A History of Force Feeding

A History of Force Feeding Ian Miller A History of Force Feeding Hunger Strikes, Prisons and Medical Ethics, 1909–1974 This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the work’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if such material is not included in the work’s Creative Commons license and the respective action is not permitted by statutory regulation, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to duplicate, adapt or reproduce the material. Ian Miller Ulster University Coleraine , United Kingdom ISBN 978-3-319-31112-8 ISBN 978-3-319-31113-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31113-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016941754 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 Open Access This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the work’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if such material is not included in the work’s Creative Commons license and the respective action is not permitted by statutory regulation, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to duplicate, adapt or reproduce the material. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study began life in Manchester during 2009 where I fi rst began to write about suffragette hunger strikes and the complexities of prison medicine. I developed further aspects of the research while employed at University College Dublin between 2009 and 2013 where I became intrigued by Irish republican force-feedings. The remainder of this study was kindly supported by a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship in Medical Humanities undertaken at Ulster University in Northern Ireland, a natu- ral home for a book on hunger strikes to be written. Due to the long gestation of the project, I have accumulated numer- ous debts. I am particularly grateful to Leanne McCormick for her sup- port of this project and my other ideas during my time as a researcher at the Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland at Ulster University. She provided a warm, supportive working environment alongside Andrew Sneddon, Greta Jones, and Donald MacRaild. Further afi eld, I am grateful to David Nicholl for his enthusiasm for my project. The project has resulted in a number of conferences and public engagement initiatives. I am particularly grateful to Ciara Breathnach and Laura McAtackney for their help in encouraging me to fi nd ways to engage with public audi- ences. In particular, I would like to thank Dr Berry Beaumont whose campaigns against force-feeding in the 1970s form part of the book. I am also grateful for the various comments and suggestions from audi- ence members at conferences and events at Birkbeck College, Maynooth University, Ulster University, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Queen’s University Belfast, Glasnevin Cemetary (Dublin), University of Liverpool, Trinity College Dublin, Boston College (Dublin), Uppsala Universitet, v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS King’s College London, and Universität Zürich. I also wish to acknowledge the helpfulness of the staff at the various archives in which this research was conducted: John Rylands Library (University of Manchester); National Archives, Kew; National Library of Ireland; National Archives of Ireland; Public Record Offi ce of Northern Ireland; the Quaker Peace Library; and Linen Hall Library, Belfast. I wish to acknowledge the BBC archives (based at Ulster Folk Museum) for allowing me to access and use audio-visual material. I am also grateful to Greta Jones who allowed me to access oral history material relating to the Troubles held at Ulster University. My research also benefi tted from a period as a visiting research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Emotions. Finally, I am indebted, as always to my family members: Kevin Miller, Pauline Miller, Sarah Miller, Katie Miller, and Miriam Trevor. CONTENTS 1 Introduction 1 2 ‘A Prostitution of the Profession’?: The Ethical Dilemma of Suffragette Force- Feeding, 1909–14 35 3 ‘The Instrument of Death’: Prison Doctors and Medical Ethics in Revolutionary-Period Ireland, c.1917 67 4 ‘A Few Deaths from Hunger Is Nothing’: Experiencing Starvation in Irish Prisons, 1917–23 91 5 ‘I’ve Heard o’ Food Queues, but This Is the First Time I’ve Ever Heard of a Feeding Queue!’: Hunger Strikers, War, and the State, 1914–61 125 6 ‘I Would Have Gone on with the Hunger Strike, but Force-Feeding I Could Not Take’: The Coercion of Hunger Striking Convict Prisoners, 1913–72 153 vii viii CONTENTS 7 ‘An Experience Much Worse Than Rape’: The End of Force-Feeding? 191 8 Conclusion 237 Bibliography 243 Index 261 LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 2.1 Torturing women in prison: vote against the government 57 Fig. 2.2 A suffragette is force-fed in Holloway Prison 58 Fig. 6.1 Number of recorded hunger strike incidences responded to, and not responded to, with force-feeding in English Prisons, 1913–40 157 Fig. 6.2 Number of times prisoners were force-fed on individual hunger strikes in English prisons, 1913–40 162 Fig. 6.3 Instruments used for force-feeding in English prisons, 1913–40 163 Fig. 6.4 English prisons in which incidences of force-feeding occurred, 1913–40 165 Fig. 6.5 Recorded motivations for hunger striking in English prisons, 1913–40 167 ix OPEN CHAPTER 1 Introduction In March 2013, a group of detainees at Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, Cuba, went on hunger strike. At the height of their protest, 106 individuals were refusing to eat. For detainees incarcerated for over a decade without charge or trial, food refusal offered a potent way to rebel. Having been stripped of their capacity for political communication and placed in an institution that severely restricted personal freedom, the simple act of not eating allowed detainees to reassert control over their bodies. It granted autonomy and self-determination, posing a challenge to Guantánamo’s disciplinary ethos. These hunger strikes were also highly political. By rejecting food, detainees openly defi ed the authority of the American government which had incarcerated them. They used their bodies as weapons, the last remaining resource available for remonstrating against adverse institutional conditions. 1 In turn, the newsworthy nature of these protests drew international attention to allegations of institutional torture and violence seemingly supported by the Obama administration. The protestors knew that hunger strikes attract worldwide interest from journalists, human rights activists, politicians, ethicists, and doctors. They had posed a formidable moral question: Is it acceptable to allow a prisoner to starve to death? Corpses present problems. A dead hunger striker can offer evidence of deplorable prison conditions. A death also goes some way towards validat- ing dissident political perspectives. These, after all, had been worth dying for. Surely they must have some value? In the event of a death, less sympathetic © The Author(s) 2016 1 I. Miller, A History of Force Feeding, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31113-5_1 2 I. MILLER observers always assert that hunger striking amounts to suicide and that the corpse was once a ‘terrorist’ intent on endangering the public with mindless violence. Why, they ask, should anyone care about a dead ‘terrorist’? Yet, in politically charged circumstances, a lifeless hunger striker can swiftly transform into a martyr, a victim of political cruelty whose despera- tion led him/her to perform the unthinkable act of mutilating one’s own body, entirely eradicating it in a grotesque act of disfi gurement that (s)he could have halted at any time simply by eating. Throughout the twentieth century, the emaciated bodies of hunger strikers provided a powerful symbol of determined resistance to aggres- sive states, not least in Ireland. Hunger strikers who died there did so for a national or collective cause, not to selfi shly escape individual suffering or institutional misery. Their deaths were altruistic, selfl ess acts performed for the greater good of a national, religious, or political cause. 2 They became ‘good deaths’, not suicides. In turn, death by hunger strike reshaped public perceptions of victim and aggressor. Bobby Sands provides a compel- ling example.

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