Catalogue description Records of Medical and Prisoner of War Departments

The first of a series of Commissioners for Sick, Wounded, and Prisoners, more commonly known as the 'Sick and Hurt Board', were appointed in 1653. They were responsible for the relief of sick or wounded seamen; at first the relief they provided was of an improvised nature. The Royal Greenwich Hospital, a home for superannuated seamen, had only a limited number of places for invalids; no naval hospitals were especially built until the middle of the eighteenth century, though hospital ships were employed intermittently from at least as early as the mid-seventeenth century. On board ship surgeons with warrant rank had been carried since the seventeenth century.

The Sick and Hurt Board was responsible for the management of the naval hospitals and the naval medical service, although until 1796 it neither examined nor appointed naval surgeons.

From 1740 the Sick and Hurt Board was in addition charged with the care and exchange of prisoners of war of all services, both enemy in British hands and British in enemy hands. In the Sick and Hurt Board's records both medical and prisoner-of-war business was generally mixed.

In 1796 responsibility for prisoners of war was transferred to the Transport Board and in 1806 the Sick and Hurt Board was wound up and its medical duties also transferred to the Transport Board, which now had a medical commissioner. When the Transport Board was itself abolished in 1817, the medical side of its work, together with the medical commissioner, was transferred to the Victualling Board.

On the abolition of the Victualling Board in 1832, naval medicine became the concern of the Physician of the Navy. In 1835 he was renamed the Physician General of the Navy, who was responsible to the Fourth Sea Lord.

In 1843 the Physician General became Inspector-General of Naval Hospitals and Fleets, and in 1844 Director General of the Medical Department. At the same time ships' surgeons were given commissioned status.