Hunting down ship doctors’ diaries in California

Dr Asha Hornsby has been appointed as the Huntington Library's Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. She will spend two months in the USA analysing the Library's historic collection of unpublished nineteenth-century ship doctors’ diaries.

The fellowship will enhance and extend the scope of her second monograph which centres upon this neglected form of writing: a genre that can unlock our understanding of travel, disease and its treatment in the period and reveal the many cultural encounters that medical seafarers made whilst shipboard and during their visits to the world’s ports.