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- 12614
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:36.278Z
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- 12575
- text
- not know whether it was the wide roll of the ship, as felt in that
giddy perch, that occasioned it, but I always got sea-sick after taking
medicine and going aloft with it. Seldom or never did it do me any
lasting good.
Now the Surgeon’s steward was only a subordinate of Surgeon Cuticle
himself, who lived in the ward-room among the Lieutenants,
Sailing-master, Chaplain, and Purser.
The Surgeon is, by law, charged with the business of overlooking the
general sanitary affairs of the ship. If anything is going on in any of
its departments which he judges to be detrimental to the healthfulness
of the crew, he has a right to protest against it formally to the
Captain. When a man is being scourged at the gangway, the Surgeon
stands by; and if he thinks that the punishment is becoming more than
the culprit’s constitution can well bear, he has a right to interfere
and demand its cessation for the time.
But though the Navy regulations nominally vest him with this high
discretionary authority over the very Commodore himself, how seldom
does he exercise it in cases where humanity demands it? Three years is
a long time to spend in one ship, and to be at swords’ points with its
Captain and Lieutenants during such a period, must be very unsocial and
every way irksome. No otherwise than thus, at least, can the remissness
of some surgeons in remonstrating against cruelty be accounted for.
Not to speak again of the continual dampness of the decks consequent
upon flooding them with salt water, when we were driving near to Cape
Horn, it needs only to be mentioned that, on board of the Neversink,
men known to be in consumptions gasped under the scourge of the
boatswain’s mate, when the Surgeon and his two attendants stood by and
never interposed. But where the unscrupulousness of martial discipline
is maintained, it is in vain to attempt softening its rigour by the
ordaining of humanitarian laws. Sooner might you tame the grizzly bear
of Missouri than humanise a thing so essentially cruel and heartless.
But the Surgeon has yet other duties to perform. Not a seaman enters
the Navy without undergoing a corporal examination, to test his
soundness in wind and limb.
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