The Enduring, Gilded Periphery: Colonialism and Grand Cayman in Capital's Atlantic World

Abstract

The man they called “Smiley” died in February 1938 on an operating table in Kingston, Jamaica. His stomach cancer, only recently discovered, was quickly deemed inoperable by a doctor in the Cayman Islands, where he lived with his pregnant wife and four children. In Cayman, there had been no public hospital. Instead, a British heiress paid to build a four-bed emergency ward and dispensary meant to serve the island's 6,500 residents. Four beds for more than six thousand. Such insufficiency represented the extent of institutionalized health care at the edge of the British Empire.