Images of Anti-Slavery in Britain and the US

The UK has the unenviable distinction of having been a global leader in the Atlantic slave trade, second only to Portugal. British ships transported more than three million Africans to the Americas between the 1600s and 1807. The profits of the trade and the labors of the enslaved were huge. 

[Image: British Slave Ship, Insurrection on Board a Slave Ship, Carl Wadstrom, An Essay on Colonization, 1795]

By the late 18th century, a movement to end the trade and eventually slavery itself began to gain momentum in Britain. Anti-slavery sentiment arose from both religious and secular sources. 

Religious sects like the Quakers had long opposed slavery. After mid-century, they were joined in Britain by members of Dissenting (Non-Anglican but Protestant) sects such as Methodists and by some Anglicans. 

The influence of Enlightenment thinkers also played a role. The illustration below, from Voltaire's popular novella Candide, shows Candide and his companion Cacambo encountering a slave who has had his hand destroyed in a mill and a leg cut off for running away. The slave tells them, "This is the price of your eating sugar in Europe."

In the 1780's, the pioneering potter Josiah Wedgwood, Charles Darwin's grandfather, produced the famous medallion below on behalf of the movement to end the slave trade.

The image below, of "tight packing" aboard the slave ship Brookes, was published in Plymouth, England in 1788. It became an icon of the antislavery movement. Mortality onboard such vessels was often enormous. As much as 50% of the "commodity" did not survive the voyage. 

In the same year, British artist George Morland exhibited his sentimental genre painting "The Slave Trade," showing Africans being loaded into boats on the West African coast.

The painting below, by JMW Turner, depicts the infamous case of the slave ship Zong . The Zong Incident occurred in 1783, almost sixty years before Turner painted his take on it. 

When the Zong overshot its intended destination in Jamaica and ran low on water, the captain ordered more than 100 Africans thrown overboard in order to save the rest. The captain claimed insurance on the "lost cargo." The insurance company refused to pay.

In the court case that followed, Lord Chief Justice Mansfield (pictured below), who had effectively declared slavery illegal under English law in 1772, denied the insurance claim. Many people thought the captain and his henchmen should have been tried for murder.

The Zong "Massacre," as it is often called today, galvanized opponents of the slave trade. In its wake, they mounted a mass popular movement to end it, led by MP William Wilberforce. Parliament finally abolished the slave trade in 1807. 

Abolition of slavery itself in the empire followed in 1833, but the institution survived decades longer in many parts of the globe. Turner's painting the Zong Massacre in was done in 1840 for the International Conference on Abolition of Slavery, held in London.

The legal slave trade to the USA ended in 1808, but a clandestine trade and slavery itself lasted until the end of the Civil War. British artist Eyre Crowe produced a famous depiction of a slave sale in Charleston, South Carolina in 1856. 

During the Antebellum Era (1820-1860), abolitionists in the USA produced many anti-slavery images. They tended to focus on the brutality and violence of the slave system, in which slaveowners wielded tyrannical power over their human chattels. Below are a few examples.

Today, a new curriculum for US History in the Florida of Governor Ron DeSantis, emphasizes the "benefits" of slavery to the enslaved.  He is simultaneously at war with one of Florida's biggest economic powerhouses, Disney, Inc. 

There is a certain irony in this. Disney famously produced a film that, inadvertently, perhaps, made slavery look like a Good Barbie land. I refer of course to Song of the South (1946), the movie based on the Uncle Remus Stories of Joel Chandler Harris. 

My, oh my, what a wonderful day! Zippity do da! Zippityay, sings Uncle Remus to the nice little white children of his owner. Yes, it was that good. 

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Masters of Caricature: Thomas Rowlandson

Thomas Rowlandson (1757-1827) was a prolific English caricaturist of the Georgian Age. His cartoons and prints encompassed politics, personality, social life, medicine, death, and other topics both contemporary and timeless. He produced large numbers of illustrations for books, both fiction and non-fiction. 

Many of Rowlandson's published works are bawdy and erotic, certainly by later Victorian standards. His unpublished works included more explicit erotica, which he created for private individuals. 

"The Courtesan" is an example of the milder erotica. An elderly "customer" leers lustily at the young woman, the Georgian equivalent of the modern escort.

A more explicit drawing is "Ladies Trading on their Own Bottom" (1810). Here, an elderly Jewish man seated between two prostitutes is giving them bags marked 100, clearly payment for services rendered.  

In the 1780s Rowlandson became friends with another master caricaturist, James Gillray. Gillray's success producing satirical prints encouraged Rowlandson to try his hand at it. Together, he and Gillray helped to make the pugnacious John Bull a personification of Britain and British resistance to the French and Napoleon. 

One of Rowlandson's forays into political caricature was a series he did on the electoral campaigning of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. The story is related in the 2008 film The Duchess, starring Keira Knightley, and by yours truly elsewhere. 

The Duchess' political activities aroused a scandal. Rowlandson took full advantage of the situation, portraying her mingling with and even kissing men from the lower orders. The cartoons implied that she was acting much like a common woman of the streets. [See Scandal: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and the British Election of 1784] 

Rowlandson seems to have been a bit obsessed with the Duchess. Despite the implied criticism in his electoral cartoons, I think he may have had a secret crush on her. His depictions of her were not always political. An example is a watercolor, "A Gaming Table at Devonshire House" (1787).

Devonshire House was the London residence of Georgiana and her husband the duke, where they (or she) threw many lavish parties. Here, Rowlandson pictures the Duchess in a hat throwing the dice during a game of faro. Her sister, also hatted, is reaching into her purse for more money. One of the young men at the table is the Prince of Wales, the future George IV, who famously gambled away a fortune. 

The painting is dripping with sensuality. Rowlandson may have been criticizing Georgiana's fondness for gambling but he was an avid and often successful gambler himself. He certainly captures her famous beauty here. 

Rowlandson was equally fascinated with the more grisly business of anatomy and one of its offshoots, body snatching. He produced a number of prints showing anatomists and their pupils dissecting corpses. on the right, the man in the brown coat is looking at a price list for bodies. [Image: "The Dissecting Room"]

In "The Persevering Surgeon" Rowlandson adds a touch of eroticism. The surgeon is about to dissect the body of a young woman, and seems to be leering lustily at her breasts. 

Rowlandson also portrayed the business of securing the "subjects" of dissection. Body snatching, as it was known, involved stealing freshly dead bodies. It was an illegal, but highly profitable trade. 

Obtaining enough bodies legally, even for teaching purposes, was difficult. The growth of anatomy schools in the late 18th century increased the demand for them far beyond the legal supply. 

Anatomists and their pupils often hunted for subjects. Starting in the late 18th century, professional gangs of "Sack Em Up Men," also known as "Resurrection Men," helped to supply the deficiency. They obtained the goods from cemeteries, dead houses, and hospital morgues. In some infamous cases they murdered people to sell their bodies. 

Rowlandson portrayed their nocturnal work in prints such as "The Resurrection Men." 

You may have noticed the presence of skeletons in the previous images. They obviously represent Death, the nemesis of us all, and the great equalizer. They appear in many of Rowlandson's prints. an example is "Death in the Dissecting Room." Here, Avenging Death makes a sudden appearance, terrorizing the anatomists and the body snatcher hauling in a fresh subject. 

Rowlandson's interest in the grisly and macabre is also seen in his drawing of men hanging from a gibbet along the Thames. 

 

In 1814, a friend of Rowlandson's, George Henry Harlow, produced this portrait of him. He was then in his late 50s and at the peak of his career. He died in 1827. 

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Anatomy, John Hunter, and the Irish Giant

Visitors to London's Leicester Square today find it a place of entertainment and perhaps a bit of naughtiness. Eating, drinking, theater, and gambling are on offer. Few of the visitors are aware that once the square was home to a major center for teaching surgery and anatomy. Untold numbers of dissections took place there, of both human and animal bodies. 

During the late 18th century, Leicester Square was the location of the anatomy school of the renowned (and sometimes reviled) surgeon John Hunter. His bust once graced the central area of the square but was removed as part of a renovation in 2012. It is unlikely that many visitors ever gave it more than a passing glance anyway. They are usually there for other reasons than absorbing a bit of history.

The younger brother of anatomist William Hunter, John learned his trade working for William. The business included the art of body snatching, the main source of human corpses for dissection until the 1830's. Eventually, the brothers fell out and John went his own way.

After serving as an army surgeon for several years, John set up his own anatomy school, which eventually settled at the Square. The building, which also contained his house and an extensive anatomical museum, now houses a pub. (below)

Directly across the square lay the house of his friend Joshua Reynolds, a portrait painter of the wealthy who had a strong interest in anatomy. Reynolds' house is now a bar. But don't knock Progress.

Hunter dissected every type of human or animal he could lay his hands on. His subjects included the famous Irish Giant, Charles Byrne or O'Brien, pictured at the top of the post in a print by Thomas Rowlandson from 1785. 

Hunter acquired the giant's body against the deceased's wishes by bribing the man who had it, allegedly for the then enormous sum of 500 pounds. Hilary Mantel wrote a novel about Hunter's pursuit of the Irishman's corpse, The Giant, O'Brien (1998).

In the painting of Hunter below, one can see part of the giant's skeleton, at top right. The painting today is on display at St. George's Hospital in Tooting. Hunter was chief surgeon at St. George's when it was located near Hyde Park. Today the hospital boasts one of the top cardiology units in the UK. I had the good fortune to benefit from it a couple of years ago. 

Ironically, Hunter himself died of a heart attack in 1793. It happened during a heated argument with the governors of St. George's Hospital. It may have been a burst aneurysm. 

Animals of all kinds, lower as well as higher, went under John Hunter's dissecting knives. He maintained a large menagerie at his suburban house at Earl's Court, including kangaroos, giraffes, and leopards. [Images: Hunter's house at Earl's Court.]

Hunter's huge anatomical collection, or what survives of it, now resides in the Hunterian Museum, at the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln's Inn Fields. Among the exhibits is the skeleton of the Irish Giant. It's fascinating stuff, but definitely not for the squeamish. [Image 1: Part of the Hunterian Collection Image 2: The skeleton of the giant]

In 1771, Hunter married Anne Home, a poet who wrote the lyrics to 14 of Franz Joseph Haydn's English songs. She and Haydn met after her husband's death. They became close friends. How close is a matter of speculation. 

Hunter left Anne in straitened financial circumstances. In 1799, she sold her husband's anatomical collection to the government for the then huge sum of £15,000. The government gave the collection to the Royal College of Surgeons. 

In 1776, Hunter became surgeon to King George III. In 1790, Prime Minister William Pitt appointed Hunter Surgeon General of the British Army. In the latter post he instituted reforms to insure that surgeons were recruited on the basis of ability rather than family connections.

Further Reading:

Wendy Moore, The Knife Man (London: Penguin, 2006)

Druin Burch, Digging up the Dead  (London: Vintage, 2008)

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The National Health Service at 75: The Best Present the UK Ever Gave Itself

July 5, 2023 is the 75th anniversary of the opening of the National Health Service in the UK. The NHS was established in 1948 by the Labour government that had won the election of 1945. The main principle of the NHS was that medical care should be free at the point of service. 

The NHS is not an insurance scheme, such as exists in Canada and most European countries with universal health care systems. The NHS is funded out of general taxation. Everyone is covered, not only citizens but non-citizen residents, and even persons visiting the country. It remains free at the point of service, except for some types of dental and eye care.

Opponents, and there were many, argued that the infant service would never work. The country couldn't afford it, they said. But that child has survived for 75 years, and is the most beloved institution in the country. 

Although I have lived most of my life in the USA, I have extensive personal experience of the NHS. I lived in Scotland until age 6. I returned to the UK numerous times as a professor of British history, and moved to London in 2009. 

As a young boy I remember receiving penicillin for ear infections and extensive care for a vision problem caused by measles (the measles vaccine did not exist then). But I did not remember much about the NHS during my early years in the USA.

During the Cold War in the 1950's and early 60's, I learned that socialized health care is communist; that it does not work; and that the American fee for service system was the best in the world. Who  was I to dispute it?

None of these claims was true. But if you hear a lie often enough you may begin to believe it. I suppose I did although I’m not sure I was ever completely convinced. In any event, several things led me to a different view. 

One is that I studied British history as an undergraduate in the mid-1960's, and later earned a PhD in Modern British history. Among other things, I learned about the NHS, the poor provision of health care that preceded it, and the marked improvements since.

Second, and more important, I discovered the reality of the NHS through personal experience as an adult. I benefited the service (free of charge) in 1971 while residing in the UK as a PhD student, and on other occasions while doing research as a history professor. 

Since moving to the UK in 2009, my family and I have benefited numerous times from the NHS, for minor and major ailments. My wife received excellent care on two occasions when she was in hospital for life-threatening conditions. I received similar care and attention after suffering a heart attack in June 2021.

Because we are over 60, our prescriptions are free. For under 60s, they cost a flat fee of £9.65 or @$12.00 at current exchange rates.

Another great plus of the NHS is that I do not fear medical bankruptcy, which strikes about 600,000 people a year in the US. Less important, but still significant, I do not have to fill out insurance forms when I need service. Nor do I have to choose from a bewildering array of insurance options.

The NHS is expensive, as any health care system will be. But it is far more efficient in a fiscal sense than the chaotic mess that masquerades as a health care system in the USA. As proportions of national income, the UK spends about half the amount that the US does. That is also true of European countries with national insurance systems. The US public is being ripped-off bigtime.

The NHS is not perfect. Far from it. Americans are told that waiting times for service are long. That is sometimes true, and they have gotten longer in the last few years. The pandemic and Brexit have been the main causes, combined with inadequate investment in the service during the last thirteen years of Conservative (Tory) government. 

The pandemic forced an overstretched staff to put off treating many chronic disorders to focus on saving acute cases of Covid. Brexit caused an exodus of staff from the EU. Insufficient investment and poor planning led to underpayment of staff, causing further losses of nurses, doctors, and allied health professionals. Many of them have left due to a combination of overwork, stress, and falling real incomes.

Opponents of a universal system in the USA claim that care in the NHS is "rationed" and that "death panels" decide who will live and die. This is total rubbish. The US has de facto death panels called "health insurance" corporations. They can decide who will and who will not receive a particular treatment. Such decisions can and often are a death sentence.  

Some British politicians, mostly Tory, would like to privatize more of the system, to make it more “American.” That would be an utter disaster. The NHS is the best present the British ever gave themselves. 

Anyone who has paid attention to the rest of the world should realize by now that some form of single payer system that covers everyone and is free or nearly free at the point of service, is both more humane and more efficient than anything that exists or is even under consideration in the USA. 

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