Dr Nicholas Duvall will be speaking about a conference presentation he is set to deliver next month based on his research on the Prison Medical Service, entitled 'Disorder, Disillusion and Disrepute': Medicine and the Prison Medical Service, 1970-1990'. Please find his abstract below.

Staff and students are warmly invited, so if you wish to attend please RSVP to Sheilagh Holmes. Refreshments and a lights lunch will be provided!

Abstract

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Prison Medical Service, the body responsible for coordinating the healthcare of inmates in prisons in England and Wales, was the subject of considerable, critical attention, from both the public and other sections of the medical profession. This was partly due to the service’s involvement in practices widely perceived to be harmful, including the forcible feeding of hunger strikers; the alleged overprescribing of psychotropic medication; and doctors’ participation in the disciplinary regime of the prison. Additionally, they practised within an environment widely held to be deleterious to the health of inmates, particularly those who were mentally ill. These factors, and the fact that the Prison Medical Service was not part of the National Health Service, combined to make prison medicine appear isolated and disreputable. This paper will examine how prison doctors, responding to this hostility, fashioned their identity within the medical profession, and how this shaped their relations with other doctors. It will add nuance to the limited existing historiography on prison medicine, which has hitherto largely focused on power relations between inmates and medical staff. By drawing on contemporary medical journals and official inquiries, which offer a range of medical and lay views, I will show that prison medicine’s identity was complex. While its representatives were defensive when their own competence and ethics were challenged on the pages of the medical press, they were also, at times, critical of unhealthy aspects of prison life, such as rudimentary sanitation and the difficulty of finding beds for mentally ill inmates in psychiatric hospitals. This latter problem was a source of resentment in the relationship between prison doctors and their counterparts outside, whose intransigence in the face of potentially difficult patients was readily blamed for problems transferring these prisoners to more suitable accommodation. Understanding the quality of this relationship is important, since doctors outside the prison walls had an important role to play in the healthcare of prisoners, from the provision of specialist treatment beyond what prison medical officers could provide, to ensuring continuity of care after a prisoner’s release.