14. On The Consequences of Racial Prejudice.

Dearly Beloved,

Our youngest son Hal, was born in the Royal Hospital in Muscat in midsummer on a day when the temperature reached 51c. outside. A few days after leaving hospital he developed a staphylococcal infection, white powdery spots on the skin and umbilicus, a potentially deadly infection. These were treated by a nurse, Catherine. She was the mother of a friend of my daughter, Jessie, at the British School in Muscat and the wife of Dr David Sellu who at that time was the doctor to the Sultan's mother and a surgeon by training. He had started life as a barefoot child, one of a family of ten in a Sierra Leonian village, but because of his obvious abilities he had been sent to university and, at the time of the tragedy that befell him, was a senior lecturer at what is now Imperial College in London.

Some twenty years after Hal's birth Josephine, was called for jury duty at the Old Bailey. During a break in her case of gang murder, she noticed the name David Sellu as the accused in an adjacent court room. The charge was gross negligence manslaughter. David had been working part-time at a private hospital, and an orthopaedic surgery patient who had developed a stomach problem was passed to him for treatment by a colleague. The operation was delayed as a result of the lack of an anaesthetist and the patient suffered a perforated intestine and died shortly after the operation. The autopsy found the deceased to be in poor health with undiagnosed liver disease. Many doctors in private hospitals finding themselves in such a situation dial 999 and ask for a blue light job, an ambulance to take the patient to an NHS hospital where there will always be an on call anaesthetist and surgical team.

The problems started for David when the coroner suddenly announced that he thought that a crime had been committed. Subsequently David found himself investigated by the Police for unacceptable delay in operating on the patient and subsequently charged with Gross Negligence Manslaughter. He was tried at the Old Bailey and found guilty and sentenced to 30 months of imprisonment. He was shocked to discover that he was to be imprisoned, not in an open prison but in Belmarsh Prison a category one prison, criticised in a government report in 2009 because prisoners were controlled by high amounts of force and known to the inmates as Hellmarsh. So David found himself imprisoned with drug dealers and murderers. At times was unable to sleep until two o'clock in the morning when his two cell mates turned the television off. He was deprived of his licence to practise by his professional bodies. David wrote a book about his harrowing experiences entitled Did He Save Lives? A Surgeon's Story (2019).

At this point the friends and colleagues of David in the hospitals where he had worked realised that a wrong had been done to this self effacing and quiet man. Also the medical profession in general became concerned, because given the importance of precedent in English law, any physician might be found guilty of Gross Negligence Manslaughter if his patient died.

An appeal was launched which was eventually successful, evidence came to light that the hospital itself had recognised that it had inadequate resources for emergency care, notably a lack of an on-call anaesthetist. The jury had told the Judge that they did not understand the nature of the charges but the appeal court found him to have misdirected the Jury. Eventually David's professional licences by the British Medical Association were restored and he returned to work.

Perhaps the most poignant aspect of this tragedy is that his son who had qualified as an MA in medicine at the university of Manchester after six years of study, decided not to take up his career as a doctor because he had seen his father humiliated. His son saw that, despite an immaculate professional record and a life of selfless service, a single incident had caused that to amount to zero when it came to assessment, trial and sentence. Reading the case, the role of racial prejudice is salient. As David concludes in his book “Would the outcome of this case have been different if I was white? As they say in prison, 'was it 'cos I is black?'”

I believe that racial prejudice does its damage through many minor decisions by different individuals which culminate in serious disadvantage to people of another racial background. The private hospital where David worked turned the blame onto him and the assessment pointing to the hospital's own report on its lack of anaesthetic support did not reach the light of day until the appeal court. The coroner's decision now seems arbitrary. The judge misdirected the jury. He should have been a category D prisoner in an open prison as he clearly represented a risk to no one, instead it was Belmarsh, at least for the first part of his sentence. Perhaps one of the most horrifying passages in his book describes the attitude of the chairwomen of the panel he had to apply to for home leave from another prison when he at last became eligible. She said “'We have a reputation as a prison to uphold... We would not want the press to know that you have been let out to roam the streets. You can just imagine the headlines: “ Dr Death seen wandering in town”'. One can only wonder at the salience structure of that person's mind; what did she mis-perceive as she looked at David?

This letter tells of weird coincidences; Jessie has moved on from her school playground in Muscat and is now a lecturer and researcher in Philosophy of Mind with a special interest in how people perceive one another, especially bias, including racial bias. As I write this I reflect that throughout this night my anaesthetist son Hal will be on duty for NHS emergency cases despite the fact that, if it had not been for Catherine, Hal might have died thirty years ago of a staph. infection, whilst racial disadvantage has extended to David's son who will not fulfill his life-long ambition to be standing by as a doctor in the NHS too, despite having qualified. There is also a profound sense of irony that it was the lack of just such an on-duty anaesthetist which started David's difficulties and plunged him, his career and his caring and conscientious family into huge distress.

Christ brought his teaching to maturity as he embraced the outsiders; the unclean Samaritan who's behaviour is exemplary for us, the Canaanite woman (Matthew 15;22:28) whose people he firsts insults as dogs, (literally “doggies”) and then embraces her and in doing so embraces the whole of humanity. Christ also talked of the hazards of judging others. 

When racial perception is involved, what are the salience structures of our minds? Are we up to the challenge?

Peace,

Paul.

Completed: 23 April 2021


Cristo Negro (Black Christ) - Iglesia de San Felipe, Portobelo, Panama

Adam Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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