by Neil McKenna
There was no doubt in Dr Barwell’s mind that this young man’s chancre ‘would have been communicated by a person who had the disease, and not by slight or mere contact’. While he could not be absolutely certain that this young man had been sodomised (though the gaping anus strongly suggested that he had), at the very least there had been direct and prolonged sexual contact between a syphilitic penis and this young man’s anus.
The sore was not the worst he had ever seen, but nor was it slight either. ‘With energetic treatment such a sore would be healed in two months or ten weeks, sometimes much sooner,’ Dr Barwell said. He gave Fanny a battery of medicines: iodide of mercury, bichloride of mercury, iodide of potash and a weak solution of carbolic acid as a mild disinfectant.
Twice a week, every week, as winter turned into spring, Fanny put on the same old cutaway coat and the same shabby plaid trousers and attended Dr Barwell’s surgery at Charing Cross Hospital in character as a poor but respectable clerk. Dr Barwell remained stern and aloof, and Fanny knew better than to engage him in conversation. Sometimes he would examine her bottom and sometimes merely take her own account. Mercifully, the sore was healing, and Fanny learnt to recognise the little grunt of approval Dr Barwell made when things were progressing well.
In April 1870, after almost two months of treatment, Fanny’s visits to the hospital abruptly ceased. Dr Barwell was mildly surprised, as this person had been assiduous in keeping his appointments. But it was common for attendance to fall off once the sore had healed. This young man was almost cured, though not quite, and Dr Barwell would have liked to have continued seeing him for a few more weeks yet.
But before he knew it there were two policemen standing on the doorstep of his house on a Saturday morning in the middle of May. A young man had been arrested upon suspicion of sodomy, they said, and they ‘insisted upon his accompanying them to see if he could identify his patient’. Dr Barwell refused. He was a doctor, not a policeman, and he would have no part in these proceedings if he could help it. He had strong professional obligations of confidentiality, even to avowed or suspected sodomites, and he was, he said, ‘most unwilling to be mixed up in such an unpleasant business’. But the policemen would not take no for an answer. If Dr Barwell refused, they would apply to Mr Flowers for a summons, forcing him to make the identification. And if he refused to answer that summons, he would be in contempt of court and they would arrest him. He had no choice in the matter.
‘And so,’ as the Lancet reported, ‘ Dr Barwell was thus most unwillingly made a witness for the Crown.’
19
The Battle of the Bottoms
An Awkward Question
‘Mamma dear,’ said the youth, ‘what is the meaning of the word bugger?’
‘Bugger, my child? Why do you ask?’
‘Because I heard my tutor call the coachman a damn bugger.’
‘Well, my child,’ replied the Marchioness, ‘a bugger is a person who does his fellow an injury behind his back.’ Cough.
The Pearl, 1880
T he consulting room at Newgate Gaol had rarely been so crowded. Crammed inside along with Fanny and Stella, there were no fewer than six doctors, four prison warders, three detectives, two medical orderlies, Mr Abrams the solicitor and a gentleman from the Treasury who was there to represent the public interest. There was barely room to swing a cat.
That afternoon in early June was especially fine and warm, which was all very well outside in God’s fresh air, but in the dank and airless confines of Newgate, with its unmistakable and pervasive smell of prison rot – a rank combination of unwashed bodies, disease, sewage, despair and hopelessness – the stench and the heat were overwhelming. Several of the gentlemen in attendance felt decidedly faint, and only the strong odour of carbolic in the consulting room prevented them from actually keeling over.
F anny and Stella had been transferred to Newgate at the end of May. As the web of conspiracy seemed to grow ever larger, and the case against them assumed greater and greater seriousness, the House of Detention in Coldbath Fields was deemed inadequate to contain such dangerous prisoners.
In Newgate they could be held ‘in close prison’, or solitary confinement, so that the contagion of sodomy and effeminacy which they both carried within their bodies would not taint the other prisoners. ‘We are of the opinion that there is much danger of contamination among younger prisoners,’ a Report by the Departmental Committee on Prisons had concluded when considering this very subject. ‘They are of an age when curiosity stimulates the inherited or acquired depravity which is so often found in young criminals.’
The extraordinary scene in the consulting room at Newgate Gaol was the consequence of an impasse between the Crown, who wanted unambiguous and unarguable forensic proof that Fanny and Stella had been repeatedly sodomised, and the defence, who wanted to prove the exact opposite.
As things stood, the defence appeared to be at a slight advantage, having already despatched Dr Hughes, Dr Harvey and the splendidly named Dr Le Gros Clark to examine Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park in the House of Detention a fortnight earlier. Their conclusions, reached after a very thorough examination, were the very opposite of those reached by Dr Paul, the police surgeon who had examined Boulton and Park the morning after their arrest, and by Dr Barwell, who said he had treated Park for syphilis of the anus. According to Dr Hughes, Dr Harvey and Dr Le Gros Clark, there was nothing abnormal about these two young men’s penises, and nothing in, on or around their anuses or rectums which betrayed any evidence of unnatural crime – just a small scar, a cicatrix, on the outside of Stella’s anus where she had been operated upon for fistula in ano early in 1869.
Now half a dozen ‘eminent medical gentlemen’ – from both sides, and from no side, of the argument – would examine these young men for forensic signs of sodomy. And to ensure that everything was above board and out in the open, the examinations would be conducted while they were all assembled together in the consulting room of Newgate Gaol. According to the newspapers the examinations were to take place ‘by the direction of the Government’, a decision taken at the highest levels, and it was said that the Attorney-General himself had taken personal charge of the case.
‘Eminent medical gentlemen’ was how they were described in the newspapers, though there was medical eminence and there was medical eminence. The undoubted star of their troupe was Dr Alfred Swaine Taylor of Guy’s Hospital. He was remarkable for the fact that he was a Professor twice over, simultaneously holding two chairs at Guy’s: in chemistry and in medical jurisprudence. He was the most celebrated medical jurist of his day, having almost single-handedly pioneered the science of forensic medicine.
Dr Taylor’s first book, A Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, was published in 1836, when he was just thirty years old, and had already run to eight editions. He had appeared as an expert witness in over four hundred trials, and he was feared and loved in equal measure by the guilty and the innocent.
With his shock of dark hair, now streaked with silver, Dr Taylor looked much younger than his sixty-four years. He was insatiably curious about everything, a polymath, with interests ranging from the physics of geology to the chemistry of photography. He was an expert in poisons and in the classification of gunshot wounds, and an early pioneer in the use of chloroform. By a strange coincidence, it was Dr Taylor who had administered chloroform to Ernest Boulton during the operation for fistula in ano performed by Dr Hughes at the Boulton family home in Peckham Rye in February 1869.
By an even stranger coincidence, it was Dr Taylor who, thirty-six years earlier, had performed the post-mortem dissection on the young actress Eliza Edwards, and made a startling, not to say disturbing, discovery: Eliza Edwards was in fact a man – of sorts.
By a third bizarre coincidence it was as a student at Dr Taylor’s celebrated series of lectures, in the early 1850s, that Dr James Thomas Paul had first heard about sodomy and sodomites, and about young men who dressed as young women. He had been inspired, if th
at was the right word, to discover more, and it became quite a passion with him. The wheel had turned full circle, but Dr Paul would not be there to meet his old mentor. The defence were adamant. They would not brook his presence.
Hot on the heels of Dr Taylor in the stakes of medical eminence came Dr Frederick Le Gros Clark, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, Examiner of the University of London, Chair of Surgery at St Thomas’s Hospital, Examiner of Surgeons to the Royal College of Physicians and so on and so forth. Dr Le Gros Clark was already well acquainted with the private parts of the two young men in women’s clothes, having examined them just a fortnight earlier in company with Dr Hughes and Dr Harvey. None of them could find any sign of sodomy, insertive or receptive, so Dr Le Gros Clark could be counted as a witness for the defence.
The third medical gentleman who could justly lay claim to eminence was Dr Henry James Johnson, a distinguished surgeon who for the best part of forty years had specialised in les souvenirs d’amour, the diseases of love. Now nearly seventy, Dr Johnson was still remarkably upright and remarkably active. He had a large private practice in Suffolk Place, off Trafalgar Square, and those gentlemen unfortunate enough to contract a dose would hasten in a closed carriage to his consulting rooms where they could be assured of the best and most up-to-date treatment for their condition.
For two years, from 1832 to 1833, he was the House Surgeon at the old London Lock Hospital, which had been set up in 1746 to provide free treatment for syphilis and other such afflictions to the poor, and it was here that he had developed his formidable knowledge and expertise in all diseases venereal.
In 1851, after recovering from a long illness from which he fully expected to die, he published Gonorrhoea and Its Consequences, which was among the first books to argue that gonorrhoea was an infectious disease in its own right: not a local irritation; not a weakened form of syphilis; and emphatically not an unfortunate consequence for the male of the species of those constricting ‘vaginal spasms’ experienced by women (especially prostitutes) when overly aroused during sexual intercourse.
With Dr Johnson, the real medical eminence of their group ended. Dr William Hughes, who was also one of the party, was of course a highly respected and respectable doctor in general practice in Fenchurch Street, but he could lay no conceivable claim to expertise on the subject of sodomy or post-sodomitic symptoms. Dr Hughes was there for one reason only: having operated on Boulton’s fistula a year earlier, he was privy to the pertinent medical history of one of the young men in question.
Equally, Dr Barwell was under no illusions about the reasons for his own presence in the consulting room at Newgate Gaol on this sticky afternoon in June. He was there because, like Dr Hughes, he had compelling and pertinent medical knowledge of one of the defendants: the young man he now knew to be called Frederick Park. Having treated this young man for an unambiguous and unarguable chancre of the anus, he supposed himself to be a witness for the prosecution.
Dr John Rowland Gibson, the Surgeon of Newgate Gaol, was the sixth and final member of this medical troupe. It would have been an impossible professional discourtesy for him not to be present in his own consulting room while the two prisoner-patients under his care and control were examined by colleagues. By any standard of medical etiquette, he had to be present and he had to participate in the proceedings.
To give him his due, Dr Gibson’s many years of experience of attending to the medical needs of the very worst of God’s creatures must have given him insights into the dark depravities and feralities of the criminal body and the criminal mind, insights not usually granted to doctors. Among Dr Gibson’s many duties was to testify as to the sanity – or otherwise – of murderers and rapists and other hardened criminals, and to certify that those executed within the prison walls were properly dead when taken down from the gibbet. With such a rare and unusually solemn practice, Dr Gibson might be expected to detect those outward bodily signs and deformations – visible only to the trained eye – which betrayed the inner diseased pathology of the criminal and the degenerate.
Likewise, with his long experience of criminals, Dr Gibson might well be able to intuit certain incorporeal qualities about his patients, such as patterns of lying, auras of deceit, miasmas of criminality, airs of guilt – or even innocence. In any and in all events, Dr Gibson would bring something different and strange to these very different and very strange proceedings.
Notwithstanding the eminence of the six medical gentlemen present, only three of them had any actual experience of the signs and symptoms of sodomy: Professor Taylor with Eliza Edwards, almost forty years previously; Dr Johnson, who claimed to have seen one certain case of receptive sodomy among the outpatients of the Lock Hospital – again, almost forty years earlier; and Dr Barwell himself, who, after a lifetime of professional innocence in such matters, had this very year seen three young men with afflictions of the rectum in as many weeks. With the best part of 150 years’ combined knowledge and experience, these six doctors had examined the back passages of just five confirmed sodomites.
British doctors laboured under a disadvantage when it came to trying to determine whether or not Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park had been sodomised. If it was the case indeed, as one and all were only too ready to proclaim, that sodomy was a rare and alien fungoid in the sexual flora of the British Isles, then it stood to reason that British doctors would neither have, nor need to have, forensic knowledge or experience of the tell-tale signs of sodomy.
It was widely felt that any disagreement between the six eminent medical gentlemen on whether or not these two young men had been sodomised would be detrimental to the reputation of the medical profession. The Lancet confessed to ‘a feeling of apprehension lest a new scandal may be caused by directly conflicting medical testimony’ in ‘this very grave case’ and felt sufficiently exercised to devote an entire editorial to the delicate subject of knowledge (or rather, the lack of knowledge) of sodomy among English doctors.
So how could a fair verdict be reached, a verdict based on sound scientific principles and on observable forensic evidence? The Lancet felt ‘most strongly’ that the Government ‘should place the medical evidence for the prosecution in the hands of a select committee of medical men’. Given the dearth of home-grown experience in ‘this very repulsive subject’, the Lancet urged the Government to recruit the two leading French specialists in sodomy, Monsieur Ricord and Monsieur Tardieu, to work in coalition ‘with two English medical men of the highest eminence’.
I n the consulting room at Newgate, Fanny and Stella lay upon identical couches, their nakedness covered by coarse brownish sheets with the words ‘Newgate Prison’ emblazoned in letters three inches high. Both of them were sorry sights now: pale, unshaven and undernourished. Their plucked and tweezered eyebrows were beginning to grow out of shape, and their eyes were dull. Neither of them appeared to evince any surprise at the presence of so many people in the consulting room. Mr Abrams had no doubt warned them what they must expect, and they waited patiently for what they knew must happen.
Apart from the mandatory bath in filthy water upon admission to Newgate Gaol, facilities for washing were almost non-existent. ‘The two things most neglected in Her Majesty’s prisons are cleanliness and godliness,’ recorded one inmate of Newgate. Apart from a damp rag and the occasional basin of brackish water grudgingly allowed before a court appearance, prisoners were unable to keep themselves clean. Fanny and Stella had done their best, but their private parts and their backsides were in an unwashed and decidedly unpleasant state.
Quite apart from the closeness of the room, the malodorous state of Fanny and Stella and the overwhelming stench of prison rot (to which only Dr Gibson seemed oblivious), the atmosphere in the room was tense. As the Lancet had prophesied, the medical gentlemen present were in profound and uncomfortable disagreement. The hospitable preliminaries of Dr Gibson had fallen flat, and even Dr Le Gros Clark’s fabled ‘dignified courtesy of manner’ failed to ease the tension.
<
br /> Each medical gentleman took his turn to examine the two young men. Their genitalia would be looked at first: penis, testicles and scrotum lifted, pulled, squeezed and peered at; foreskin rolled back; and the meatus, the lips of the urethra, pinched and prised apart to see if there was any discharge. Then they would be asked to turn over and lie flat while their buttocks were carefully parted and scrutinised, before they were instructed to stand up and bend over the couch while their anuses were minutely examined.
Dr Johnson had bought with him a large and powerful lens for the purpose of magnification, and also a speculum, the hugely unpopular and painful device shaped like the beak of a duck used to force open the vaginas of prostitutes suspected of being diseased. Which in a way was entirely right and proper, if it was true that these young men had so unmanned themselves, so unsexed themselves, that they had allowed men to use them as common prostitutes.
E ven if they had not actually read the controversial works of the sodomite-hunter Professor Ambroise Tardieu, or the marginally less rabid, marginally more rational discourse of his recently deceased German colleague Dr Johann Ludwig Casper, most of the medical gentlemen present had a broad idea of what they were looking for.
There were, Professor Tardieu had decreed, three ‘characteristic signs of passive pederasty’. First, infundibulum, or a funnel-shaped depression of the anal cleft caused by the intense pressure applied by the penis of the insertive sodomite to the anus of the receptive partner in order to gain ingress.
Second, erasure of the rugae, the characteristic puckerings and ridges around the anus. The mechanics of sodomy eroded and erased these rugae, literally wore them away, partially or completely, and when such erasure was present, sodomy must be presumed to have been the cause. When, as a young man, Professor Taylor had examined the anus of ‘Miss Eliza’ Edwards post-mortem, the rugae had been entirely obliterated. Such was the alchemy of sodomy that the anus resembled female labia.