Resisting the Acts

Abstract

Since the 1970s, the implementation of the Contagious Diseases Acts and the struggle to have them repealed has attracted a considerable amount of historical attention. The Acts have become something of a watershed for historians of the mid-nineteenth century and have been used to demonstrate the emergence of feminism and social purity in Britain, developments in public health, radical reform in the army and struggles within the Liberal Party. In examining the feminization of venereal disease in relation to the Acts, it is important to focus away from a more general analysis and concentrate specifically on the medical debate between Extensionists and Repealers. A close reading of the Select Committees and Royal Commissions into the Contagious Diseases Acts, as well as the more general medical literature dealing with the Acts, shows that the defence of the Acts depended on an idea of the innate pathology of the prostitute. Historians writing on the CD Acts have not placed enough importance on the medical opposition to them. Many of those doctors who opposed the Acts were amongst the British medical elite. Not only did they question the notion that prostitutes were necessarily diseased but they challenged a rather complaisant medical establishment with new ideas about the diagnosis and treatment of venereal disease.