The “Medical Plot Thickens”: Bad Medicine and Good Health in the Contagious Diseases Acts Repeal Campaign

• Published in: Literature and medicine 2021-03, Vol.39 (1), p.69-88
• Main Author: O’Brien, Ellen L
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Ambiguity; Apathy; Authenticity; Authorship; Disease; Gender identity; Health behavior; Ideology; Indictments; Infectious diseases; Intertextuality; Intervention; Jurisdiction; Legislation; Literary devices; Logic; Medical profession; Medicine; Morality; Narrative techniques; Plot (Narrative); Prostitution; Public health; Sex industry; Society; Victorian period; Womens health
• ISSN: 0278-9671; 1080-6571; 1080-6571
• DOI: 10.1353/lm.2021.0007

Britain’s Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) mandated the use of medical detention and speculum exams to manage the bodies of “common prostitutes” and thereby reduce sexually transmitted diseases among enlisted men. Repeal advocates challenged the gendered power structure of the Acts but also used melodramatic frameworks to produce a broader critique of nineteenth-century Britain’s centralizing medical orthodoxy and to argue for unregulated traditional approaches to medicine. Across a variety of repeal speeches and documents, advocates idealized alternative health practices in order to challenge institutionalized modern medicine and the governmental interests that extended its authority. J. J. Garth Wilkinson’s Forcible Introspection of Women for the Army and Navy by the Oligarchy, Considered Physically (1870) exemplifies the multivocal and intertextual medicolegal plots of repeal melodrama as it cast professionalized modern medicine as corrupt, villainous, and in collusion with the state while presenting alternative medicine as authentically preventative, curative, and democratic.