Inaccurate accounts of British Malta
Awell-known detractor of our British colonial period recently interviewed a local academic, on our university radio station, about his publication on the 1813-1814 plague in Malta.
The interviewer immediately tried to steer the publication’s author to speculate whether the re-emergence of a plague so soon after the arrival of the British had anything to do with inferior standards of medicine and hygiene now that the Knights of St John had departed.
The British influence was further described as an “alien” Nordic culture imposed on a southern Latin one with insinuations that this might have been a retrograde step for medicine in Malta.
A few years ago I attended a lecture delivered by an architect on ‘Underground Valletta’, in which he noted that the city’s air stunk so much of drains that, on arrival, the British installed vents all over Valletta to deal with this problem. Our present-day plumbers inherited this British technique of drain vent pipes which open above roof tops.
The book author admitted he was recording social aspects of the plague and that his expertise wasn’t medical, so he may have not been aware that British medicine was then in ascendency. In the 16th century, the medical school at Padua in northern Italy was at its height of excellence and you can still visit the famed anatomical teaching theatre where dissections of human cadavers, although illegal at the time, were carried out. The English doctor William Harvey was advised to train at Padua.
Harvey’s 17th-century work is one of the turning points in medical science. Padua had taught him the anatomy of the heart and circulatory system, including small details like the valves in veins, but as to how the system worked, Padua had got it all wrong.
This famous medical school taught that blood flowed to and fro in the system (as in a two-way traffic road) while Harvey worked out that blood must flow in one direction only (as in a oneway street), which is why veins and the heart have valves.
Harvey’s 17th-century work was one of the turning points in modern Western medical science. The 19th century ushered in two other major medical advances, Florence Nightingale’s revolution in nursing hygiene which dramatically cut down post-operative mortality figures, and the introduction of the first anti-viral vaccine – Edward Jenner’s discovery that a vaccine made with the cowpox virus could prevent human deaths from smallpox plagues.
These milestones marked the ascendency of British medicine which, along with the introduction of the industrial age, confirmed Great Britain as the global superpower of the 19th century – and this is where our British colonial period starts.
A few years ago, Alberto Angela, the producer of the excellent Italian cultural television programmes, when introducing a feature on the Reggia di Caserta, described how the Bourbons of the Kingdom of Naples intended this palace and its extensive gardens and estate to vie with the grandeur of Versailles. When they learned that the British had invented a medical technique that prevented deaths from smallpox, they contacted our colonial administration and a British naval doctor from Malta was dispatched to
Naples to show them how to vaccinate against smallpox. The novel “alien” medical scene in Malta was highly appreciated in Naples.
The University of Malta historian being interviewed about his book on our 1813-14 plague then went on to claim what a land of abundance nearby Sicily was – meaning compared to “miserable” Malta.
Historical facts speak otherwise. Before British troops were stationed in Sicily in 1806 to protect it from French armies, and before feudal rights were abolished in 1812 with the help of Britain’s representative in Sicily, Lord Bentinck, the island’s wealth was in the hands of a few rich families. By 1847, half the island’s woodland had been destroyed resulting in a drier climate.
By 1886, Sicily was heading towards a food shortage aggravated by a rise in population, and between 1880 and 1914, about 1.5 million Sicilians emigrated, mainly to the USA, but some are our ancestors.
Another wave of Sicilians emigrated to Malta when we joined the EU. People emigrate in search of a better life, and emigration has been almost exclusively from Sicily to Malta and
not the other way round.
It is always a pleasure to listen to young historians Liam Gauci and Emanuel Buttigieg, on University of Malta radio, with their interesting bites mainly on our maritime history.
They recently interviewed one of their students who had published an account of the work and life of our dockyard workers.
Needless to say, the often quoted “injustice” of the colonial administration came up, namely, that British expats working alongside the Maltese were paid much more. The British colonial administration had this rule that personnel working away from home were entitled to an expat wage allowance. Maltese doctors, say, working for the colonial service outside Malta, would have enjoyed a similar expat allowance.
Furthermore, what we keep quiet about is that our Labour administration was prepared to pay some doctors several times the going rate during the doctors’ strike (that is what I was offered if I had returned from UK to head the Maltese Health Service pathology department; I declined and somebody else took up the offer).
The Nationalist administration also paid personnel who set up the muchneeded cardiac surgery department several times more than the health service’s standard wage rate.
We now hear Maltese film industry workers claiming government hasn’t yet paid them for work carried out three years ago, while paying huge sums to foreign workers in this industry. Please stop inaccurately attributing British colonial wage injustices against Maltese workers. It is also our Labour and Nationalist administrations who have defrauded, and continue defrauding, our service pensioners and not the UK government. Detractors of British Malta also keep on about the George Cross on our flag being an “alien” imposition, but they can rant about it till they’re blue in the face, because it’s not going anywhere.
Neither is Valletta, the city of the romanticised “gentlemen pirates” of the eight-pointed cross (and their emblems in St John’s co-cathedral), going anywhere because all these are now part of our national cultural heritage.
Albert Cilia-Vincenti is a former UK and Malta senior civil servant.
The novel ‘alien’ medical scene in Malta was highly appreciated in Naples