Call for Papers: Health, Welfare, and Mutual Support in Maritime Communities, 1550 – 1850

The focus of this one-day workshop/symposium on 14 January 2027 at the National Maritime Museum is the disciplinary crossroads between medical, social, and maritime history. We aim to bring researchers interested in these fields together to present research and create connections across an area of emergent research. 

Much traditional scholarship on maritime healthcare has focused on the Navy, hospitals, and elite medical practitioners, imagining the establishment of permanent naval hospitals as the positive conclusion of inevitable progress. 

Recent scholarship has challenged this narrative, emphasising the partial and socially restrictive aspects of increasingly institutionalised systems of maritime health care. Medical humanities have increasingly incorporated approaches of social history, but this has only recently begun to address the specific histories and concerns of maritime communities. 

Overview of the workshop

This workshop aims to place naval and institutional medical care within a broader context of informal healthcare and mutual support within maritime communities, informing and encouraging future research in this developing field. 

We conceive 'maritime communities’ to include not only mariners working in the Navy or commercial shipping, but also those working in shipbuilding and other maritime industries on land, as well as their related familial and social networks. 

We invite researchers to share work on these topics ranging from the early modern period onwards (approximately 1550-1850). Specific themes are listed below, and we welcome submissions on all areas connected to the broader themes of the event.

Hosted by the National Maritime Museum, the workshop will include opportunities for focused discussion in a number of panels. We anticipate that the event will provide opportunities to develop an ongoing network of researchers working in this emerging field.

Thanks to the generosity and support of the Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme and National Maritime Museum, there will be no registration fee for this event. 

Limited financial support for speakers is available; details will be provided upon acceptance.

Workshop convenors

Ben Weddell is a third-year CDP student, supervised by the University of Reading and Royal Museums Greenwich. His thesis investigates ‘Social Networks and Shared Identities of Maritime Communities, 1747-1797’. 

Aidan Quigley is a second-year CDP student, supervised by the University of East Anglia and Royal Museums Greenwich. His thesis is provisionally titled 'Disability and Naval Seafarers in Early Modern England, 1600-1700’.