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Hong Kong Annual Administration Reports, 1841-1941
PAPERS RELATING TO
In referring to some cases in a subsequent report he said:- "Mok-A-Kwai, released from gaol in a dying condition, and Leung-A-Hoi still in gaol suffering from phthisis, were both when they entered healthy, powerful, muscular men, presenting no indications whatever of hereditary disease. To what then can the disease they were attacked with be attributed? I cannot myself regard it otherwise than as caused by the punishment they had received, both of them were horribly marked, their backs having sloughed from extensive bruising."
Lord Carnarvon felt some difficulty in accepting the Colonial Surgeon's statements as to the injurious effect of flogging prisoners on the back, inasmuch as he was the medical officer who had for years certified that such floggings might be safely administered.
63. The Secretary of State therefore directed an inquiry by a Medical Board, of which the Colonial Surgeon should not be a member, to examine and report as to the truth or otherwise of a theory which his Lordship thought was one "of extreme importance, whether regarded from the point of view of ordinary humanity, of medical science, or of penal discipline.”
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64. The Medical Board, which consisted of the principal Naval Medical Officer on the station and a local physician, reported that unfortunately no record had been kept, based on careful medical examination of the condition of the prisoners prior to punishment, and that they could get no reliable statistics to guide them. In reply to this the Colonial Surgeon remarked that had "he known or foreseen what the effects of flogging would be, he would "have taken more careful notes," the Board had therefore to rely mainly on what they saw themselves in the gaol in 1878.
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Referring to the rattan that they saw used in the Hong Kong gaol, they said, "we consider the rattan too heavy a weapon (it is 47 inches in length and two inches in circumference)," and its effects are very likely to go deep into the cellular and "muscular tissues, probably producing loss of substance by sloughing, and thus for a long time delaying the healing of the " wounds." In describing the effects of some floggings they themselves witnessed in the gaol, they refer to a case where "a "secondary abscess formed over the hip joint," and to another in which they saw a prisoner receive 36 lashes on the 1st of March, with respect to whom they say they found, on the 14th of May, "the wounds not healed, sloughing from the evident loss of sub- "stance," and on the last examination they made of this case early in September "the wounds then were not completely healed.”
65. Whilst therefore unable to throw much light on the specific question of the physiological effect of flogging on the back, the Medical Board exposed the fact that the instrument, or as they call it "the weapon," generally used in the Hong Kong gaol, had been too heavy and severe. One piece of evidence, however, elicited by Lord Carnarvon's inquiry was interesting, and it explained a passage to be found in an address to the Queen from the Chinese inhabitants of the Colony, in which they refer to the