“Medicalizing the Bodies of Atlantic Seafarers at the Chatham Chest, 1704–1803”

A colloquium with Zachary Dorner (University of Maryland)
Please note that all colloquia papers are pre-circulated. Please register via the link below to receive a copy.

Since 1588 the Chatham Chest provided annual pensions and lump-sum payments without labor or rehabilitation requirements to Royal Navy veterans who were deemed eligible. Yet, by the early eighteenth century, the Chest’s design proved inadequate for the growing number of impaired sailors throughout the Atlantic world, prompting a series of adaptations that reshaped the determination of disability. This paper explores the centuries-long negotiation between ideals and logistics that shaped the process determining whether injured seamen would receive benefits, emphasizing the significance of surgeons for grouping some veterans as disabled, and thereby worthy of relief, as a matter of public policy.

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Zachary Dorner is an associate professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park, whose work sits at the intersection of medicine, business, and empire in the Atlantic world. His prize-winning first book, Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century, addresses medicine’s codependence on plantation agriculture, long-distance trade, financial markets, and colonial warfare. Dorner is working on a second book that reexamines the narrowing definitions of care that existed for the dependent populations of people tasked with doing the work of empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His writing has also appeared in the journals Labor, History of Science, William & Mary Quarterly, and Journal of British Studies, in addition to Commonplace, The Recipes Project, Boston Review, and Washington Post.