THIS BOOK has been written to fill a gap. Dr Thomas Trotter MD was an extraordinary man who had a remarkable career. First, as a surgeon in the Royal Navy who reached eminence as Physician to the Channel Fleet under Admiral Lord Howe and Lord St Vincent, he played an important role in bringing about the health improvements that helped turn the Fleet into the devastating fighting machine which routed the French at Trafalgar; then, later in civilian life, he became a forward-looking thinker and a prolific writer on non-naval medical problems. These included the dangers of gas in coal mines, the nervous diseases supposedly caused by social change and the rise of ‘luxury’ in Georgian society, and alcoholism. Alcohol problems are now a well-established area of medical study, and practitioners look back on Trotter as a pioneer whose work was seminal in establishing that chronic drunkenness was a disease rather than a moral lapse.

Yet Thomas Trotter has never been the subject of a full-scale biography. This may be partly due to the fact that his life had two different phases, the naval and the civilian. But it also reflects the enormous variety of Trotter's career, which, to do it full justice, requires an understanding of a wide range of historical and scientific themes – the Scottish Enlightenment, eighteenth-century medical education, the slave trade, private practice in Georgian Northumberland, the mining industry, the Romantic movement, the organization of the navy, its operations in the English Channel during the Revolutionary War and its determination to improve the health of sailors just as it improved the fabric of its ships.