This book reveals the ever-present challenges of patient care at the forefront of medical knowledge. Syphilis and gonorrhoea played upon the public imagination in Victorian and Edwardian England, inspiring fascination and fear. Seemingly inextricable from the other great 'social evil', prostitution, these diseases represented contamination, both physical and moral. They infiltrated respectable homes and brought terrible suffering and stigma to those afflicted. Medicine, Knowledge and Venereal Diseases takes us back to an age before penicillin and the NHS, when developments in pathology, symptomology and aetiology were transforming clinical practice. This is the first book to examine systematically how doctors, nurses and midwives grappled with new ideas and laboratory-based technologies in their fight against venereal diseases in voluntary hospitals, general practice and Poor Law institutions. It opens up new perspectives on what made competent and safe medical professionals; how these standards changed over time; and how changing attitudes and expectations affected the medical authority and autonomy of different professional groups.

When Sir Humphrey Appleby warned his Prime Minister against making “courageous policy”, he could have been talking about venereal diseases. Many have considered misogyny, class conflict and racial paranoia as the drivers of venereal diseases control policy in the early twentieth century. In reality, such policy was inclined towards disease control in the most practical way, with the resources to hand, and in line with realistic outcomes. This book re-examines historical sources to reveal the unacknowledged complexity of determining public policy for the control of venereal diseases in two case studies, Edinburgh in Scotland and Adelaide in South Australia.

Historians have long engaged with Roy Porter’s call for histories that incorporate patients’ voices and experiences. But despite concerted methodological efforts, there has simply not been the degree and breadth of innovation that Porter envisaged. Patients’ voices still often remain obscured. This has resulted in part from assumptions about the limitations of archives, many of which are formed of institutional records written from the perspective of health professionals. Patient voices in Britain repositions patient experiences at the centre of healthcare history, using new types of sources and reading familiar sources in new ways. Focusing on military medicine, Poor Law medicine, disability, psychiatry and sexual health, this collection encourages historians to tackle the ethical challenges of using archival material and to think more carefully about how their work might speak to persistent health inequalities and challenges in health-service delivery.

From New York Times bestselling author Naomi Wolf, Outrages explores the history of state-sponsored censorship and violations of personal freedoms through the inspiring, forgotten history of one writer’s refusal to stay silenced. Newly updated, first North American edition--a paperback original In 1857, Britain codified a new civil divorce law and passed a severe new obscenity law. An 1861 Act of Parliament streamlined the harsh criminalization of sodomy. These and other laws enshrined modern notions of state censorship and validated state intrusion into people’s private lives. In 1861, John Addington Symonds, a twenty-one-year-old student at Oxford who already knew he loved and was attracted to men, hastily wrote out a seeming renunciation of the long love poem he’d written to another young man. Outrages chronicles the struggle and eventual triumph of Symonds—who would become a poet, biographer, and critic—at a time in British history when even private letters that could be interpreted as homoerotic could be used as evidence in trials leading to harsh sentences under British law. Drawing on the work of a range of scholars of censorship and of LGBTQ+ legal history, Wolf depicts how state censorship, and state prosecution of same-sex sexuality, played out—decades before the infamous trial of Oscar Wilde—shadowing the lives of people who risked in new ways scrutiny by the criminal justice system. She shows how legal persecutions of writers, and of men who loved men affected Symonds and his contemporaries, including Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater, and the painter Simeon Solomon. All the while, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was illicitly crossing the Atlantic and finding its way into the hands of readers who reveled in the American poet’s celebration of freedom, democracy, and unfettered love. Inspired by Whitman, and despite terrible dangers he faced in doing so, Symonds kept trying, stubbornly, to find a way to express his message—that love and sex between men were not “morbid” and deviant, but natural and even ennobling. He persisted in various genres his entire life. He wrote a strikingly honest secret memoir—which he embargoed for a generation after his death—enclosing keys to a code that the author had used to embed hidden messages in his published work. He wrote the essay A Problem in Modern Ethics that was secretly shared in his lifetime and would become foundational to our modern understanding of human sexual orientation and of LGBTQ+ legal rights. This essay is now rightfully understood as one of the first gay rights manifestos in the English language. Naomi Wolf’s Outrages is a critically important book, not just for its role in helping to bring to new audiences the story of an oft-forgotten pioneer of LGBTQ+ rights who could not legally fully tell his own story in his lifetime. It is also critically important for what the book has to say about the vital and often courageous roles of publishers, booksellers, and freedom of speech in an era of growing calls for censorship and ever-escalating state violations of privacy. With Outrages, Wolf brings us the inspiring story of one man’s refusal to be silenced, and his belief in a future in which everyone would have the freedom to love and to speak without fear.

How did beliefs about syphilis shape the kinds of treatment people with this disease received? The story of how a town in the Ozark hinterlands played a key role in determining standards of medical care around syphilis. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the central Arkansas city of Hot Springs enjoyed a reputation as one of the United States' premier health resorts. Throughout this period, the vast majority of Americans who traveled there did so because they had (or thought they had) syphilis—a disease whose incidence was said to be dramatically on the rise all across the country. Boasting an impressive medical infrastructure that included private clinics, a military hospital, and a venereal disease clinic operated by the United States Public Health Service, Hot Springs extended a variety of treatment options. Until the antibiotic revolution of the 1940s, Hot Springs occupied a central position in the country's struggle with sexually transmitted disease. Drawing upon health-seekers' firsthand accounts, clinical case files, and the writings of the city's privately practicing specialists, In Search of Sexual Health examines the era's "venereal peril" from the standpoint of medical practice. How, Elliott Bowen asks, did people with VD understand their illnesses, and what therapeutic strategies did they employ? Highlighting the unique role that resident doctors, visiting patients, and local residents played in shaping Hot Springs' response to syphilis, Bowen argues that syphilis's status as a stigmatized disease of "others" (namely prostitutes, immigrants, and African Americans) had a direct impact on the kinds of treatment patients received, and translated into very different outcomes for the city's diverse clientele—which included men as well as women, blacks as well as whites, and the poor as well as the rich. Whereas much of the existing scholarship on the history of sexually transmitted diseases privileges the actions of medical elites and federal authorities, this study reveals Hot Springs, a remote and fairly obscure town, as a local node with a significant national impact on American medicine and public health. Providing a richer, more complex understanding of a critical chapter in the history of sexually transmitted diseases, In Search of Sexual Health will prove valuable to historians of medicine, public health, and the environment, in addition to scholars of race, gender, sexuality.

The essays in this volume examine the nature and extent of disease on indigenous communities and local populations located within the vast regions of the Indian and Pacific Oceans as a result of colonial sea power and colonial conquest. While this established a long-term impact of disease on populations, the essays also offer insights into the dynamics of these populations in resisting colonial intrusions and introduction of disease to newly-acquired territories.

Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health explores the politicized role of sexual health as a concept, discourse, and subject of debate within Irish literary culture from 1880 to 1960. Combining perspectives from Irish Studies, Modernist Studies, and the Social History of Medicine, it traces the ways in which authors, politicians, and activists in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland harnessed debates over sexual hygiene, venereal disease, birth control, fertility, and eugenics to envisage competing models of Irish identity, culture, and political community. Analyzing the work of canonical authors (Yeats, Synge, Shaw, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien) and less often discussed figures (George Moore, Oliver Gogarty, Signe Toksvig, Kate O'Brien) in conversation with medical, scientific, and legal writing on sexual health, it charts how the medicalization and politicization of sex informed the emergence and development of modernism in Ireland. At the same time, by reading this literary material alongside the polemical and journalistic writing of figures such as Arthur Griffith, Maud Gonne, and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, it also reveals the ways in which key events in Irish cultural and political history - the Parnell Split, the Limerick Pogrom, the Playboy riots, the passage of the Censorship of Publications Act - were shaped by ongoing debates and dilemmas in the field of sexual health. This book will benefit students, researchers, and readers interested in the history of sex and its regulation in modern Ireland, the impact of sex and medicine on Irish political history, and the nature of modernism's engagement with sex, health, and the body.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Women’s medicine highlights British female doctors’ key contribution to the production and circulation of scientific knowledge around contraception, family planning and sexual disorders between 1920–70. It argues that women doctors were pivotal in developing a holistic approach to family planning and transmitting it across borders, playing a more prominent role in shaping scientific and medical knowledge than previously acknowledged. Illuminating women doctors’ agency in the male-dominated field of medicine, this book reveals their practical engagement with birth control and later family planning clinics in Britain, their participation in the development of the international movement and their influence on French doctors. Drawing on a wide range of archived and published medical materials, Rusterholz sheds light on the strategies British female doctors used and the alliances they made to put forward their medical agenda and position themselves as experts and leaders.

Sarah Green shows how late Victorian Decadent literature paradoxically treats sexual restraint as healthy and aesthetically productive.

This book examines how the medical profession engaged with print and literary culture to shape its identities between the 1830s and 1910s in Britain and its empire. Moving away from a focus on medical education and professional appointments, the book reorients attention to how medical self-fashioning interacted with other axes of identity, including age, gender, race, and the spaces of practice. Drawing on medical journals and fiction, as well as professional advice guides and popular periodicals, this volume considers how images of medical practice and professionalism were formed in the cultural and medical imagination. Alison Moulds uncovers how medical professionals were involved in textual production and consumption as editors, contributors, correspondents, readers, authors, and reviewers. Ultimately, this book opens up new perspectives on the relationship between literature and medicine, revealing how the profession engaged with a range of textual practices to build communities, air grievances, and augment its cultural authority and status in public life.