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y Earnshaw in her examination of „Sick and Disabled Convicts in the Colonial Community‟; in
the 1820s, slightly more than five percent of male convicts transported to New South Wales
from England and Ireland arrived with a documented disability or chronic disease, while this rate
dropped still further during the 1830s to just under four percent. 79 New Norfolk‟s rate is also
significantly higher than the rate of impairments reported in male convicts arriving in the
probation era, which mirrored the rate of 1830s New South Wales at slightly less four percent. 80
Significant, however, is that of the thirty-one prisoners who arrived in Van Diemen‟s Land with
a pre-existing condition or illness, the majority would have remained physically able to perform
some type of labour – their condition did not entirely preclude employment. If the prisoner had
been utterly incapable of any kind of labour, they would have been discounted as a suitable
candidate for transportation and rejected during the medical assessments before embarkation.
Pre-Existing
Condition or Illness
Number of
Cases in Sample
Number per
Thousand Cases
Visual Impairment 13 32
Hand Impairment 7 17
Impediment of Speech 4 10
Scrofular 3 7
Ear or Hearing Impairment 2 5
Heart Condition 1 2
Limb Impairment (Leg) 1 2
Total Cases 31 77
Table 1: Proportion of patients at New Norfolk Hospital who arrived in Van Diemen’s Land with preexisting
conditions or illnesses. 81
79 Earnshaw, „The Lame, the Blind‟, p. 26; Maxwell-Stewart, „Crime and Health‟ in Richards, Valentine and Dunning
(eds.), Effecting a Cure, p. 40.
80 Maxwell-Stewart, „Crime and Health‟, in Richards, Valentine and Dunning (eds.), Effecting a Cure, p. 40.
81 TAHO, Royal Derwent Hospital: Case Notes (HSD 246/1/1, HSD 246/1/4, HSD 246/1/6); TAHO, Conduct Registers
of Male Prisoners Arriving in the Period of the Probation System (CON 33/1).
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