On the 15th of June 1846, John Frederick White, a 27-year-old private based at the Cavalry Barracks, on Hounslow, was awarded 150 lashes for assaulting a sergeant. Twenty six days later he died. The military surgeons, after performing a post mortem examination, drew the conclusion that the soldier died from inflammation of internal organs. They denied any connection between the flogging and White’s death.

The military officers were ready to bury the body when this news reached the ears of anti-flogging campaigner Thomas Wakley, coroner for Middlesex and founder of the Lancet. Wakley decided to hold a public inquest into the death of White to find out what was the exact correlation between the superficial lacerations caused by the flogging and the internal inflammations that occurred afterwards and caused the soldier’s death.

For weeks, the observations made upon the skin of the soldier’s back were reported in detail by The Times, inflaming the public debate on the abolishment of flogging in the army. The sensationalism was fomented by the story that a large piece of skin was cut away from the soldier’s back and nowhere to be found. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the inquest into the death of private White, as extensively covered by The Times, provided a platform for discussing and promoting the knowledge of the characteristics and properties of the human skin.

The questions to be addressed are: how did the information resulted from the post mortem examinations contribute to popularize the knowledge of the skin among the paper’s readers? How did The Times cover the mystery of the missing piece of skin? What was the role played by the skin in shaping the argumentation set by the anti-flogging supporters? What impact did the eventual intervention of dermatologist Erasmus Wilson have on the inquest’s outcome?

This research argues that The Times’ focus, during the inquiry, on the examination of the skin of John White, contributed to develop a greater understanding, among the public, of the physiological, pathological and psychological aspects of the wound caused by the whip, then, a wound still considered ‘only skin-deep.’