Categories
History

Review: Medicine, Morality and Political Culture: Legislation on Venereal Disease in Five Northern European Countries, c.1870-1995

Having written a whole chapter on Venereal Disease propaganda in the Second World War (and a journal article that I need to put forward), this looks interesting:

Catching venereal disease is different from catching a cold. It’s nastier, more intimate, raises suspicions, and makes you wonder why you were so stupid not to have safe sex, or why you had sex at all. Not surprisingly, the loaded meaning of VD has haunted European society for ages. Who infected whom was not simply a medical but also – at least for the past 150 years – a political question. An oversimplified but nevertheless true answer to this question has been, until fairly recently, that women infect men. The roots of this view are found in 19th-century approaches to combating VD by controlling prostitution, most often through a system of licensed brothels and compulsory medical checkups and treatment. “Syphilis” (or what was diagnosed as such) was seen as a gendered sickness, transmitted by “loose” women from the lower classes whose civil liberties were trampled by lock-up hospitals, police control and forced examinations, all in order to protect male sexual needs.

Read full review.

By Second World War Posters

Mass Communications Academic, @MMUBS. British Home Front Propaganda posters as researched for a PhD completed 2004. In 1997, unwittingly wrote the first history of the Keep Calm and Carry On poster, which she now follows with interest.

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