Maritime Seminar: Mad Sailors and Melancholy Matroser

Please note: This seminar takes place at the Naval Museum in Karlskrona. It will also be possible to watch the presentation online. Links are distributed to the CEMAS e-mailing list about a week before the seminar.

"Eighteenth-century sailors had a reputation for being hardy, superstitious and 'unthinking'; overall lacking in the introspection typically associated with the ‘finer-‘, or even disordered-, feelings of both piety and melancholy. However, the uniquely depressing action of the sea on the mind and body occupied the attention of many ships’ surgeons. The fatigues of sea-service in tempestuous weather, the rigid discipline, and the boredom posed by the unvaried prospect of the sea itself, all seemed to make sailors' peculiarly vulnerable to 'dejection of spirits' and the other diseases it so often seemed to usher in. In the British navy, mental disorder was widely accepted as an expected risk of sea-service, but officials largely favoured physical causes and symptoms in their understanding, diagnosis and treatment of insanity. In the Danish-Norwegian navy, melancholy and other disorders related to the sufferer’s ‘inner feeling’ such as nostalgia, appear to have been much more common. In this paper, Beck investigates this difference, drawing on the medical and court records of the Danish-Norwegian navy to consider the way understandings of mental disturbance were shaped ‘from below’ in shared environmental, but different national, contexts."

Dr Catherine S. Beck is a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen.

About the Maritime Seminar

The Maritime Seminar is organized by the Centre for Maritime Studies in collaboration with the National Maritime and Transportation Museums. The seminars are open for all.

More about the Centre for Maritime studies

All Maritime seminar events (Swedish page)

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