This article examines the practice of post-mortem examination in the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815). The professional medical logbooks kept by ship’s surgeons as part of their mandated practice reveal that they turned to pathological anatomy to diagnose their patients – a technique typically associated with French anatomy during this period. I show that these post-mortem dissections blended medicine and surgery together by correlating clinical signs and symptoms of disease with pathological manifestations of disease in the bodies after death. This article also considers the medical culture that existed on these ships that enabled this research, specifically how captains, officers and crew responded to, and interpreted, such medical enquiry on board. By resituating the naval ship as a site of medical experimentation and enquiry, I explore how naval surgeons participated in medical research within the Royal Navy and used the ship space to engage in pathological anatomy before their British civilian counterparts flocked to French hospitals after the wars.

In this paper, we dissect how different regimes of labour were crucial to the success of the British and Brazilian expeditions which observed the 1919 total solar eclipse in Príncipe and Sobral. We connect regimes of labour with degrees of invisibility and discuss plausible justifications for various absences/presences in the written records. We discuss reasons for the inclusion of Cottingham, the artisan–technician expert on clockwork mechanisms, into the teams; the entanglements of forced labour with scientific and technical work in Príncipe; and the various regimes of labour in place at Sobral. We argue that the impact of various regimes of labour in Príncipe and Sobral cannot be confined to the provision of infrastructural support, but include critical location choices, the possibility of scientific success during the observations themselves, and the processing of plates following observations.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, British civil engineers strove to enhance their status and assert the identity of their developing profession. Alongside associational and visual cultures, one means of achieving a sense of community was through the formation of a shared literary culture. As a profession notorious for what Torrens described as ‘papyrophobia’, it is perhaps surprising that many engineers, in this period, read widely and wrote extensively. John Smeaton (1724–92), for example, valued good authorship and experimented widely with literary form. James Brindley (1716–72), his contemporary, wrote sparingly, but nevertheless generated a literary strategy in support of his projects. Other engineers, such as John Phillips (fl. 1785–1813), made use of their engineering background and of engineering literature to create alternative careers. By exploring how mid- to late eighteenth-century engineers wrote, in order to persuade and to educate others as well as to publicize, record and defend their professional decisions, this paper will show how their reputations were dependent on literary constructions as much as on physical ones.