Doctor Edward Wright escapes London's Bedlam disgrace to face manslaughter notoriety in South Australia, 1845
From William Hogarth's The Rake's Progress, depicting inmates being mocked by visitors at Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam) in London.
Image courtesy Wellcome Library, London
Edward Wright was one of South Australia’s first flawed geniuses. After graduating in medicine from Edinburgh University in 1813 and much experience in public hospitals, Wright became apothecary, house surgeon and superintendent at Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam) in London in 1818. (This institution for the mentally disturbed was severely criticised by Edward Gillon Wakefield at an enquiry in 1814-15.)
Wright, the president of the Phrenological Society in London and other learned societies in London, was dismissed as Bedlam superintendent in 1830 for frequent drunkenness, neglect of duties and undue familiarities.
He tried to clear his name and then went to Syria. After four years, he returned to London but failed to find a suitable practice.
He became interested instead in the proposed settlement of South Australia and, hoping for an official appointment, joined the managing committee of the South Australian Literary Association. He was employed to sell land and to give lectures on behalf of the new province.
His best service was to help bring South Australia to the attention of prominent settler John Morphett whom he had known in Beirut and later in London.
In 1835, the South Australian colonisation commissioners rejected Wright’s application to be medical officer in the new province but he was allowed a free passage and sailed with his wife and four sons in the Cygnet.
Wright arrived at Kangaroo Island in September 1836 and, after two busy months, was appointed by Colonel William Light to the Holdfast Bay station. This appointment terminated after governor John Hindmarsh arrived and Wright had to depend on private practice.
Wright bought land in Franklin Street, Adelaide, and shared in the social life of the new settlement. His patients included many prominent settlers, among them close friends: the Thomas family.
Wright was also caught up in political opposition to the governor Hindmarsh’s party and was active in the public meeting that supported Light's choice of site for Adelaide and in establishing the Southern Australian to compete with the official Register newspaper.
Although Wright didn’t bother to enrol in the colony’s medical register, started in 1844, he appears to have been a good practitioner in the days of cupping, cauterizing and applying leeches.
Morphett said Wright was very clever but, for a man of 18 stone, he was reckless, overindulgent and continually poor.
In 1845, Wright, seemingly intoxicated, prescribed large doses of morphia for a Thebarton hotel landlord imprisoned as a mental case at the Adelaide Gaol. Tried for manslaughter in the supreme court, Wright claimed in defence that the victim had “taken only the quantity becoming a gentleman after dinner”. Wright was discharged on a technical point but Judge Charles Cooper considered him morally responsible for the man’s death.
Although the trial didn’t lose him all his friends, Wright withdrew from public life. One son, Charles, carried on his practice and the others had a farm at Dry Creek.
