Unaccountable Subjects: Contracting Legal and Medical Authority in the Newgate Smallpox Experiment (1721)

Abstract

Abstract The first experimental trials of smallpox inoculation were conducted on a group of prisoners in London’s Newgate Prison in 1721. These inmates were long believed to have been facing execution, but archival material reveals that they had in fact received pardons conditional on penal transportation to the Americas. This article rereads the design, progress, and reception of the experiment, reorienting the narrative around the prisoners, their agency, and the legal mechanisms of transportation and pardon. In that light the experiment reflects the dynamics of eighteenth-century governance and punishment: a relatively weak state’s reliance on contractors and deputies (whether to transport convicts or to conduct experiments), on the tacit co-operation of those below, and on the rhetorical management of its actions. Forced to accord the Newgate prisoners a measure of autonomy, the physicians and their royal backers faced a constant struggle to manage their subjects’ participation and to control the experiment’s meaning amid fierce controversy that ranged far beyond inoculation. The Newgate cohort reveals a basic identity between the medical subject and the political subject, but also highlights the fragility of such scripts, regardless of the political, economic, and cultural apparatus brought to bear.