Medical Life in the Navy

A naval surgeon's account of the service in the 1860s - Haslar hospital, the mess, the sick bay, slaver-hunting off Mozambique and the discipline. Stables wrote a hundred and thirty boys' books afterwards and toured England in what may have been the first leisure caravan, a horse-drawn wagon he called the Wanderer. Fifty-eight plates spanning 1599 to 1900, from Turner and Aivazovsky to satirical scenes of Bond Street and shipboard life, extend the surgeon's world from the sick bay to the wider navy and the society ashore.