Medical emergencies can be harrowing no matter where they occur. When they happen on a boat or ship, many miles and days or weeks from hospitals and doctors, they can be especially distressful. Add to this the fact that some of the types of accidents seen at sea are rarely encountered by landlubbers, and you understand the need for a book such as The Waterlover’s Guide to Marine Medicine.

Subtitled How to Identify and Treat Aquatic Ailments and Injuries, and written by a doctor, Paul G. Gill, Jr., the book deals with hypothermia and cold-water immersion, seasickness, jellyfish stings, sunburn and near-drowning, among other emergencies.

Much of the text is good basic First Aid, such as how to give CPR or apply a tourniquet. But it also ranges into areas a bit more exotic, such as recognizing the symptoms of fish poisoning and avoiding shark attacks.

The Waterlover’s Guide to Marine Medicine bills itself as “the essential shipboard medicine chest,” and that is a good description. The author, in addition to being a physician, is someone who also loves to sail and has spent many years doing so. He therefore knows whereof he writes.

The text is supplemented by line drawings where words alone might not suffice, for example, in showing how to make a sling for a broken arm or how to remove a fishhook from a finger. This is one book that no sailor or other boatperson should leave port without.