JOAN DRUETT

Imagine a four-year voyage trapped on board a grubby little whaling ship with people who don’t like or respect you, even though you are doing your best to keep them hale and healthy!

I recreated the lives of these adventurous men through the journals kept by eleven surgeons who sailed in the broad Pacific and reef-studded, fever-ridden South China Sea in the 1830s--and a colorful lot of characters those eleven men turned out to be. Several were tattooed, one being the hilariously adventurous John Coulter, who was stranded with cannibals in the Marquesas and fought in a tribal battle. Other surgeons battled constantly with their own captains, who were determined to make them pay their way by doing common seamen’s work. While Rough Medicine has bloodchilling tales aplenty, there is a lot of rough humor, too.

'Carefully researched, elegantly illustrated with line drawings, and vividly written in lucid prose, this wonderful book is pleasing to leaf through and rewarding to read."
-- G. Eknoyan, Choice.