Poverty and the pox: Venereal disease in London hospitals, 1600--1800 (England)

This dissertation examines the treatment of venereal disease in London hospitals in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that gender and class played an important role in determining the scope of medical options available to venereal patients, as well as patients' own experiences of medical care.; My research engages two main assumptions about early modern institutional venereology. First, it has been thought that London hospitals refused venereal patients on moral grounds until the establishment of the Lock Hospital in 1747. Data from St. Bartholomew's and St. Thomas's Hospitals shows that venereal patients found care at these institutions from as early as the mid-sixteenth century. Moreover, the scope of venereology at these hospitals was great; between twenty and thirty percent of all Bart's patients were in the venereal wards through much of the seventeenth century. Secondly, studies have assumed that moral reformation was the primary impetus behind institutionalized VD care. Moral reformation did become important at the very end of our period, and became quite prevalent in Victorian VD hospitals. However, for the majority of two centuries London hospitals did not strive to reform paupers with VD. This revision shows that venereal patients were legitimate objects of charity from a very early date, and that the Lock Hospital emerged not as a result of Enlightenment, but as a result of demography as London's population bulged as a result of migration.; In order to demonstrate the role of gender and class I compare the scope of care available for patients who could afford private treatment. An important public-private gap differentiated the medical experiences of rich and poor. The stigmatized nature of this disease made medical privacy all-important. This study shows that medical confidentiality emerged in this period as a direct result of VD. However, that luxury was not available to paupers who had to utilize hospitals. Wealthy women could also afford to hire female practitioners, while poor women always faced hospital care that was controlled by male administrators and delivered by male doctors. Because of the sexual nature of the pox, gender infused the medical exchange and colored the experiences of venereal patients at every step.