There was a serious stigma about sexually-transmitted ill-

nesses. Men could divorce their wives if they were even sus-
pected of having a venereal disease—even if they received the
disease from their husband. So as gonorrhea and syphilis rap-
idly spread, so did panic.
In 1864, responding to public pressure and sensational
press accounts, the British Parliament passed the first of many
Contagious Disease Acts. This law allowed local police, espe-
cially in towns with naval bases, to arrest suspected prostitutes
and force them to undergo medical examinations. The “infect-
ed” prostitutes (there was no good testing method in the 19th
century and thus there were undoubtedly many false positives)
were sent to locked hospitals for three months or longer to un-
dergo treatments (that did not work). Germany, France, and
the US all followed Britain’s lead. Of course no such laws were
ever put in place for the clients of the prostitutes, thus mak-
ing the laws very ineffective as ways of stopping the spread of
venereal disease but serving admirably to lay the groundwork
for extensive police operations of control, extortion, and stig-
matization, mostly of women accused of prostitution.
In the early Victorian period there were numerous folk
beliefs about how men could cure their sexually transmitted
diseases by having sex with “pure girls” (children between 12–
14 years of age), or with nursing new mothers, or with black
women, or even by fellatio. Obviously, these “cures” only com-
pounded the problem. Interestingly, there were no such folk
cures for women infected with these diseases. In fact, gonor-
rhea and syphilis were considered harmless to women, despite
resulting in infertility and sometimes death.
The US Civil War saw the first mass experimentation
with medical treatments, as sexually transmitted diseases were
threatening the war effort. The most common treatment for
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