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

This book provides an important new perspective on the relationship between knowledge circulation and clinical practice in fin-de-siecle Britain. Historians have tended to focus on the controversy surrounding the Contagious Diseases Acts or the dramatic policy shifts following the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases. As the title suggests,Medical Knowledge and Venereal Disease in England, 1886–1916 instead undertakes a detailed study of the transmission of venereological knowledge among medical professionals during the intervening decades between 1886 and 1916. It will be the first book to systematically examine how rank-and-file doctors, nurses, and midwives built up knowledge of the aetiology and pathology of venereal diseases, and how they were able to diagnose and treat patients. It does so by focusing on their work within key educational and professional frameworks, including voluntary hospitals, laboratories, club practice, and Poor Law infirmaries. These decades were marked by profound changes in venereological knowledge. From those, such as Jonathan Hutchinson, in elite hospital practice to the rank-and-file, such as domiciliary midwife Christina Sutherland, medical professionals were adopting new ideas and technologies that would have a profound effect upon patient care.

Anne Hanley is Junior Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford, UK. Her research and teaching relates primarily to the social history of medicine during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, whilst also drawing upon a number of closely-related themes in gender, political, and economic history. She has previously published in Social History of Medicine and Medical History, and has contributed to Tracey Loughran and Gayle Davis’s edited collection, Infertility in History: Approaches, Contexts and Perspectives (2015).