which sickness and deaths at sea reached their highest point. New countries were being opened up, British settlers, officials and troops were all making their way to distant lands. Trade and traffic on the seas increased. Yet sanitary science and preventive medicine lagged hopelessly behind. Accommodation on ship—board was insanitary and it was a lucky ship that cleared from an English port without some contagious sickness amongst the crew or passengers. At the time of the Napoleonic Wars no infectious disease could be controlled except, thanks to Jenner, small-pox. The mode of conveyance of the most fatal forms of transmissible disease was wholly unknown. It was not known until 1840 that enteric (or typhoid) fever was spread by human excretions, and the part played by lice in transmitting typhus was only discovered in 1909. Nor was the responsibility of the mosquito for conveying malaria and yellow fever recognised until 1897 and 1901 respectively. Even the infective nature of cholera and dysentery was in those days denied by the medical profession, although occasionally a shrewd observer like Captain King—who sailed with Cook—was “rather inclined to imagine that his people escaped the flux (i.e., dysentery) by the precautions which were taken to prevent them receiving it from others.” Although tuberculosis or consumption carried off Captain Cook's own surgeon, Anderson, and one of his captains, Clerke, the view that it might be contagious (which had been suggested in 1689) met with no general acceptance.
