Hospital ship
The Second Geneva Convention of 1949 prohibits military attacks on hospital ships that meet specified requirements, though belligerent forces have right of inspection and may take patients, but not staff, as prisoners of war.
[7] However this experiment in medical care was short-lived, with Goodwill assigned to other tasks within a year and her complement of convalescents simply left behind at the nearest port.
These early hospital ships were for the care of the sick rather than the wounded, with patients quartered according to their symptoms and infectious cases quarantined from the general population behind a sheet of canvas.
In the 1690s, the surgeon aboard Siam complained that the meat was in an advanced state of putrefaction, the biscuits were weevil-ridden and bitter, and the bread was so hard that it stripped the skin off patients’ mouths.
The hospital ships Unity and Welcome sailed for England on 18 October 1683, with 114 invalid soldiers and 104 women and children, arriving at The Downs on 14 December 1683.
[9] The number of medical personnel aboard Royal Navy hospital ships was slowly increased, with regulations issued in 1703 requiring that each vessel also carry six landsmen to act as surgical assistants, and four washerwomen.
[7] On 8 December 1798, unfit for service as a warship, HMS Victory was ordered to be converted to a hospital ship to hold wounded French and Spanish prisoners of war.
The crew of these vessels watched over ships coming to England, which were forced to stay in the creek under quarantine to protect the country from infectious diseases including the plague.
Hospital ships were generally superior in their standard of service and sanitation to the medical provision available at the time for convalescent soldiers.
Another early hospital ship was USS Red Rover in the 1860s, which aided the wounded soldiers of both sides during the American Civil War.
In World War I these included SS Letitia (I) and HMHS Llandovery Castle which was deliberately sunk by a German U-boat with great loss of life, despite the hospital ship's clearly marked status.
[19] The last British royal yacht, the post World War II HMY Britannia, was constructed in a way as to be convertible to a hospital ship in wartime.
After her decommissioning, Peter Hennessy discovered that her actual role would have been as Queen Elizabeth II's refuge from nuclear weapons, hiding amidst the lochs of western Scotland.
[20] A development of the Lun-class ekranoplan was planned for use as a mobile field hospital for rapid deployment to any ocean or coastal location at a speed of 297 knots (550 km/h, 341.8 mph).
If a hospital ship persists in violating restrictions, a belligerent is legally entitled to capture it or take other means to enforce compliance.
