Open AccessThis study is a brief social biography and demography of British naval doctors during the nineteenth century, asking why Scottish-educated surgeons were so prominent. Understanding the demography and changing dynamics of naval surgeons’ labor illuminates the complex relationship among the military, discrimination, and nationalism that shaped this influential labor market. This study reviews how to collect demographic information from multiple types of sources: university archives, matriculation records, digitized medical journals, and student rolls. It also uses chi-square tests to show the significance of the demographic information collected. The results show us the entangled relationship between database conceptualization, data collection, and data analysis.