ABSTRACT
The present chapter explores the links between one area of military commitment and developing knowledge, skills and innovations which were not without effect in the country more widely, though with certain time-lags: the relations between the armed forces, medicine and public health in the later eighteenth century. It deserves to be documented more systematically than space allows in the present volume, if only because historians of naval and army medicine have not considered these wider effects of the developments they have recorded, while economic and social historians, in this case no less than in many others, have not given the army and navy in the eighteenth century the attention which their importance deserves. [ 1 ]
