The life of the man-o'-war's-man, according to Lord Nelson, was on an
average "finished at forty-five years." [Footnote: _Admiralty
Records_ 1. 580--Memorandum on the State of the Fleet, 1803.] Bad
food and strenuous labour under exceptionally trying conditions sapped
his vitals, made him prematurely old, and exposed him to a host of
ills peculiar to his vocation. He "fell down daily," to employ the old
formula, in spotted or putrid fevers. He was racked by agues,
distorted by rheumatic pains, ruptured or double-ruptured by the
strain of pulling, hauling and lifting heavy weights. He ate no meal
without incurring the pangs of acute indigestion, to which he was
fearfully subject. He was liable to a "prodigious inflammation of the
head, nose and eyes," occasioned by exposure. Scurvy, his most
inveterate and merciless enemy, "beat up" for him on every voyage and
dragged his brine-sodden body down to a lingering death. Or, did he
escape these dangers and a watery grave, protracted disease sooner or
later rendered him helpless, or a brush with the enemy disabled him
for ever from earning his bread.

His surgeons were, as a rule, a sorry lot. Not only were they
deficient in numbers, they commonly lacked both professional training
and skill. Their methods were consequently of the crudest description,
and long continued so. The approved treatment for rupture, to which
the sailor was painfully liable, was to hang the patient up by the
heels until the prolapsus was reduced. Pepys relates how he met a
seaman returning from fighting the Dutch with his eye-socket "stopped
with oakum," and as late at least as the Battle of Trafalgar it was
customary, in amputations, to treat the bleeding stump with boiling
pitch as a cauterant. In his general attitude towards the sick and
wounded the old-time naval surgeon was not unlike Garth, Queen Anne's