'What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor?': Medicalising Drunkenness in the British Royal Navy

Using the official ship medical logbooks from the French Wars (1793-1815), this paper will explore how naval surgeons conceptualised and problematised alcohol consumption as a medical issue in the British Royal Navy. Centring the surgeons’ professional role within this growing medical bureaucracy, it will examine how surgeons wielded their medical expertise to police undesirable and unhealthy behaviours amongst the crew. Equating disease and disorder, naval surgeons reveal early tendencies towards the public health and anti-vice campaigns that would come to dominate British and colonial health policy in the mid-nineteenth century.

Dr. Manon C. Williams is a social historian of medicine and a recent graduate of the University of St Andrews. Her doctoral research, funded by a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities, explored how naval surgeons constructed their professional identities within the naval bureaucracy and British medical community during a period of sustained global warfare.

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