Ship's Surgeons of the Dutch East India Company - Commerce and the Progress of Medicine in the Eighteenth Century

This volume offers a fascinating exploration of the reality of their profession, drawing on data and firsthand accounts from over 3,000 of the surgeons in the company’s service, and spanning topics as diverse as the recruitment policy of the company, the career trajectory of the surgeons in its employ, their geographical origins, and their life expectancy. Demonstrating that the image of these surgeons as uneducated apprentices is little more than a myth, Iris Bruijn portrays them more appropriately as fairly well-educated men subject to the risks of life at sea, including incurable diseases otherwise unknown in their European homeland.