TROTTER'S ESTRANGEMENT from Bridport and St Vincent removed him from any involvement in the day-to-day health problems of the Channel Fleet, but it gave him the time he needed to make a longer-term impact through his writings. In 1796, he had produced Medical and Chemical Essays. It was a short work containing discussions of scurvy among convicts in New South Wales, a case of heart disease at Haslar, and methods of keeping water ‘sweet’ at sea. Following its publication, Trotter began work on what was to become his major contribution to naval medicine. It was entitled Medicina Nautica: an Essay on the Diseases of Seamen and was clearly seen by its author as an important work. The operations of the Channel Fleet, he explained in the preface, provided an unparalleled field of investigation from which valuable conclusions could be drawn about a range of maritime diseases, including scurvy. The book would be of value both to specialists and to medical readers in general and would be based upon practical experience rather than theory.

Trotter followed some of Blane's statistical methods in his work, but prided himself on producing a more profound examination of the subject. Volume one, which was published in 1797, comprised a chronological journal or ‘General Abstract’ detailing the operations and health of the Channel Fleet from 1794 to 1796; two ‘Discourses’, one of which dealt with the organization of naval hospitals, the pay and conditions of the naval surgeons, the character of seamen, uniforms, diet, recruitment and impressment; the other with maritime diseases, notably ague, typhus, yellow fever, rheumatism, dysentery and scurvy.