Introduction: Institutions and Experiences

Summary

The Admission of Venereal Patients . . . [is] a Subversion of the Charity, or a Misapplication of the Money given in trust for the Poor . . . the Society [has] constantly rejected Venereal Patients for the very reason of Being Venereal.

So wrote one of the governors of the Westminster Infirmary in 1738. It is clearly a strong invective against allowing so-called “foul” patients into hospitals. Many have presumed that this policy was pervasive in early modern London. It was not.

Considerably more scholarship has explored venereal disease in the modern period. However, there is a growing body of literature on the early modern period that has explored medical treatises, graphic art, and literature, analyzing the various meanings that early modern doctors, artists, and playwrights attached to sexual infection. Yet early modern institutional care has received rather less attention. Robert Jütte has identified the area as a notable gap in the literature and called for further research. This study hopes to add to Jütte’s work on Germany and that of Jon Arrizabalga, John Henderson, and Roger French on Italy.

Discussions of institutional care for venereal disease in early modern England have tended to assume that the attitude expressed above by the governors of the Westminster Infirmary was standard throughout the period. Moreover, English scholarship has focused the lion’s share of attention on one particular hospital, the London Lock Hospital. The Lock, a voluntary hospital devoted exclusively to venereal disease, was established in 1747. Its appearance in the mid-eighteenth century led many to assume that impoverished venereal patients seeking treatment earlier had nowhere to turn. Historians presumed that the Lock Hospital must have filled some void, that prior hospitals must have excluded venereal patients on moral grounds. With the Enlightenment, in this view, came new tolerance and a new hospital as its manifestation. A kind of whiggishness has colored many discussions of the Lock, portraying it as a progressive step in the march of modernity. To make this case scholars have asserted that early hospital provision for venereal patients was scant or nonexistent. Arguing from a slightly different vantage point, some recent historians of sexuality have advanced a similar picture.