Medicine, Knowledge and Venereal Diseases in England, 1886-1916

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.

“The book begins with the training of competent general practitioners. Like infectious diseases more generally, it proved a tough job to find time for venereology in the medical student curriculum.” (Graham Mooney, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 74 (3), July, 2019)

“This book considers the societal, legislative, scientific and medical changes that influenced our understanding of, and responses to, syphilis and gonorrhoea. … it richly illustrates the problems faced by healthcare professionals and contains a wealth of information of interest to the more general reader.” (Tim Mason, BSHM British Society for the History of Medicine, bshm.org.uk, July, 2017) 

“This meticulous and solid work adds substantially to our understanding of the medical and other health professions’ knowledge of venereal diseases during a period of significant debate about these ailments, with changing understandings of their significance to individual and national health, and major advances in diagnosis and treatment. Hanley also reminds us how very far from monolithic the medical profession has always been and of the significance of financial factors in the uptake of new developments.” (Lesley A. Hall, Wellcome Library Research Fellow, UK)

Anne Hanley is a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. After completing her PhD in History at the University of Cambridge, she worked with the Centre for History and Philosophy of Science and the Museum of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Leeds. Her research interests are in the social history of medicine and healthcare during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with closely related themes in gender, political and economic history. She has published on the history of infertility, midwifery, medical education and nineteenth-century clinical experimentation.