Thomasin Summerford

Title of dissertation: Meddling With Medicine: The Specialisation of Sea Surgeons’ Chests in the Early Modern Period


Since my BA dissertation, about the relationships between costume and disease in the Restoration period, I have had a fascination with the connections between medicine and design. This continued into the first year of my MA at the RCA, specialising in Renaissance decorative arts, when I explored Vesalius’s anatomical illustrations in relation to the uncanny realism of Spanish polychrome sculpture. The final year of my MA has culminated in a dissertation entitled ‘Meddling With Medicine: The Specialisation of Sea Surgeons’ Chests in the Early Modern Period’. Through an analysis of the surgeon’s chest from the ship the Mary Rose, Vincenzo Giustiniani’s materia medica chest, and John Woodall’s treatise for sea surgeons, The Surgeons Mate, the paper aims to track the design of sea surgeons’ chests between 1500 and 1700. It attempts to place these objects within medical literature of the time, and argues that they evolved from being merely a collection of appropriated objects put into an existing container, into a highly specialist one, of which the container was designed with a clear methodology to organise the provisions inside.