Reading dermatology in the Victorian newspaper. The performance of medical vocabulary in The Times correspondence column

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1 Context

In the second half of the nineteenth century, an inquest into the death of a soldier posed a challenge to perceiving the skin as a barrier of the human body during corporal punishment. A soldier called John Frederick White died from wounds caused by the infliction of 150 lashes. At that time, beating someone’s back with sticks, whips or other tools was a judicial measure to maintain order in the army and the navy as well as in schools, prisons and private homes [Abbott, 2010 ]. In the army, an individual could be inflicted with anything from fifty up to thousands of lashes, which were given in instalments over the period of a year. A time interval was allowed between the whipping sessions to give the skin the opportunity to heal [Scott, 1950 , p. 86]. Considering the skin’s healing only as a symptom of full recovery was a misconception generated from an understanding of the skin as a superficial and protective layer that was independent of the underlying tissues. Sanitary reformer G. C. Rothery wrote: ‘nature has provided a cushion covered with a sensitive skin, which if acted upon rightly, cannot result in injury’ [ 1897 , p. 44]. However, these ideas coexisted with a new perception of skin that had appeared in nineteenth-century medicine and the popular imagination. It was becoming clearer then, that the skin was an anatomical organ equipped with its own pathological and physiological characteristics [te Hennepe, 2014 , p. 546].

The Times newspaper correspondence column on the inquest into the death of Private White, upon which this contribution focuses, furnishes an illustrative case study of how a newspaper could marshal information about the skin’s anatomy. The scientific discourse is embedded in a story that apparently deals with an example of Victorian injustice in the army. As this article will show, the correspondence column of The Times offers an insight into two aspects. On the one hand, it gives information on the dermatological interests and concerns of the Victorian middle-class reader. On the other, it shows how The Times might have used such correspondence in order to counterbalance sensationalism with a scientific frame to both entertain and inform without losing credibility.

2 Literature review

In the nineteenth century publishing was one of the most significant mechanisms for the exchange of scientific ideas; ‘science was newsworthy’ [Mussell, 2011 , p. 329]. Journalists and novelists translated scientific idioms into ordinary language so that for the first time people had access to information previously shared only by experts in the field [Roderique, 2000 , p. 19]. The contribution of the Victorian press to the dissemination of scientific ideas and to the formation of public opinion has been extensively investigated [Henson et al., 2004 ]. For example, it has been demonstrated how nineteenth-century periodicals provided a place of controversy and interchange [Shuttleworth and Cantor, 2004 ]. Yet, little attention has been paid to the nineteenth-century news coverage of science in large circulation daily newspapers, as most of the focus has fallen on specialised periodicals. Among the few exceptions is Jean-Pierre Goubert’s The Conquest of Water [ 1986 ], which argued that The Times exercised a major role in popularizing knowledge of the health benefits of clean water through large-scale advertising. Alan Rushton [ 2011 ] employed digital newspaper indices to look at how a rare bleeding disorder, known as haemophilia, became national news concerning Prince Leopold (b. 1853). The press used medical evidence to create human interest stories able to provoke strong emotional reactions; the newspaper also translated medical terms into ordinary language, which resulted in both informing and entertaining the readers [490].

The thriving print culture of the nineteenth century was an essential conduit for the popularization of knowledge about the properties of the human skin among both medical doctors and the general public. Notable examples include the first illustrated treatise of skin disease by Robert Willan ( On Cutaneous Diseases [ 1808 ]); Thomas Bateman’s skin atlas of Dermatology ( Delineation of Cutaneous Diseases [ 1817 ]); and one of the first dermatological treatises written for the general public, Erasmus Wilson’s A practical Treatise on Healthy Skin [ 1845 ]. The representation of skin can have multiple meanings, which often contradict each other: skin can become a site for the manifestation of profound cultural, political and psychical investments [Cavanagh, Failler and Johnston Hurst, 2013 , p. 2]. For example, for the Victorians the interpretation of the skin was at the border between science and beauty and, mostly, skin exemplified the science of beauty [Michie, 1999 , p. 408]. But the skin was also understood as multi-layered organ where pathologies could be observed [Lie, 2013 , p. 38; te Hennepe, 2012 ]. Despite a growing academic interest over the last two decades in the skin as an object of cultural inquiry, the role played by the lay press in advancing knowledge of dermatology has so far not been extensively investigated. Scholarly skin works have proliferated in the fields of cultural theory and history [Connor, 2004 ; Benthien, 2002 ]; physical anthropology [Jablonski, 2006 ]; feminist studies [Ahmed and Stacey, 2004 ]; medical history [Lie, 2013 ] and literature [Walter, 2013 ]. The role played by letters to the editor in the field of science communication in the Victorian press has also received little attention. In the Victorian period, the frequent publication of letters to the editor demonstrates that there was a high level of interaction between newspapers and their readers. This was a constant, cyclical process through which the interests and identities of the readers were inscribed into the paper [Nicholson, 2012 , p. 283]. The correspondence columns in popular Victorian periodicals were important sources of medical information for readers [Furlong, 2016 , p. 42]. However, any considerations of letter columns in the nineteenth-century press should take into account that while the form might stand for the private expression of an individual, it was often a highly constructed public performance [Taunton, 2009 , p. 359].

3 Objective

This paper will explore how skin was framed in the context of the Times coverage of the inquest into the death by flogging of Private White. It will conduct a rhetorical analysis of the editorials and letters to the editor, focusing on the figurative and literal language used in the text to describe the wounded skin of the soldier. This paper will show that the exchange of opinions between the editor and readers, triggered by the post-mortem examinations performed on the body of the soldier, created a public platform for debating structure and function of our largest organ, the skin. I argue that on the one hand, The Times participated in the debate about flogging in the army by bringing forward skin anatomy as an argument against corporal punishment. On the other hand, the publication of such letters should be questioned in the light of The Times marketing interest in maintaining an influential and reliable voice in the mid-Victorian press market.

4 Methods

In this paper I will conduct a textual analysis of a sample of letters and editorials that appeared during the time of the inquest: 15 July to 4 August 1846. The inclusion criteria are that the letter/editorial must answer yes to both of the following questions: did it include a discussion about skin, either metaphorical or literal? And, did it refer to flogging in the army?

Given the limited number of data under discussion, one should be cautious when making generalizations about the role The Times might have had in fostering a debate about skin and corporal punishment. Nonetheless, this analysis furnishes an illustrative example of how and why science could be considered newsworthy in the mid-Victorian period. The choice of The Times as an object of inquiry is dictated by quantitative factors as well as qualitative ones. Firstly, a key-word search for the term ‘skin’ using The Times Gale Cengage Digital Archive shows that throughout the nineteenth century there was an increase in the number of appearances of the term with a peak in 1846 (see Figure 1 and 2 ). A close examination of the actual articles in microfilm shows that the peak is determined by the coverage of the inquest into the death of Private White. Enlarging the key word search of ‘skin’ to a sample of other London newspapers, using the 19th century British Library Newspapers Archive, corroborates, together with a close reading of the text, that it is in The Times that the word ‘flogging’ was mostly accompanied with ‘skin’ during the inquest (see Figure 3 ). If we read the coverage of the story it appears that the occurrence of the word ‘skin’ is incremented by the letters to the editor.

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The Times was among those established newspapers that rose to prominence in the 1840s and 1850s facilitated by the abolition of the ‘taxes on knowledge’ [Boyce, 1978 , p.22]. By then, the capability of the paper to drag the reader’s attention to social problems, predict events and address public opinion was already a recognized feature of The Times [ History of The Times, 1939 , p. 147]. This newspaper’s reputation for influence and impact, circulation and quality ensured its predominance on bourgeois public opinion [Conboy, 2004 , p. 118].

Thomas Barnes, who edited the paper between 1817 and 1841, is usually credited for significantly contributing to the development of the ‘Letters to the Editor’ page of The Times into a national institution [Taunton, 2009 , p. 359]. The Times was the paper that made the greatest effort, in the flogging case at Hounslow, at aligning popular inquiry with the progression of reform by drawing attention to the political significance of the case [Burney, 2000 , p. 17]. This contribution will also show how the letters to The Times played a role in drawing attention to the medical significance of the case.

5 Results and Discussion

In the summer of 1846, much of the British national and provincial press took an interest in the inquest held by Thomas Wakley, then coroner for Middlesex and founder editor of the medical journal the Lancet . The enquiry aimed to explore the cause of the decease of a 27-year old soldier called John Frederick White. Private White had received 150 lashes under the Martial Court as a result of having assaulted a sergeant with a poker while drunk, at Hounslow barracks, London. Two weeks after the flogging White was found dead in his dorm. Medical officers within the army declared that the soldier had died from inflammation of the pleura and that ‘the cause of death was in no wise [sic] connected with the corporal punishment he received three weeks before’ [ July, 28, p. 7 ]. Interrogated by Wakley, several officers remarked that White’s skin had healed ‘nicely’. Military staff surgeon John Hall, who was the first to see White dead, wrote in a letter to the Army Medical Department that White’s back had healed ‘kindly’. Dr. Warren confirmed to the coroner that his skin had healed rapidly for the first two weeks. A note in the medical book on July 4 stated that his back was quite well and he was fit for duty [Ibid.]. Thomas Wakley was determined to demonstrate that indeed a connection between the flogging and the death of the soldier did exist. The inquest into the flogging at Hounslow was held on four dates, July 15, 20 and 27 and August 3, 1846.

The Times dedicated 38 items to the coverage of the inquest between 16 July and 5 August. These include: eight news articles written by anonymous reporters with updates regarding the inquest as well as extracts of the inquest’s verbatim proceedings; ten verbatim reports of proceedings in the Parliament addressing flogging in the army; five editorials; twelve letters and three adverts. According to The Times , the editor received hundreds of letters on the Hounslow case. It was The Times itself, in a brief printed on 28 July, that stated that despite receiving over 100 letters per day about the flogging at Hounslow the paper could publish only a small selection of them [ July, 28, p. 5 ].

6 The rhetoric and sensationalism of anatomy

During the sitting of the House of Commons that took place on the second day of the Hounslow inquest, the then Secretary at War, Fox Maule blamed the press for misinforming the public regarding the cause of death of Private White. According to Maule [ HC Deb 20 July, 1846 ], the newspaper reports had misled the public by implying that a large piece of skin had been removed from the soldier’s back during the flogging, which suggests that the soldier had been flayed alive. See for example the reaction of a reader who sent a letter, the first to be published on this case, which revolved around the idea of the body cut into pieces.

An ironmaster called William Crawshay [ July, 20, p. 3 ] pointed out that in nineteenth-century England, while the donkey was protected by law, a human being had been cut into pieces. ‘Cut to pieces by a tribunal, itself the prosecutor, judge and jury’, he wrote. This image of the body cut to pieces was triggered by the fact that during a second autopsy, it emerged that a large piece of skin was missing from the soldier’s back.

The piece of skin was eventually found; apparently it had been removed during the first autopsy to check the state of the organs underneath. The inquest could then continue but, by then, newspaper reporters had been caught up by the fascination attached to the mystery of the missing fragment of skin. The danger of attracting public attention to this was that it would have diverted them from the main problem, which was to ascertain the connection between the flogging and death. The missing fragment of skin would not have demonstrated this connection: the fragment of skin was a direct product of dissection and not of flogging. Paradoxically, in this way, public resentment would have focused on the practice of dissection rather than that of flogging.

Maule’s attack on the press furnishes the first occasion for The Times to publish its first editorial connected with the inquest. In this editorial, The Times [ July, 23, p. 4 ] glossed over the medical details, focusing instead on the illegitimacy and barbarism of corporal punishment. This is comprehensible, as addressing Maule’s observations might have reduced the discussion to a pure matter of health whereas at stake were moral principles of human conduct. The editorial alternates between rhetorical interjections, such as ‘Here is the treatment of the English soldier!’ and rhetorical questions such as ‘Do they believe that flogging a man nearly to death reclaims him?’. The attacks on the military system employ emotive words such as ‘horror’, ‘disgust’ and ‘inhumanity’ and bodily metaphors such as ‘painful revelation’ and ‘the heart beats with indignation’. ‘Painful’ is a word rich in connotations: it does not only mean bodily and mental suffering but also shares the same etymology as punishment, from the classical Latin poena . Halfway through the editorial the following anacoluthon appears:

The episode is fragmented into pieces, each of which constitutes a component of the anacoluthon. This fragmentation reminds us of both the body cut into pieces and the suspension of time between each lash being given. In the anacoluthon it is the suspension of time, the lack of logic and the pauses that are dramatically emphasized. Here, the author is describing nothing new but a well-known ritual of military life. The anacoluthon used as a figure of speech is considered a grammatical mistake, due to the lack of syntactical rules. The flogging is an anacoluthon: incoherent and illogical, reflecting the disjointed nature of human thought and the fracture. The reference to bodily discharges ‘bleeding and putrefying wounds’ puts together life and death and the relentless process of gangrene.

In its second editorial, The Times again reverted to the metaphor of the body cut into pieces. In an attempt to explain the distinction between punishment and torture, The Times wrote: ‘Do not cut him into small pieces under pretence of a slight correction’ [ July, 27, p. 4 ]. This second leader was written in response to a letter that raised the question of how many lashes can be administered on a human being without putting the vital organs at risk. Again The Times did not linger on aspects beyond its journalistic competence, yet it translated the concept into adjectives evoking non-quantifiable abundance and excess. It used words that connote quantity, in particular ‘utterly’ and ‘atrocious’. Here is an extract: ‘We wish to revert more particularly to that atrocious system of punishment which has just now been so fearfully illustrated. That the punishment of the lash is so utterly brutalizing… so disgusting… so extravagant… so barbarous’. ‘Atrocious’ is a term of Latin origin where the suffix -ous was used for adjectives indicating abundance. Then we have two adverbs expressing an excessive degree of fear and utter: ‘fearfully’ and ‘utterly’. Analogies on the brutality of torture are then made listing a couple of medieval practices: ‘woman boiled in Smithfield’ or a ‘man disembowelled in Kennington.’

In these editorials the wounds are used as a visual reference to the spectacle of punishment made of blood and pain. The Times said that the story of the soldier being flogged was an offence to English feelings [Ibid.]; it did not say an offence to English knowledge, or an offence to knowledge of the human body. However, that is what was at stake in the inquest: an epistemological problem of a medical nature in connecting external lacerations to death. The Times acknowledged this aspect in a later editorial published in response to a reader who had accused The Times of using too strong language to describe what had happened at Hounslow [ August 1, p. 8 ]. The Times printed: ‘The works lately published by Dr. (Henry) Marshall and Dr (William) Fergusson will convince any person that we have not exaggerated the case’ [ August 1, p. 4 ]. It then quoted some extracts from the works of the cited medical doctors, who had witnessed scenes of flogging where: ‘The man’s back became so black as the darkest mahogany, and greatly swelled’ [Ibid.]. Notice how even in choosing an extract from medical works, The Times selected the most metaphorical language. We will see now how the letters to the editor systematically addressed epistemological problems regarding the skin using a language that appealed to the senses without necessarily being sensational.

7 The medical letters: not only skin deep

The first of the letters that addressed the problem of flogging from a medical point of view was printed on 28 July under the title ‘The Physiology of Flogging’. This represented a shifting point in the news coverage of the story because from this moment on the number of letters with a medical focus exceeded the number of editorials printed. This is most probably due to the fact that the day before, the dermatologist Erasmus Wilson, called by Wakley to present the results of the third autopsy, gave his deposition. During this first deposition, Wilson explained that although the skin had healed, by cutting into the red marks left by the lashes, he had found that the interior of the spine of the soldier was in an extreme state of disorganization; the muscles appeared softened and according to him this had been caused by the contractions of the muscles during the flogging [ July, 28, p. 7 ; Lancet, 1846, pp. 172–179 ]. Censor, the anonymous author of the letter entitled ‘Physiology of Flogging’, identifies himself as someone who studied the effects of flogging on health. His premise is: ‘The skin, which some persons seem to think may be treated like an inorganic substance, has a special relation to the internal organs’ [ July, 28, p. 6 ]. It explains that lashes and any other kind of superficial lacerations affect the power of the heart. As we have seen in the previous section of this paper, in its first editorial on the case, The Times used the image of the heart in a metaphorical expression. It said: ‘the heart beats with indignation’ [ July, 23, p. 4 ]. Here is a first example of the difference between the metaphorical language of the editorials and the more scientific approach adopted by the author of the letter. How does ‘the heart beats with indignation’ translate into medical terms? The letter’s author explains that air falling on the surface of wounded skin is sufficient to cause inflammation of the heart, through the ganglion cells; flogging too may affect the internal organs in this way. This letter adds that the severity of the consequences is not linked to the length of the punishment but to the constitution of whoever receives the lashes [Ibid.]. Eventually, the author of the missive claims that the doctors did not measure White’s pulse the morning after the flogging; nor did they use the stethoscope after two weeks when, although his back was healed, he complained of a pain on his left side. Censor concludes: ‘Flogging is not to be treated of [sic], then, as a thing skin-deep’.

The epistemological function of the letters, whose language mostly appeals to the senses without being sensational, is more evident in that sent by a reader [ July, 28, p. 7 ], who included an extract from a series of lectures delivered by English surgeon John Abernethy at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. The letter draws an analogy between incising the skin with a lash and incising it with a knife for a surgical operation. The surgeon, whose words were reported in the letter, stressed the necessity of treating the skin with extreme care because it is a very sensitive organ and therefore the incision must be carried out under the safest possible conditions. The observation on the promptness of the operation is painful without being sensational. The letter’s sender, who interposed the surgeon’s lesson with his observations, was of the opinion that members of the army should have attended those lectures in order to understand what the surgeon had to say about ‘this keenly sensible portion of the human frame’. A final remark in this letter confirms that the death of someone who has been subjected to lashes is usually by ‘slow degrees, and by disorder of the constitution, after the lacerated parts themselves may have been in a manner healed’. This links back to misunderstanding healing as a sign of recovery. This thesis is confirmed in the letter sent by a student of medicine who copied verbatim in his missive to The Times an extract from On Spasms and other Muscular Disorders (1843) by James Arthur Wilson who documented several cases where tetanus occurred in the cicatrices of wounds inflicted by the lash [ August, 4, p. 7 ].

The employment of a more medical terminology does not preclude the usage of emotive language. In another letter sent by an ex-army officer, signed A.P.W., emotive and medical language are mixed. A.P.W. introduces himself saying he wished to comment on the ‘late melancholy affair at Hounslow’ [ July, 31, p. 3 ]. ‘Melancholy’ is an eloquent word: it combines both a reference to an emotive state, which is sadness, and a reference to medicine. It originally meant a pathological condition resulting from an excess of black bile in the body (OED). A.P.W. describes his experience of witnessing a soldier receiving 100 lashes while enlisted in the ranks of a dragoon regiment. In contrast to the previous letter, here the tone is rather melodramatic and the connection between the heart and flogging is metaphorical again. He writes: ‘I felt every blow on my own heart and they flogged on never minding until his head fell back and it appeared to me that he received the last 25 lashes while in a state of insensibility’. However, this letter is interesting for another reason. The author adds a detail deserving medical attention: the fact that it appeared that the soldier had lost sensibility.

The Times praised the stoical conduct of the soldier whose only request was that the lash might not fall on his neck, as it emerged during the trial [ July, 21, p. 6 ]. In fact one of the witnesses said that during the punishment White cried ‘Lower’ [Ibid.]. This detail was not explained, not even in the letters to The Times . Erasmus Wilson was to explain in The Lancet a few months later the reasons why White cried ‘Lower’ during the flogging. This request might have been dictated by the fact that the cutaneous nerves were so injured that the skin had become benumbed and the pain of the lash diminished [Wilson, 1846 , p. 540]. The soldier might have been asking the farriers to continue striking lower —on the same point— instead of on fresh skin in order to feel less pain [Garrisi, 2015 , p. 7].

A second letter entitled ‘Physiology of Flogging’ clarified the problem of the connection between flogging and the heart, between superficial wounds and inner organs:

8 Inquest ends

Erasmus Wilson, the British dermatologist called by Wakley to perform a third autopsy on the body of White, explained to the jury that widespread injuries to the skin were likely to have produced internal irritation. He gave evidence that in this case the flogging had been followed by a pulpy, softening and deranged state of the muscles [ August, 4, p. 8 ]. The verdict was that Frederick John White died on July 11, 1846, from the mortal effects of the flogging that he received in the cavalry Barracks, Hounslow.

Less than a week after the end of the inquest, following a parliamentary debate on the abolishment of corporal punishment, which had been resumed following the death of White, the Duke of Wellington modified the Articles of War. He established a limit of fifty lashes for corporal punishment. This decision did not go unquestioned in the House of Commons. MP John Bowring [ HC Deb 7 August, 1846 ] made a petition in Parliament calling for the total abolition of flogging. In order to support his argument against flogging, he cited one of the letters The Times had published a few days before: the testimony of English surgeon John Abernethy. John Dinwiddy [ 1982 ] observed that White’s death had had such an effect on public opinion that a series of reforms put in action after the verdict had dramatically reduced the practice before its official abolition in 1881.

9 Conclusions

In this paper I have explored how dermatology in the nineteenth century could be channelled through a newspaper’s correspondence column. Using as a case study The Times coverage of the inquest into the flogging of Private White, I have shown how a sensational and a medical perspective coexisted in the way the story was told. The editorials of The Times had to contend, within the paper itself, with a scientific approach proposed by the readers, most of whom were keen to discuss the effects of flogging on the skin from an anatomical viewpoint. While the editorials did not enlighten the public on the medical flaws demonstrated in the knowledge of the army doctors, the letters did demonstrate that there was an apparent misunderstanding of the physical effects of corporal punishment. Skin lacerations caused by flogging are not only skin deep, and therefore healing should not always be interpreted as a sign of recovery.

This analysis positions The Times as an insightful media outlet to look at in order to reconstruct the on-going debates of the nineteenth century on the effects of corporal punishment on skin. However, one must question the extent to which this exchange of letters was genuine or the product of a carefully orchestrated marketing strategy. At the very beginning of the inquest The Times had to defend its credibility in front of the Secretary at War, who, in Parliament, accused the paper of exaggerating the case. In response to this accusation, The Times did not change its style, as melodrama was a defining characteristic of news reporting, but it published a series of letters that shared some common features in terms of relevance, argument and authority. These letters provided scientific evidence against flogging in the army. They sustain a partisan position and present the skin’s connection to other organs as an argument against anti-corporal punishment. Finally, they contain references to medical authority that are visible either in the signature of the article or in internal references such as citations of medical works. The Times might have seen the letters as instrumental in serving different purposes all aimed at reinforcing its credibility. The medical vocabulary employed by the correspondents diverts attention away from the sensational to the epistemological side of the story. It gives the impression of a dialogue between the paper and its readers where the readers are seen as active contributors to the paper’s content. In other words, it is not The Times that is exaggerating the case but its putatively informed middle-class readers. An additional outcome of publishing the letters to the editor is that it differentiated The Times version of the story from all of the other newspapers. Most newspapers published the verbatim proceedings of the inquest without developing the medical discussion on the effects of flogging on skin; nor did they publish the same number of letters as The Times . So The Times, through the variety of voices expressed in the letters, manifested its unique voice and stance in this story.

The Times might have served a societal purpose in devoting space to a medical debate but at the same time its choice raises the question of how science was used as a marketing device to reinforce the press authority in the eyes of the public. Any consideration of the epistemological role of the newspapers must take into account the commercial premises, the necessity of maintaining credibility in an already crowed mid-Victorian newspapers market. The newspaper, by calling attention to the validity of an analytical study of the skin, also called attention to the validity of the journalistic practice.

10 Acknowledgments

The author thanks Anthony McNicholas, Alex Warwick, Simone Natale and Renate Dohmen for their helpful comments.

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Author

Diana Garrisi is a Research Associate at the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI), University of Westminster. She holds a Ph.D. in Media History from the University of Westminster with a thesis on the news portrayal of dermatology in the Victorian press. Her research interests include media coverage of science, in particular media representation of skin diseases and the popularization of dermatology in nineteenth-century newspapers. Diana Garrisi is the recipient of the 36th Samuel J. Zakon Award in the History of Dermatology. E-mail: dianagarrisi@yahoo.it .