Thomas Trotter’s Observations on the Scurvy (1786)
Daniel Orme, Thos Trotter M.D. (Physician to the Grand Fleet), 1796. Royal Museums Greenwich ID: PAD3448.
Throughout this blog series, medical practitioners’ involvement in the slave trade has been shown to be extensive but also varied. If sources often present the relationship as coincidental and indirect (which is itself reflective of its ubiquity), it could also be more direct — as Hannah Murphy’s post on Gallandat’s Necessary Instructions for the Slave Traders (1769) explores — being ‘formally addressed, carefully crafted, and disseminated as a conceptual basis for professional and social expertise’. The publication at the centre of this post is in many ways different. It prompts us to consider how, while involvement in slavery would continue to ground claims of medical expertise, medical expertise could also authorise rejections of the trade itself. The professional implications of taking this latter path, however, were rather more vexed than we might at first think.
In the final decades of the eighteenth century, a handful of physicians drew upon their overseas experiences to pen objections to slavery. Initially, the cruelty of plantation regimes was the focus, as in James Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (1784). Expository accounts of the middle passage were, by contrast, extremely rare in Britain.[1] It was not until 1787-8 that the newly founded Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade took this focus, spurring fact-finding missions through Parliament and encouraging former slave-ship surgeons, sailors, and the formerly enslaved, to speak out.[2] One text which anticipated this watershed was Observations on the Scurvy (1786) by the Scottish naval surgeon Thomas Trotter (1760-1832). Supplementing the practical knowledge Trotter had gained as in the British navy from 1779-83, Observations centred on his recent experience as surgeon of a slave ship, between 1783 and 1784. If Trotter’s practical approach was novel, even more unusual was his focus on the scurvy as it broke out amongst Africans under conditions of shipboard captivity. He introduces the subject,
“It will be proper to observe here, that these poor wretches are chained two and two by the wrists and ankles […]. Here they are stowed spoonways, as it is called, and so close locked in one another’s arms, that it is not possible to tread amongst them. […]. The temperature in these apartments, when nearly full, was about 100° of Fahrenheit’s scale; the effluvia is so intolerable, that in a few minutes you may have the condensed vapour from your face in great quantity.” (pp. 31-2)
For historians such realities are now chillingly familiar. For our present purposes, what is illuminating is how clearly Observations reflects the paradoxical role of surgeons in the slave trade and the inseparability of medical ‘care’ and violence in such settings. The slave trade drove innovation, with the conditions presenting new medical challenges and surgeons also financially incentivised to increase survival rates.[3] Seeing signs of scurvy as the ship was loitered for some months off the Cape Coast waiting to ‘complete the cargo’ (p. 29), Trotter preemptively sought fresh fruit from the mainland. As the scurvy intensified during the Atlantic crossing, Trotter supplemented the basic diet of the enslaved (beans, rice, and corn), and in doing so observed ‘the scorbutic slaves throw away the ripe guavas, while they devoured the green ones’ (p. 76). In view of this, he began what we would today term a ‘controlled therapeutic trial’ with nine of the worst affected, and thereby discovered that ‘vinous fermentation impairs [fruit’s] antiscorbutic factor’.[4]
Frontispiece, Thomas Trotter, Observations on The Scurvy, Edinburgh and London, 1786. Wellcome Trust.
It is not known what Trotter thought of the ethics of these experiments at the time: at least no reflection is offered in Observations. Their relationship to the general practices of race-making in medicine is, however, worth considering: if on the one hand these experiments’ end result was in keeping people alive, the circumstances of captivity and total control makes it impossible to tease apart the extent to which Trotter’s motivation was principally ethical, monetary, or intellectual. It was conceivably a mix of all three, albeit operating on different timelines and to different degrees. Trotter’s assiduity kept the scurvy largely at bay, which in turn increased the value of the cargo, and then later provided rich material for reflection. On this basis Trotter was then able to refute in his Observations competing pathological theories, and hence reinforce James Lind’s earlier (but infrequently adopted) therapeutic recommendation of citrus fruit. Expanded in a second edition in 1792, Observations demonstrated Trotter’s skills and played no small part in his rapid advancement through the navy (to Physician of the Channel Naval Fleet in 1796). Of course, in a process of unacknowledged knowledge transfer seen in many other settings, Trotter’s scientific insights were furnished by the preexisting dietary knowledge of enslaved Africans.[5]
The purpose of Observations was unabashedly medical. Nevertheless, Trotter deviates from the standard clinical indifference to slavery found in earlier medical works. If a sympathetic strain is minimally evident from his opening descriptor, ‘poor wretches’, it becomes more palpable in Trotter’s detailing not just the close confinement the enslaved endured, but the gruesome course of the scurvy which, as Trotter reasoned, was largely attributable to the condition of slavery. Pointedly, he reflected on their emotional distress as a contributing factor:
“I can by no means suppose the Negro feels no parting pang when he bids farewell to his country, his liberty, his friends, and all that is to be valued in existence. In the night they are often heard making a hideous moan. This happens when waking from sleep, after a dream that had presented to their imagination their home and friends.” (pp. 37-8)
Here the engrained connection between medicine and race-making — the ways in which the medical examination of African bodies overlapped with economic calculation — branches off into a countervailing, proto-abolitionist vein. As Trotter continued, these outpourings of grief reflected an ‘exquisite sensibility’ (p. 38) — a capacity frequently denied by defenders of slavery.[6] Though slavery was not his primary focus, Trotter indirectly reminds his readers that the more fundamental cause of injury to the enslaved was not the scurvy, but the denial of their ‘liberty’.
George Perry, The South-East Prospect of Leverpool, taken from Seacombe Boat-Ferry (1770). The Ladies Walk is far left, before the growth of the poplar windbreak. British Library
Other evidence clarifies that Trotter was, in fact, opposed to transatlantic slavery before he joined the voyage. For instance, he composed ‘Verses Written in the Ladies Walk at Liverpool, in January 1783’ on one of his regular stopovers escorting trade vessels between Liverpool and Plymouth on The William. The poem, written from the vantage point of a fashionable uptown promenade, caustically attacks Liverpool’s and, by extension, Britain’s involvement in transatlantic slavery, proclaiming ‘freedom’ as a ‘right […] robb’d’ from Africans.[7] Reading Observations against this poem makes the latter’s tentativeness even more conspicuous, and curious. Importantly, Trotter wrote the poem two months before The William hit a sandbank in the Mersey, which resulted in his being demobilised there without pay or other means of support.[8] This adds another layer of complexity to Observations. As Trotter explains, it was his ‘fortune to embark on an African voyage’ given his insecure status, ‘my rank on the Navy Lift not intitling [sic] me to immediate employ’ (p. 21). After this voyage, Trotter returned to the Northeast of England, dividing his time between a riding practice and studying for his medical degree in Edinburgh. Keen to continue his career in the Navy, Trotter was likely conscious of the professional risks of taking an overt stance against slavery. Before the Abolition campaign began to shift views, naval authorities valued the navy as the ‘nursery for seamen’, and a patriotic ‘connection between colonial trade, naval strength and the preservation of national sovereignty […] made abolitionism appear dangerous’.[9] In this light, it is not a stretch of the imagination to think that Trotter’s reluctance to openly condemn the trade in Observations – in contrast to his unpublished ‘Verses’ – might have been influenced by his insecure position and the potential consequences of venturing views beyond his station.
If the parameters of naval medicine prevented a more overt statement against slavery in Observations, Trotter’s strictly medical approach nevertheless lent authority to the work. According to his biographers, initial reviews were ‘lukewarm’, deprecating Trotter’s youth and wishing he had ‘treated the subject on the usual theoretical level’.[10] However, there were many positive reviews as well, with his ‘faithful observation’ approved in the New Annual Register, and extensive reviews in French and Latin language journals.[11] Also unmentioned is the fact that Observations was translated into German in early 1787. The difficulties its technical-nautical expressions presented (particularly trade-specific terms like ‘spoonways’ had no equivalents in German) is an interesting instantiation of the (un-)translatability of the middle passage.
Frontispiece and Preface to Neue Bemerkungen über den Scorbut von Thomas Trotter. Aus dem Engl. übers. von Christian Friedrich Michaelis, Leipzig, 1787. Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum Digitale Bibliothek.
If Trotter’s work was valued for its new findings on the scurvy, its revelations about slavery were even more unprecedented. Observations preceded by two years the ‘flurry of parliamentary (and abolitionist) activity’ to gather evidence about the slave trade.[12] This process would eventually see Trotter provide far more uncensored and disturbing testimony before the House of Commons Select Committee on the Slave Trade in 1790. Surgeons naturally spoke on both sides of the debate, but Trotter’s position in the navy made his answers particularly significant.[13] His experience was relevant for another reason, as the vessel he had worked on was none other than The Brooks, the ship made infamous by the widely reproduced 1788 abolitionist illustration ‘Plan of the Brooks’.[14] Whether Trotter’s Observations inspired the Brooks image remains unexplored. With so little published about the middle passage by contemporary authors before 1788, it seems more than possible that Observations played an earlier, and not insignificant, part in the abolition movement. If this was the case, it would further substantiate our growing appreciation of the complex connections and overlap between race-making in medicine and in abolitionism itself. Like other surgeons who used their medical knowledge to influentially oppose slavery, their desire to speak for the enslaved was shaped, and further authorized, by the endurance of a clinical practice which presumed authority over the lives, bodies, and minds of the enslaved.
Adam Bridgen is Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Department of English at Durham University. One of his core interests is the relationship between social class and writing about slavery and empire during the long eighteenth century, which he draws into focus by exploring and contextualising lesser-known works and authors. His research on Trotter will feature in his co-edited essay collection, British Working-Class and Radical Writing Since 1700, published open-access with University of London Press, and in his forthcoming monograph on labouring-class antislavery poetry.
[1] See John Coffey illuminating essay, ‘“I was an Eye-witness”: John Newton, Anthony Benezet, and the Confession of a Liverpool Slave Trader’, Slavery & Abolition, 41, no. 1 (2022), pp. 1-21.
[2] For example, Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (London, 1788); James Field Stanfield, Observations on a Guinea Voyage (London, 1788); Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (London, 1789).
[3] Jane Webster, Materializing the Middle Passage: A Historical Archaeology of British Slave Shipping, 1680-1807 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), p. 75.
[4] Jeremy Hugh Baron, ‘Sailors' scurvy before and after James Lind – a reassessment’, Nutrition Reviews 67(6), 315-32, p. 323.
[5] See also Londa Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017).
[6] Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 221.
[7] There is no evidence that the poem was published at the time, its first appearance being in The European Magazine, 17 (1790), pp. 149-50, published alongside two other poems written in 1781 and 82. Trotter had been publishing poems in magazines intermittently from 1778 onwards.
[8] Brian Vale and Griffith Edwards, Physician to the Fleet: The Life and Times of Thomas Trotter, 1760-1832 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), pp. 47-53.
[9] Christer Petley, ‘The Royal Navy, the British Atlantic Empire and the Abolition of the Slave Trade’, in John McAleer and Christer Petley (eds), The Royal Navy and the British Atlantic World, c. 1750-1820 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 97-121, 107.
[10] Vale and Edwards, Physician to the Fleet, p. 69.
[11] The New Annual Register, Or General Repository of History (1786), p. 253. Le Censeur Universel Anglos, Volume 5 (1787), 24-33. Commentarii de rebus in scientia naturali et medicina gestis, Volume 30 (1788), 332-36.
[12] Webster, Materializing the Middle Passage, p. 72.
[13] For discussions of the impacts of Trotter’s 1790 testimony, see Vale and Edwards, Physician to the Fleet, p. 67; Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus, Marcus Rediker (eds.), Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World (UCLA Press, 2007), p. 4; Ramesh Mallipeddi, ‘“A Fixed Melancholy”: Migration, Memory, and the Middle Passage’, The Eighteenth Century 55 (2014), 235-53, pp. 245-6; Kevis Goodman, Pathologies of Motion: Historical Thinking in Medicine, Aesthetics, and Poetics (Yale: Yale University Press, 2023), p. 90.
[14] Cheryl Finley, Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 35.