Content area
Full text
In the spring of 1858, Dr. Lewis Quier Bowerbank applied for the position of consulting surgeon at the Kingston Public Hospital. The son of a Jamaican parish rector, Bowerbank had received his medical education from the University of Edinburgh, with additional training in London. Upon returning to Jamaica later in 1836, he practiced medicine in the capital of Spanish Town before moving in 1853 to Kingston, the island's major port city, where he established a medical practice with his brother-in-law. He also served as a member of the island's Central Board of Health. But when he applied to become consulting surgeon at the Public Hospital, the commissioners rejected Bowerbank and left the post vacant. Just two days later, Bowerbank published a scathing exposé of endemic neglect and malpractice within the hospital and adjoining lunatic asylum. Bowerbank's Letter to the Commissioners of the Public Hospital and Lunatic Asylum of Kingston, Jamaica Relative to the Present State and Management of these Institutions sparked a years-long controversy over the general conditions in the hospital and asylum.1 Within that broader controversy, one particular aspect of institutional practice emerged as the subject of intense focus and eventually became the source of imperial scandal: the cruel and abusive treatment of women patients in the lunatic asylum.2
Medicine was not usually the stuff of imperial scandal. Like political scandals in Britain, imperial scandals often started with salacious charges of sexual impropriety that gradually shifted toward more weighty accusations of corruption.3 But if medicine was not a frequent generator of scandal, torture—and especially the torture of women—was.4 The most important revelations of the Kingston lunatic asylum scandal concerned the torture and abuse of vulnerable black women and shone light on administrative misconduct. Moreover, its ramifications mushroomed far beyond the island. As scholars have noted, scandals allowed the boundaries of appropriate behavior to be delineated in a public setting. The issue of respectability was especially salient in colonial contexts, where morality was seen as a key distinction between metropolitan and colonial life. It was widely accepted that many British colonies—and Jamaica in particular—were hotbeds of corruption and vice. The supposed purity of British social life was protected by the oceans that separated the metropole from the corrupting colonies. Scandals—whether...