Introduction

Abstract

On 21 April 1497, the town council of Aberdeen, Scotland, ordered that for protection from the disease of syphilis ‘all light [loose] women ... dicist from thair vices and syne of venerie’ and work for ‘thair [sic] support, on pain, else being branded with a hot iron on their cheek and banished from the town‘.¹ The Aberdeen council believed it was necessary to stigmatize possible carriers of syphilis in this way, in order to differentiate fallen women from upright women. Such measures proved unsuccessful and after six months the Scottish Privy Council passed an edict ordering all syphilitics into banishment on the island of Inchkeith near Leith. While the state came to use less brutal means of dealing with promiscuous women, the need to brand or to stigmatize such women remained a central feature of public health policy. Some four hundred years later, medical authorities in Great Britain began to suggest that it was possible to distinguish likely carriers of syphilis and other venereal diseases by the way they looked; that is, that such women‘s bodies were inscribed with clear signs of degeneracy and subsequently these women could be shown to have an aptitude for prostitution and a capacity for disease. Public health officials, eugenicists, some feminists, social purity workers and certain members of the clergy used this information to lobby the government to create homes and ‘colonies’ for these unfortunate women so they would no longer be a threat to society.