Lucy Moynihan reflects on a recent workshop exploring and interpreting archives of medical racism in Liverpool.
Lucy Moynihan is a PhD student in the Department of History.
In May, historical researchers, heritage professionals, and practitioners from across the Liverpool city region gathered at the Central Library for the second workshop co-organised by Dr Stephen Kenny and Dr Alexander Scott on archives of medical racism in Liverpool.
This followed their first event held in November, which invited researchers working with these traumatic histories to reflect on the interconnected legacies of enslavement and medical knowledge. It felt especially pertinent that the most recent workshop session was held on William Brown Street, just across the way from the site of Liverpool’s first infirmary complex and the so-called ‘dark triangle’ of sites connected to medical racism.
Our conversations throughout the afternoon were focussed on the history and memory (or misremembering) of enslavement, medical knowledge and the consequential legacies of health inequalities which disproportionately affect Black people as a result.
Dr Stephen Kenny introduced us to the first Liverpool Infirmary, which was opened in 1749 and became an instrumental site in the networks of transatlantic slavery in the town. The infirmary was built on the site that St. George’s Hall now occupies, and it was neighboured by other institutions of medical knowledge, including the Liverpool Medical Library and the Asylum. These formed an integrated medical complex which received funding and support from enslavers, traffickers, and a range of commercial, civic, and cultural bodies in the town.
Figure 1 Photograph of the Liverpool Royal Infirmary List of Donors of Twenty Guineas and Upwards 1748 to 1889 (614 INF/10/4), showing donations from the Underwriters in Liverpool, the Ancient Lodge of Free Masons and the Liverpool-Barbados firm Barton, Irlam & Higginson.
The connection between the medical complex and enslavement went beyond financial capital – the first infirmary became the site where those wishing to qualify as slaving ship surgeons would come to be examined and get their certification. Dr Khalil West shared the findings from his research into the Infirmary records, revealing that between August 1779 and April 1807, nearly 800 so-called ‘African surgeons’ were certified at the infirmary. Following the Dolben Act of 1788, it became law that every British slaving vessel was required to carry a certified surgeon on board to monitor the health of the enslaved people and the crew. This was not an act of care – even though we might normally think of a medical intervention as being concerned with the health of the people affected by legislation like this. There was no place for care in a system which saw captive Africans as inventoried property. The surgeons were employed to ensure minimum mortality, and therefore higher profits for Liverpool slaving merchants. The surgeons were examined at Liverpool by medical men like Dr James Currie and Dr John Rutter, two figures who are often associated with William Roscoe and networks of abolitionists in the town. They were both instrumental in establishing the Liverpool Athenaeum, a library and newsroom founded in 1797, which is the subject of my PhD research. By certifying hundreds of men as African surgeons, they maintained the system of transatlantic slavery.
It was striking to learn that African surgeons were examined at the Infirmary on the first Tuesday of every month – the same day that committee meetings for the Athenaeum took place. Following the workshop, I went back to the Athenaeum’s records to investigate how these sites of knowledge in Liverpool operated within this ecosystem of institutions which disseminated racialised ideas.
On Tuesday 4 February 1800, Dr Currie, Dr Rutter, and Dr James McCartney attended the monthly committee meeting at the recently opened Athenaeum. They were joined by William Roscoe, Robert Norris, and enslaving president George Case. During the meeting they ordered fifty-six books for the library, including Woodville’s Medical Botany, Matthew Hale’s Primitive Origination of Mankind and Charles White’s An Account of the Regular Gradation of Man. That they ordered White’s racist account is especially significant, given that he conducted part of his unethical research at the first Liverpool Infirmary complex. Having placed an order for a book that not only disseminated racial myths about Black people, but also whose author had ties to Liverpool, Rutter, Currie and McCartney would have made their way across town from Church St to the Infirmary on Lime St where they would have examined a new cohort of slaving ship surgeons. This case study of a single day reveals that the history of medical racism in Liverpool is cross-institutional, and as West’s talk urged us, requires us to ‘follow the broken lines’ of the city’s archive.
Institutions of knowledge, like the libraries I research, and the Liverpool Infirmary Complex, were not neutral sites of knowledge formation – these institutional sites continue to be spaces where racialised ideas and colonial power consolidated and reproduced. The words of Jioni Warner, who presented on her work as curator at the Thackray Museum of Medicine in Leeds, invited us to consider how museums and heritage spaces can begin to address these histories in a meaningful way in conversation with affected communities and the public.
One of the guiding questions which we kept returning to throughout the day concerned reckoning with these violent histories, especially when we consider the city of Liverpool and the built environment itself as an archive. How do we acknowledge the pain, the consolidation of colonial power, and the resistance that is woven into the fabric of the city’s past? I do not think we have reached an answer to these questions yet, in a history fractured and laced with a culture of amnesia and misremembering. However, I think that Anna-Louise Loy’s artistic intervention beautifully re-inserted agency and dignity for the millions of enslaved Africans who were victims of transatlantic chattel slavery – reminding us that they continually resisted and survived in spite of the violence they were subject to. Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation reminds us that the history of enslavement can never be fully recovered from an archive of violence, but by historians, researchers, artists and creative practitioners working collectively to address these histories, we can begin to engage in reparative history and address the legacies of medical racism in the present. As Alexandre White, Pyar Seth and Victoria Lane wrote in the foreword to the volume Uprising and Resistance, ‘Where history loses form, art and poetry take shape.’
Figure 2 above: Artwork responding to the Register of African Surgeons by Anna-Louise Loy.