I

In an 1869 report on public health, Charles CameronFootnote ¹ proclaimed the desire of the medical profession of Ireland for the extension of the Contagious Diseases Prevention Acts. The acts themselves of 1864 (27 & 28 Vic. c. 85), 1866 (29 Vic. c. 35) and 1869 (32 & 33 Vic. c. 96) ensured that doctors in England and Ireland were empowered, along with the police, to examine and detain women suspected of being infected with venereal disease. The acts were ostensibly modelled on the French system of regulation of prostitutes and initially covered and military zones including the Curragh, Queenstown (Cobh) and Cork. The initial act stipulated the registration and regular internal examination of women suspected of being prostitutes. Those women found to be infected with venereal disease were forcibly detained for periods of up to three months in a lock hospital. In 1866 two more towns in England were added to the number of subjected towns and this act enabled doctors to carry out fortnightly examinations of prostitutes. In late 1869, the acts were extended to cover eighteen towns in the United Kingdom while also prolonging the period of detention of diseased women for up to nine months. Cameron expressed a hope that the acts ‘may be extended to the civil population of these countries, amongst whom they would prove as beneficial as they have already in the case of soldiers and sailors’.Footnote ²

In the same year the Irish Times reported on ‘an important meeting’ that took place in London and included ‘members of parliament, eminent medical men (including Dr B. F. McDowell, surgeon to Westmoreland Lock Hospital), clergymen and gentlemen interested in the Health Laws to confer respecting the extension of the Act of 1864’.Footnote ³ This meeting of the Association for the Extension of the Contagious Diseases Acts (founded a year earlier) would voice similar support of the medical hierarchy of Britain and Ireland for the acts (C.D.A.s) and their extension to the civil population. The association itself had originated in England based on reports of steady rises in venereal disease in non-protected areas and its campaign of extension was very much driven by The Lancet. The Irish medical press, specifically the weekly Dublin Medical Press and Circular (D.M.P.C.) and the monthly Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science (D.Q.J.M.S.), mirrored The Lancet’s wholehearted enthusiasm for extension, announcing the setting up of Irish branches of the committee in 1868. Indeed, the association in Ireland sent signed resolutions to the lord lieutenant in favour of extending the acts, emphasising how the acts were a matter ‘of deep interest to the well-being of the people’.Footnote ⁴ But it was an increasingly vociferous public crusade against the acts, mainly in England, that initiated a prolonged and vigorous campaign in their defence by the D.M.P.C.

Initially, due in the main to press coverage, it appeared as if the desire to extend the acts to the civil population was wholly supported by the medical profession in Ireland, but as the debate raged on, certain key figures in the Irish medical profession switched sides. However, their voices of dissent remained largely undisclosed to the public, ensuring the repeal movement remained insignificant in Ireland. A meeting organised in Dublin by those in favour of repealing the acts ended in chaos and disruption, thanks largely to an organised medical opposition unprecedented in Britain. This article will examine the D.M.P.C.’s campaign to extend the C.D.A.s. in Ireland and explore its influence within the context of the debate surrounding these controversial acts. The study is also suggestive of differing social and moral norms between Ireland and Great Britain.

II

The Dublin Medical Press and Circular, or the Dublin Medical Press as it was originally named, was the first ‘weekly politico-medical periodical’Footnote ⁵ of its kind in Ireland, a medical publication that went outside the parameters of medical information to include a wide range of topics that the editors believed were relevant to the profession in Ireland. Robert Rowlette, the author of the history of the D.M.P.C. in its centenary year, conceded that its editor’s aim was to produce an informative newspaper rather than a repository of medical knowledge.Footnote ⁶ This was markedly different from the only other medical publication in Ireland – the Dublin Journal of Medical Science (D.J.M.S., later known as the Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science). The D.J.M.S. in the early years of its existence considered itself a cut above the squabbling of medical politics, and in fact Sir William Wilde,Footnote ⁷ editor from 1845 to 1849, asserted that the journal ‘never admitted any subject extrinsic to matters of practical or scientific import’.Footnote ⁸ The D.M.P.C., conversely, was originally launched in defence of provincial medical officers in the Medical Charities debate.Footnote ⁹

The Dublin Medical Press (D.M.P.) was first published on 9 January 1839 under the editorship of Dr Henry Maunsell and Dr Arthur Jacob, both professors and members of the council of the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. Both these men were formidable characters, intensely driven to protect the interests of the profession in Ireland. For the editors of the D.M.P., The Lancet (founded by Thomas Wakley in 1823) expressed most pointedly the inherent potency of the printed word in the quagmire of nineteenth-century medical politics.Footnote ¹⁰ There can be little doubt that it was in the wake of Wakley’s triumph with his publication that the idea of the Dublin Medical Press was born.Footnote ¹¹ The first half of the nineteenth century was the making of professional medicine in Ireland and the birth of the D.M.P. would serve to document the consolidation of modern medicine in Ireland.Footnote ¹² Ostensibly, the D.M.P.C. and The Lancet marked a new departure for medical journalism, and though each was unique in its approach to medical topics, the defence and betterment of the profession was a common factor in both. From the outset the D.M.P. was well received by the medical profession; the statement at the end of the first quarter that the average circulation was 1,000 copies a week surpassed many of the weekly popular newspapers.Footnote ¹³ The D.M.P. was to remain ranked alongside the best-selling weekly Irish newspapers in an environment that was embracing the power of the printed word.

As the century progressed the D.M.P. grew larger, almost doubling in size, and by 1866 it had amalgamated with an English medical journal – the Medical Circular – to become the Dublin Medical Press and Circular (D.M.P.C.). By this time Arthur Jacob’s fourth son, Archibald Hamilton Jacob, had taken over the editorship and it would be this Jacob who would lead the journal through the C.D.A. controversy. It is likely that the elder Jacob’s influence remained as he maintained his position as professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Royal College of Surgeons until 1867. Archibald Jacob represented the fourth generation of his family to embark on a career in medicine and succeeded his father as ophthalmic surgeon in the Royal City of Dublin Hospital in 1866. Like his father, he became a member of the council of the Royal College of Surgeons.Footnote ¹⁴ There were marked differences between the two men however: Arthur Jacob had steered the journal through the most controversial period of Irish medical history with a steely determination that won him many enemies within the profession. Archibald Jacob’s editorship, conversely, was in a period of relative calm in Irish medical practice, where intra-professional wrangling, though not a thing of the past, had waned significantly.Footnote ¹⁵ Colleagues found the younger Jacob far more amiable than his father, attesting to a ‘charming personality and … a kindness of heart that endeared him to many’.Footnote ¹⁶ In 1863, at their annual dinner, the president of the Irish Medical Association proposed a toast to the D.M.P.C. and its editor, an indication of the journal’s reputation in medical circles. By 1867 the Irish Medical Association members received the D.M.P.C. as a privilege of membership.Footnote ¹⁷ Rowlette, who would have known Archibald Jacob, asserted that he ‘was hardly the equal of his father, but in persistence along the course he thought right, he was just as determined’.Footnote ¹⁸ Such determination evinced itself in the columns of the D.M.P.C. where Jacob the younger doggedly defended the C.D.A.s and advocated their extension to the civil population. Indeed, Jacob was to pen an article on the acts in which he detailed their ‘good, moral effects’ in the Curragh and Cork.Footnote ¹⁹

III

As early as 1846, the D.M.P. voiced its concern at the extent of venereal disease in the army: ‘it is seen that nearly one man in every five – or more correctly, 181 per 1000 – is attacked with venereal disease’.Footnote ²⁰ Dr J. Morgan, surgeon to Westmoreland Lock Hospital, argued that ‘no disease has perhaps been more anxiously discussed by the profession’.Footnote ²¹ Such perturbation regarding the spread of venereal disease in Ireland was to be revisited many times by the journal in the following decades and by the late 1860s, like the D.J.M.S., the newly amalgamated D.M.P.C. eagerly embraced the extensionist cause. In 1869 B. F. MacDowell of Westmoreland Lock Hospital echoed many of his colleagues’ sentiments by insisting that extending the acts to the civil population was a matter ‘of great and pressing importance’, citing the alarming increase in cases, particularly in Dublin, not yet included within the remit of the acts.Footnote ²² Two years earlier in the Report of the committee of enquiry on venereal disease, Thomas Byrne, surgeon to Westmoreland Lock Hospital, commented that he ‘was greatly surprised that the Contagious Diseases Prevention Act was not made to extend to Dublin’.Footnote ²³ While it is impossible to gauge exactly the preponderance of venereal disease in Ireland, the high volume of ‘quack’ cures for syphilis and gonorrhoea available in the popular press attests to the growing problem. Maria Luddy’s work alludes to high numbers of patients being treated in Westmoreland Lock Hospital – in excess of 60,491 patients being treated from 1792 to 1910.Footnote ²⁴

The decision in 1820 that Westmoreland Lock Hospital was exclusively for the treatment of females attested to the fact that in both government and medical discourses, females or more specifically prostitutes were increasingly identified as the main perpetrators in the spread of venereal disease. Cameron, in his public health report, warned of the dangers to the public if ‘the unhappy creatures who ply this dreadful trade … remain free from the surveillance of the authorities’.Footnote ²⁵ Phillip Howell discusses how those seeking to extend the acts sought to move beyond their initial military rationale and to accentuate their universal benefits as a means of upholding and protecting social order.Footnote ²⁶ Broader sociological and cultural factors regarding women and sexuality in Ireland in the latter decades of the nineteenth century ensured that this debate would be a controversial one. Promoters of extension began to denounce the prostitute as a threat to the proper functioning of society, thus legitimising attempts to extend the acts to the civilian community. In 1867 Dr Henry W. Williams, in a letter to the editor of the D.M.P.C., wrote ‘the public want protection from certain abandoned women, who, having no remnant of any good feeling left, wilfully and wantonly spread disease amongst the opposite sex day after day and night after night’.Footnote ²⁷ By the 1870s the D.M.P.C. was echoing The Lancet’s vilification of prostitutes and arguing that their threat to the civil population legitimated moves to extend the acts.

In 1869 such support to extend the acts to the civilian population was given credence by the findings of the Parliamentary Select Committee appointed to inquire into the working of the C.D.A.s. The report asserted that ‘In certain military districts the limit of five miles imposed by the present law appears to be insufficient’.Footnote ²⁸ An 1869 report from the Cork Lock Hospital complained that the limitations of the act ensured that prostitutes were easily evading the police.Footnote ²⁹ The D.Q.J.M.S. had warned that ‘the beneficial results that have accrued from the C.D.A.’s] operations have been most encouraging but while we dwell on these gratifying and encouraging facts, we must not conceal from ourselves that we are but in the beginning of our labours’.Footnote ³⁰ The conviction that prostitutes could easily evade detection because of the legislative limitation prompted many members of the medical profession, both in Ireland and Britain, to believe that the only plausible solution was an extension of the acts. The good results of the acts were extolled by the medical press, with often contradictory and conflicting statistics. But at this point, with little opposition, the path appeared clear for the acts to go beyond their original geographical limitations. The medical press confidently asserted that the extensionist cause was one shared by the majority of the profession. Indeed, The Lancet postulated in 1871 that its stance ‘fairly represents the general opinion of medical men with regard to the Acts … those that dissent from the general view are a minority, containing a few able, if eccentric men, but still wholly unimportant both as regards numbers and standing’.Footnote ³¹ In Ireland, the D.M.P.C. asserted that ‘There is a great interest evinced by a large section of the medical profession in the extension of the [C.D.A.s] to the civil population’.Footnote ³² Jacob described a medical opponent of the acts as wholly divergent with the views of ‘most of our readers’.Footnote ³³ Indeed, the 1871 Royal Commission initiated to inquire into the operation of the acts stated that all medical witnesses agreed with the principles of the C.D.A.s.Footnote ³⁴ The Association for the Extension of the Contagious Diseases Acts was initially supported by the medical hierarchy of Ireland. In Dublin, the president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, G. H. Porter, was appointed its chairman, and the organisation was supported by such well-known professors of medicine as E. D. MapotherFootnote ³⁵ and others, ‘all well known and distinguished for their professional requirements’.Footnote ³⁶ Leading members of the medical elite were also appointed as officers in the Belfast and Cork branches of the association.Footnote ³⁷ Charles Cameron enthusiastically asserted that there was ‘nothing more noble, nothing more exalted than the objects [the Association] have in view’.Footnote ³⁸ The C.D.A.s themselves had been passed with little resistance and it would appear likely that many supporters of the acts harboured the belief that their extension would be passed with relative ease. The D.M.P.C. confidently asserted their viewpoint, claiming: ‘the question [of extension] seems so simple, and is … so plainly proved, that it is only to be wondered at if the application of these Acts is not speedily rendered universal’.Footnote ³⁹ In 1872, 2,500 doctors from Britain and Ireland sent a memorial to the Home Secretary calling for the acts to be extended. The adjoining letter extolled their support for the legislation: ‘We are most anxious that in any forthcoming measure nothing should be done to weaken the beneficial sanitary operation of the Acts at present in force’.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, the number of signatures from Irish doctors was restrained: twenty-two doctors from Belfast signed it, eighteen from Cork and five from Dublin. Perhaps the small number from Dublin reflected the fact that the acts were not in operation there, but it was an early indicator that universal support for extension within the medical profession so confidently asserted by the medical press, was less than certain. Such a muted response was also suggestive of a reticence by Irish doctors regarding an association with a topic of such a sexual nature. A year earlier, the D.Q.J.M.S. noted that ‘many medical men are writing and speaking in favour of either repealing these Acts, or of greatly modifying their provisions’ and expressed anxiety that support for extension would not guarantee that ‘the cause of morality would be at the same time promoted’.Footnote ⁴¹ This disquiet regarding the consequences of extension for public morality was not shared by the D.M.P.C. who steadfastly argued that the C.D.A.s were inadequate in their present form to protect the public.

The D.M.P.C. persevered in showcasing Dublin as a perfect example of the deficiency of the acts. The necessity of regularising prostitution there was mooted by the journal from the outset, insisting that prostitution was much more prevalent there than elsewhere in Ireland.Footnote ⁴² The arguments of the D.M.P.C. had a certain rationale given that Dublin was a garrison town that housed a lock hospital, which Carmichael described as ‘the most extensive institution in Europe’.Footnote ⁴³ Many doctors associated with Westmoreland Hospital depicted Dublin as a place where prostitution and syphilis were rife, a centre of disordered depravity. The poverty of the city became inextricably intertwined with discourses on venereal disease and prostitution. In 1871 an editorial in the D.Q.J.M.S. noted that ‘in Dublin there is certainly a large amount of syphilitic poison present among the lower class of unfortunates, and it can hardly be doubted but that enforced surveillance of those persons would soon lessen the spread of the disease’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Jacob, in the D.M.P.C., declared that ‘the condition of the working and lower orders in the city of Dublin, may be faintly conceived, and our dispensaries fully testify to the vast number who suffer from venereal disease’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet the subject of venereal disease was shrouded in secrecy and this was reflected in the fact that the Westmoreland board of governors didn’t seek public funding because it was a lock hospital.Footnote ⁴⁶ As the repeal campaign got underway in earnest in England in the 1870s, opening the way for restrained public discussions on prostitution and venereal disease, the same could not be said for Ireland.

During the 1870s the moral tone that permeated arguments for extending the C.D.A.s increasingly centred on the redemptive propensity of the acts when it came to prostitutes. Jacob asserted that in areas under the surveillance of the acts ‘the health of the prostitutes of the localities has gained immensely’.Footnote ⁴⁷ A medic residing in London, in a letter to the D.M.P.C., claimed that ‘It is notorious that in the districts under the Acts juvenile prostitution, formerly so rife, has been all but suppressed, the police … induce those who have commenced, or are about to commence, a life of prostitution, to return to their friends, to seek some other mode of life, or to enter homes’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Similarly, evidence given to the 1871 Royal Commission of Enquiry into the operation of the C.D.A.s indicated that the acts had enabled Catholic priests to act as moral guardians in Ireland. Reverend Maguire, a Catholic priest in Cork, recounted how the acts assisted clergy to reach prostitutes detained in hospital ‘whom at other times they could never approach’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Maguire insisted that this inevitably led to the ‘moral reclamation’ of many women. The priest’s evidence also revealed the role of the Catholic Church as guardians of public morality: ‘I speak of the body of my clergy; wherever we find a woman of that class residing, and we do not know positively that she is bad, we always make inquiry, and if we find out that she is a woman of that class, we insist on the landlord or the person occupying the room to dismiss her’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Maguire believed that the Catholic Church was working alongside the C.D.A.s in the moral policing of the public, outlining how the bishop of Cork was instrumental in raising funds for a Magdalen asylum for the city. In its initial stages, the Catholic hierarchy had been quietly associated with the extension campaign, most notably when the Catholic bishop of Down and Connor, Patrick Dorrian, accepted the office of vice-president of the Association for the Extension of the C.D.A.s in Belfast.Footnote ⁵¹

With the acts’ emphasis on the spread of venereal disease in the army it is worth noting that one-third of troops were Catholics of Irish birth or descent.Footnote ⁵² Moreover, Maguire’s view of the Catholic Church as moral crusaders is indicative of the increasing role of the priest in the everyday lives of the people. Larkin calculated that by 1860 there was one priest for every 1,500 people that would increase to one priest for every 900 by the end of the century.Footnote ⁵³ The growing confidence of Catholicism in late nineteenth-century Ireland impacted on how the C.D.A.s were managed in Ireland. Elisabeth Malcolm has described the complex nature of the Catholic clergy’s stance on the C.D.A.s, on one hand upholding the ability of the acts to ‘reclaim’ prostitutes but on the other abhorring any public discussion on such matters.Footnote ⁵⁴ One medic postulated in the D.M.P.C. that Catholicism was responsible for ‘keeping down profligacy and doing such successful battle against prostitution in Ireland’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Such moral leverage may have ensured that the debate surrounding the C.D.A.s in Ireland would conduct itself in a very different way than her English neighbour.

IV

Opponents of the acts were becoming increasingly vociferous and by 1870 the rising discontent with the provisions of the acts was becoming louder. In England, many middle-class groups saw the C.D.A.s as an unequivocal recognition of the double standard of sexuality between women and men and a legitimisation of prostitution. They saw the forcible detention of working-class women as an attack on civil liberties. One anti-C.D.A. pamphlet in 1876 read: ‘The whole conception that general physical health can be promoted or perpetuated in future generations by stimulating vice is monstrous as the claim that the daughters of the poor be sacrificed to save the wives and children of the rich is flagrantly unjust’.Footnote ⁵⁶

The C.D.A.s brought up questions surrounding civil liberty, and humanitarian and egalitarian issues which many groups in Britain felt were violated by the terms of the acts. The legislative support of the double standard of sexuality was too much for many individuals to accept. By 1869 the National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (N.A.R.C.D.A.) was established in England.Footnote ⁵⁷ The N.A.R.C.D.A. was mainly a male-organised movement, led by James Stansfeld, a liberal radical in Gladstone’s cabinet.Footnote ⁵⁸ Josephine ButlerFootnote ⁵⁹ and Elizabeth WolstenholmeFootnote ⁶⁰ set up the Ladies’ National Association (L.N.A.) the same year. Both the N.A.R.C.D.A. and the L.N.A. had branches in Ireland, though Maria Luddy asserts that the latter was a small and contained organisation in Ireland, supporting the parent branch in London by distributing leaflets, holding meetings and gathering signatures in support of the repeal of the acts.Footnote ⁶¹ By 1871, three branches of the L.N.A. had been established in Cork, Dublin and Belfast.Footnote ⁶² Two women in particular were behind the organisation in Ireland, Anna HaslamFootnote ⁶³ and Isabella Tod.Footnote ⁶⁴ They both hailed from Protestant traditions (Quaker and Presbyterian) and middle-class backgrounds, and like Butler, saw the C.D.A.s as an ‘attack on the decency and purity of society – the dignity and independence of every woman in the land’.Footnote ⁶⁵ The L.N.A. referred to Anna Haslam as a person ‘who has so long and earnestly served our cause in Dublin’.Footnote ⁶⁶ They were supported by Anna’s husband, Thomas Haslam, a staunch defender of women’s rights.Footnote ⁶⁷ The Haslams and Tod viewed state regulation of prostitution as a threat not merely to morality but to the sanctity of the family.

The public opposition to the acts in Ireland is difficult to quantify. Henry Richardson, registrar of the court of probate in Cork, contended that ‘all the virtuous women in Cork are unanimous in their feeling of opposition to these Acts’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Similarly, the secretary of a Protestant Rescue Society in Cork said that the repeal meetings were much supported there.Footnote ⁶⁹ The Irish Times, meanwhile, expressed displeasure at topics of a sexual nature being before the public, reporting as a ‘most disgusting nuisance’ pamphlets distributed by those in opposition to the acts. The article identified the ‘nauseous medical opinions and statistics regarding the most degrading of human vices’ as being particularly unsuitable for the public.Footnote ⁷⁰ The north of the country with its strong Protestant influence appeared to have less reservation with regard to public opposition to the acts. In 1870, the Freeman’s Journal reported that agitation against the acts appeared to be assuming ‘very extensive proportions’ in Belfast and surrounding areas and that signed petitions to parliament were ‘very considerable’.Footnote ⁷¹ The L.N.A. also reported in 1870 ‘a splendid demonstration’ in the Ulster Hall in Belfast, where the crowds ‘composed entirely of men … filled the hall and balconies’.Footnote ⁷² The Belfast branch of the L.N.A. collected 3,528 signatures in favour of repealing the acts.Footnote ⁷³ But when Elisabeth Addey of the Cork branch of the L.N.A. submitted ninety signatures in support of the repeal of the acts to J. P. Maguire, M.P. for Cork and a Catholic, his response reflected his discomfort with the subject. While he thanked Addey for her letter, he reminded her that, ‘It could not control his independent action as a representative; nor could it be taken by him as conclusive as to the opinion of the citizens of Cork’.Footnote ⁷⁴ It seemed the only forum for open and frank discussions on the acts in Ireland was the D.M.P.C.; even the D.Q.J.M.S. was remaining tight-lipped on the topic throughout the 1870s. The D.M.P.C., with its well-established reputation as a ‘medico-political’ publication, ensured that any deliberation on the C.D.A.s would have a veneer of scientific respectability. However, such anxieties regarding reputations acted as a formidable bulwark against vocal opposition to the acts in Ireland.

Archibald Jacob was appalled by the exertions of the L.N.A. and adopted a dismissive tone towards the movement from the outset. This was similar to Wakley’s stance in The Lancet where he contemptuously branded L.N.A. members as ‘persons who are necessarily ignorant of the facts requisite for forming a sound judgement’.Footnote ⁷⁵ The D.M.P.C. postulated that ‘Unless the hygienic utility of the Acts were made out to be as evident as the summer sun at noontide in a cloudless sky, these Acts could not be long maintained in the modern deluge of men and women’s rights movements’.Footnote ⁷⁶ The more prominent a platform the L.N.A. were getting in the public and political arena, the more the D.M.P.C. sought to undermine them in the columns of the journal. A writer to the journal did not mince his words, describing the anti-C.D.A. groups as ‘disgusting and childish freaks’.Footnote ⁷⁷ For Jacob, women speaking publicly on such topics was intolerable: ‘we cannot say much for the delicacy of these women who have not shrunk from; indeed have taken a great interest in, a subject which might have been more delicately left to the stronger sex’.Footnote ⁷⁸ In fact, the D.M.P.C. dismissed much of the repeal movement as religious fanaticism, presumably Protestant because the Catholic Church were conspicuously silent on the topic.Footnote ⁷⁹ Jacob argued that the subject of the C.D.A.s was one ‘in which medical men alone are able to give answer to politicians and statesmen’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Dr Worth of the Royal College of Physicians in Dublin echoed this viewpoint. He argued in the Irish Times that he could not refute claims made by those in favour of abolishing the acts because venereal disease was a topic that was ‘unpleasant to discuss’ in a public newspaper, insisting that the only appropriate forum was the D.M.P.C.Footnote ⁸¹ This contrasted markedly with the anti-C.D.A. campaign, which encouraged public meetings and leaflet distribution. Maguire, the Catholic priest, had asserted to the Commission that ‘we object entirely of those things being placarded about the streets, and we fancy it has done great mischief’.Footnote ⁸² However, if the D.M.P.C. was to be the only acceptable framework for debate on the acts in Ireland, Jacob needed to present both sides of the argument despite the journal’s well-known support for extension. And while the journal was determined to discredit the L.N.A., its editor adopted a much more deferential tone with medics who opposed the acts.

While the Association for Extension of the Contagious Diseases Acts included members of the medical hierarchy, it is misleading to assume that the medical profession in general sought their extension or were against their repeal. Medical critics of the C.D.A.s, heavily involved in the N.A.R.C.D.A. in England, included Charles Bell Taylor (1829–1909), an ophthalmic surgeon, and Charles DrysdaleFootnote ⁸³ (1829–1907), a venereologist who studied under the famed French venereologist Philippe Ricord. Both Bell Taylor and Drysdale wrote extensively for the medical press. The D.M.P.C. branded Bell Taylor as ‘an extreme and deadly foe’ of the C.D.A.s., asserting that he ‘goes very far in his opinions, and further than most of our readers would be likely to follow him’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet his letters to the editor, as well as Drysdale’s, were published extensively in the D.M.P.C. In fact, Bell Taylor complemented Jacob on ‘the exceptional fairness which the Medical Press is conducted’.Footnote ⁸⁵ Drysdale had a well established reputation as an avant-garde thinker due to his association with the Malthusian League,Footnote ⁸⁶ and as such his radical views on controlling the spread of venereal disease would not come as a surprise to many. Similarly, Bell Taylor and his colleague Charles Worth were also vocal opponents of the acts, and products of what Walkowitz and Howell refer to as the non-conformist radicalism developing in northern England in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁷ Both these men hailed from Nottingham, an area flagged for inclusion in any extension of the acts. Worth, a surgeon, was instrumental in encouraging Josephine Butler to join the abolitionist side.Footnote ⁸⁸ Jacob acknowledged that ‘Nottingham seems to be taking a foremost part in its opposition to the Contagious Diseases Act extension’.Footnote ⁸⁹

Drysdale argued in the pages of the D.M.P.C. that regularising prostitution was not the answer to the rise in venereal disease and held that the acts were an attack on the civil liberties of working-class women. His insisted that poverty was the primary cause for prostitution and asserted that ‘if women could make a living as easily as men, they would prefer to sell their labour for food and necessaries and not their persons’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Meanwhile Bell Taylor maintained that the acts’ identification of women as the sole perpetrators of venereal disease was unjust. He argued that the spread of venereal disease would never be controlled if ‘the whole burden of proof is thrown upon [prostitutes] alone’.Footnote ⁹¹ Like Drysdale, Bell Taylor viewed the C.D.A.s as a violation of women’s basic rights. ‘Is it not monstrous to suppose that because a man needs only pleasure, and a woman only food, that therefore the woman’s guilt is out of all proportion more horrible than the man’s, and that the government is justified in subjecting her to nameless indignities in order that he may be vicious without impunity?’Footnote ⁹²

Despite such prolific representation of leading English medics who opposed the acts, the D.M.P.C. does not offer any outspoken testimony for the repeal of the C.D.A.s by an important figure in the Irish medical profession. Early in the debate the D.M.P.C. asserted that ‘only a few in our ranks’ were opposed to their extension.Footnote ⁹³ A decade later Dr Thomson, senior surgeon to the Richmond Hospital in Dublin, told the Surgical Society of Ireland that ‘I am glad to say that in spite of reproaches, the medical profession stand, with but a few exceptions, upon the side of those who approve of the Acts’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Did Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century lack the non-conformist, radical element among the medical profession that produced the articulate opposition of Worth and Bell Taylor? In a crowded and increasingly competitive job market, the C.D.A.s offered steady employment to doctors. Indeed, the 1871 Report of the Royal Commission on the C.D.A.s observed that ‘The medical witnesses experienced in the administration of these Acts are nearly all agreed that the periodical examination of the public women is essential to the system’.Footnote ⁹⁵ The act stipulated that registered women were to be examined fortnightly, providing much needed income to Irish doctors. If the acts had been extended, this would have impacted very positively on employment prospects of the struggling medical profession in IrelandFootnote ⁹⁶ and this may have been another pre-emptive factor against vocal opposition to the C.D.A.s.

Nonetheless, a considerable number of practitioners were opposed to the acts in Ireland. As late as 1882 sixty-nine Belfast doctors had sent a petition to parliament in opposition to the acts claiming that ‘syphilis has not diminished’.Footnote ⁹⁷ However, it appears that the majority of practitioners were reluctant to risk professional reputations by publicly wading into the debate. In 1871 the D.Q.J.M.S. pointed out that ‘Many medical men are writing and speaking in favour of either repealing these Acts or of greatly modifying their provisions’.Footnote ⁹⁸ The Freeman’s Journal reported that a petition presented to parliament, seeking the repeal of the acts, was ‘headed by the names of 26 of the leading members of the medical profession in our city, who are unanimous in calling for their immediate and total repeal’.Footnote ⁹⁹ It seems likely that these medical opponents of the acts were the ones that Thomas Haslam referred to in a letter to the same newspaper that argued that ‘with nearly thirty of the most eminent members of the medical profession in Dublin on our side, we need not despair’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The names of the twenty-six doctors are printed in The Shield (the weekly publication of the L.N.A. in Britain) and included Dr George H. Porter, surgeon to the Queen in Ireland, Dr Edward J. Quinlan, secretary to the Irish Medical Association, Dr A. H. McClintock of the Rotunda Hospital and Dr James Little, chief physician of the Adelaide Hospital.Footnote ¹⁰¹ True to Haslam’s claim, the signatories were undoubtedly representative of the medical elite of Dublin but the fact that their names were only printed in The Shield and not in either the public or the medical press is revealing. Such surreptitious support for repeal perhaps suggests the men were unwilling to become embroiled in the debates on the C.D.A.s. One surgeon, a Dr James Wharton, who chaired a meeting in Dublin in opposition to the acts describing them as ‘unjust, one-sided and nefarious’, nonetheless made sure to state clearly ‘that he appeared at the meeting in his private capacity and not as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons’.Footnote ¹⁰² Perhaps Irish doctors, both Protestant and Catholic, were still struggling to establish themselves as a reputable and prestigious profession and could ill afford to be publicly associated with such a controversial topic.

A likely leader of the abolitionist movement in Ireland was Dr B. F. MacDowell, surgeon to the Lock Hospital in Dublin. One of the first Irish doctors to support the Association for Extension of the Acts, in 1869 he had acknowledged the problem of prostitution in Dublin in the D.Q.J.M.S.: ‘I consider the extensions of the Contagious Diseases Acts for the protection of the civil population in large cities to be a question of great and pressing importance’.Footnote ¹⁰³ However, MacDowell was to make a complete reversal of opinion in the forthcoming years and by 1877 the D.M.P.C. acknowledged that ‘the abolitionists secured a very important convert’ in MacDowell.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In the same year MacDowell asserted in the D.M.P.C. that he was ‘emphatically in favour of the abolitionists’ and reasoned that ‘more humane resources are within our reach, and in successful operation for limiting venereal disease than these measures’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The D.M.P.C., clearly unimpressed by MacDowell’s change of heart, accused him of ‘permitting the propagation of venereal as a penalty on prostitution’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ However, MacDowell’s opposition was muted and did not develop into a public support of opponents of the act. Given his position as surgeon to the Westmoreland Hospital, and the fact that he had played a role in the origin of the extension movement, MacDowell’s opposition to the acts would have lent great weight and respectability to the arguments for repeal in much the way Drysdale’s had in Britain. However, this was not to be and as such it appeared to the public that the acts had the support of the medical profession in Ireland. In 1879 Jacob told the Surgical Society of Ireland that he had never read ‘anything more inconclusive or unconvincing’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ than the arguments of opponents of the acts. However, at the same meeting Dr McClintock of the Rotunda Hospital (one of the signatories on the medical petition against the acts), denounced the acts as offering ‘every encouragement to illicit sexual intercourse by diverting it as far as possible from those penalties and restraints which certainly are attached to it by nature’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ McClintock referred to the old adage that syphilis was a just and divine retribution for sexual contact with a prostitute.

At the same meeting William Stokes,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ arguably one of the most eminent medical figures of his day, revealed that he opposed the acts: ‘But the reason why I would like to see those Acts repealed is that notwithstanding the undoubtedly good effects with which they have been attended, they do not go at all far enough’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Stokes advocated that both sexes should be subjected to forcible examination. Given his position among the medical hierarchy of Ireland, Stokes’s support would have been a boon to the anti-C.D.A. campaign, but he made no further public criticism of them. If Stokes, McClintock or MacDowell had become the flag-bearer for Irish practitioners who opposed the acts, the public perception of the acts in Ireland may have been altered significantly. Instead, without a leading, authoritative medical figure to speak out against the acts, the repeal campaign in Ireland could never evolve into an organisation of significant leverage to win over public support in Ireland. In the face of such restrained opposition, the way was paved for those interested in extension to showcase their support for the acts in a very public way.

V

The Irish Times announced the L.N.A. annual general meeting to be held in the Round Room of the Rotunda, Dublin, in October of 1878. The meeting would include such eminent opponents of the acts as Stansfeld and Josephine Butler, among other ‘distinguished persons’.Footnote ¹¹¹ The meeting was advertised in almost all the national newspapers, extolling the credentials of the speakers. The L.N.A. decision to have their meeting in Dublin could not have been unrelated to the likelihood of the acts being extended there if the repeal campaign was unsuccessful. There had been a number of L.N.A. speakers who had visited Ireland before 1878. For example, there was a meeting in Belfast of the Anti-Contagious Diseases Association, followed by a meeting of the Belfast branch of the L.N.A. where ‘the building was densely crowded, numbers being obliged to leave for want of room’.Footnote ¹¹² But the inclusion of such key figures in the repeal campaign and the fact that it was the annual meeting of the L.N.A. made the Dublin meeting of particular significance. The Freeman’s Journal envisaged ‘stirring speeches’ at the L.N.A. meeting, which was to be held on 31 October in Brunswick Street followed by the larger meeting in the Rotunda the following day.Footnote ¹¹³

The gossip column of the Freeman’s Journal reported on a L.N.A. meeting in London as ‘anything but a nice one for the ladies assembled there’ and were critical of Butler who spoke ‘upon the most discordant subject ever chosen by a woman’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Their summary of the London meeting was less than complimentary: ‘What she said was of little moment, rather high-flown and bombastic, energetic in tone and exaggerated in sentiment’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Meanwhile, the D.M.P.C.’s response to the Dublin meeting was predictably sardonic. In an editorial titled ‘The recent agitation in Dublin’, the D.M.P.C. suggested the subject of the C.D.A.s was unknown in Ireland, deliberately confusing it with the Contagious Diseases (animals) Acts of 1878:

In that city [Dublin], they have found a somewhat favourable scene for their operations, for there, the general public is entirely and helplessly ignorant of the subject, has a vague idea that the Contagious Diseases Acts have something to say to the foot and mouth disease in cows, and naturally expected that Mrs Josephine Butler would have expanded her oratory in a denunciation of the traffic in pleuro-pneumonic beef.Footnote ¹¹⁶

Despite having previously decried the extent of prostitution in the city the D.M.P.C. appeared anxious to portray the Dublin audience as gullible and unworldly, a stark contrast to the seasoned English audience that the L.N.A. were accustomed to. The journal attempted to discredit the L.N.A. supporters in Dublin, describing them as ‘pre-eminently amiable, gushingly philanthropic – and ravenous for something upon which to glut their redundant humanity’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The depiction of Dublin as a place ‘where almost everyone shrinks from the notion of standing up in public to discuss so dirty a subject’Footnote ¹¹⁸ was to present the opponents of the acts as unscrupulous outsiders, bent on the destruction of public morality.

The public meeting in the Round Room of the Rotunda was crowded. The meeting was attended by ‘several young men who, at different stages of the proceedings, made sometimes humorous, at other times, boisterous interruptions’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ There seems little doubt that the young men were medical students; certainly the Freeman’s Journal reported this to be the case.Footnote ¹²⁰ A letter to the Irish Times, signed anonymously ‘An Hospital surgeon’, read:

The L.N.A. reported that the meeting was ‘of a very disorderly character’, and attributed the chaos to the exuberance and boisterous nature of the audience and not to any concerted opposition to the repeal movement: ‘The presence of several hundreds of Dublin medical and other students, whose character for insubordination is well known, and the equal excitability of an Irish audience are almost sufficient in themselves to account for the scenes of confusion and uproar’.Footnote ¹²² Medical students or not, the ‘young men’ were most vocal when James Stansfeld stood to speak, and despite entreaties from the chair they continued to disrupt his speech. However, the meeting was to be thrown into complete disarray when Dr William Thomson of the Richmond Hospital, Dublin stood up and forwarded an amendment that ‘the C.D.A.s, although capable of improvement, are calculated to effect great physical and moral good and deserve the approval of this meeting’.Footnote ¹²³ Thomson’s interruption was met with great applause and what followed was, ostensibly, a medical defence of the acts delivered by Thomson in place of Stansfeld’s speech. He made particular reference to the Protestant clergymen on the platform who supported repeal: ‘Was there a gentleman on the platform, and especially any clergyman, who would say that pestilence of different forms were not sent on earth by God for the punishment of Man’s sin? (Hear Hear) …’.Footnote ¹²⁴ The Freeman’s Journal reported that ‘loud and continuous applause’ followed Thomson’s speech, seats were overthrown and the meeting had to be abandoned in ‘terrible confusion’ with Stansfeld or Butler unable to give their presentations.Footnote ¹²⁵ The D.M.P.C.’s assertion that the acts were not a subject matter for the public was driven home by Thomson and his supporters, with catastrophic results for the L.N.A. meeting.

The Irish Times, whose editors believed the subject of the acts ‘as a topic for public agitation is, in our opinion, an offence and an injury to public agitation’, congratulated Thomson: ‘One medical gentleman, who had the moral courage to encounter the itinerant mission on its own platform with a calm and crushing reply deserves all honour’.Footnote ¹²⁶ The D.M.P.C. postulated that Dr Thomson ‘put on record an emphatic denial of statements which would otherwise have been swallowed and digested by the hungry audience’.Footnote ¹²⁷ Thomson himself justified his outburst by reiterating the viewpoint that the acts were an entirely inappropriate topic for public dissemination: ‘The public of Dublin in the greater part had not heard of them before, and it was owing to the activity of a noisy and mischievous English association, that the Irish first learned that their liberties were imperiled’.Footnote ¹²⁸ The L.N.A. was depicted as an English organisation that sought to corrupt the Irish public. The Freeman’s Journal described the event as an ‘organised raid upon a meeting on a legitimate if not very inviting subject’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Without any organised and vocal opposition to the extensionist campaign, Thomson and his followers were able to sabotage the most significant attempt to publicise the abolitionist cause in Ireland. The public press echoed the D.M.P.C.’s conservatism with regard to the public discussion of sexual matters, the Irish Times in particular supporting the profession: ‘In Dublin the presence of these agitators last week was an insult and an intrusion’, and describing the meeting as ‘an offence and an injury to public morality’.Footnote ¹³⁰ While the repeal campaign remained insignificant in Ireland it was unlikely that the L.N.A. would have found a receptive audience in Ireland, where public discussion of sexual topics was a taboo.

VI

The L.N.A. meeting in Dublin was a very public attestation of the marked difference between Ireland and England in terms of ideas of public morality. After the devastation of the Famine, Ireland in the second half of the nineteenth century was establishing a cultural heritage that would become an integral part of the country’s identification. Roman Catholicism was to become deeply imbued in popular culture and with this an uncompromising moral code that had strict views on acceptable behaviour. How much this moral code impacted on the medical profession, both Catholic and Protestant, in Ireland is difficult to quantify but what can be accepted is that there was some difference in how doctors in both countries responded to the C.D.A. controversy. The L.N.A. meeting in Dublin was in direct opposition to this moral code and consequently Thomson’s rowdy and embarrassing disruption of a legitimate meeting was justified in the public and more specifically in the medical press. The Freeman’s Journal asserted that they were ‘very glad if we are spared the further consideration of a matter which is a little too strong for our Hibernian tastes’.Footnote ¹³¹ In 1883 the acts were suspended with compulsory examination abolished, and three years later were successfully repealed. Although the repeal of the C.D.A.s in an English context could be defined as an indicator of an evolving and articulate feminism, an assertion of philanthropic humanitarianism over repressive conservatism, this was far from the case in Ireland. The D.M.P.C had argued that the acts were not a subject for public discussion and the fiasco of the L.N.A. meeting in Dublin had proved them right.