English delftware drug jar for balsam, cherub and shell design, wet, front spout type 14, rear handle.
Inscription
BALSAM.
Production date
1746
Associated place
Richmond
Labels
This jar comes from a collection passed down through the Bowes family, many of whom worked as apothecaries and doctors. Born in 1770, Christopher Bowes was an English surgeon who became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England on November 6th 1788. He operated as a naval surgeon as well as an apothecary, residing in Richmond, North Yorkshire. During the 1790s, Bowes worked as a surgeon on the slave-ship Lord Stanley, which regularly sailed out of Liverpool and transported enslaved people from Africa to the Caribbean.
A surviving record of one of these voyages is from Bowes himself, in the form of a medical log. The log details the number of enslaved individuals who were onboard the ship, the sickness rate, and any treatments they were given. The particular voyage that the log corresponds to would see 16 deaths from a total of 389 recorded enslaved people onboard the Lord Stanley. At a 4% mortality rate, this figure would be too high for Bowes to earn a bonus for keeping the enslaved passengers alive. Within the medical log itself, Bowes begins to assign people numbers as opposed to using their names, as the rate of sickness upon the ship was so severe. The log reveals that in many cases, Bowes was unsure of what particular illnesses they were suffering from, and even after his attempts at treatment, the patient would die soon after.
Sir Ronald Ross, a tropical disease specialist who discovered that malaria is spread by mosquitoes, read Christopher Bowes' papers in 1911 in order to try and identify the illnesses the enslaved people were suffering from. He wrote to Bowes' descendant, Dr Arthur Bowes Elliot: "Quite possibly many of them had tried to poison themselves on being captured. Africans are experts at poisoning. Or it might have been some sort of diarrhoea similar to what infants get in this country." This reflects the long-running prejudices which informed medical attitudes towards non-white patients for centuries, and which continue to restrict access to correct diagnoses today.
