The Scurvy Scandal at Millbank Penitentiary: A Reassessment

Historical myths die hard: one such is of a supposed outbreak of scurvy—said by some to be the result of medical insouciance—at Millbank penitentiary in 1823. Thus, Sean McConville in his masterly account of prisons in the reform period writes: ‘‘The decision [to reduce the diet] was a major factor in the scurvy epidemic which followed shortly afterwards, causing at least thirty deaths’’. Other authors take a similar line: ‘‘Fifteen months later, after 30 had died, and after the whole convict population had been evacuated from the prison, Holford was convinced that the disease had been sea-scurvy’’; ‘‘there was a serious outbreak of scurvy not long after the new diet was adopted’’; ‘‘In the winter of 1823, the inmates began to succumb to typhus, dysentery, and scurvy. Thirty-one died and four hundred others were incapacitated’’; ‘‘The scurvy was the prevailing disease, and was seen in over half of the 860 inmates’’. Joe Sim in his generally condemnatory evaluation of medical staff working in prisons states: ‘‘Millbank was at the centre of a major controversy when an outbreak of scurvy occurred and thirty-one prisoners died. The [Prison Medical Service] was deeply implicated’’, and he goes on to associate the physician in charge with ‘‘experiments’’ on the bodies and minds of the confined. The myth’s origin is easy to trace—a six-page report produced by two physicians, Dr P M Latham and Dr P M Roget, summoned on 28 February 1823 to enquire into the nature of an alarming increase in disease and deaths in the prison. The report in question (5 April 1823) states: ‘‘We found the prevailing disease to be the same with that which is known by the name of Sea Scurvy . . . Conjoined with the scurvy, in almost every case, there was diarrhoea or dysentery’’, and: ‘‘we found more than one half of the whole number of