Gayle Davis

The Cruel Madness of Love

Against a backdrop of contemporary social and sexual concerns, and potent fears surrounding the moral and physical ‘degeneration’ of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century society, ‘The Cruel Madness of Love’ explores a critical period in the developing relationship between syphilis and insanity. General paralysis of the insane (GPI), the most commonly diagnosed of the neurosyphilitic disorders, has been devastating both in terms of its severity and incidence. Using the rich laboratory and asylum records of lowland Scotland as a case study, Gayle Davis examines the evolution of GPI as a disease category from a variety of perspectives: social, medical, and pathological. Through exploring case notes and the impact of new diagnostic techniques and therapies, such as the Wassermann Test and Malarial Therapy, the reader gains a unique insight into both patients and practitioners. Significant insights are gained into the socio–sexual background and medical experience of patients, as well as the clinical ideas and judgmental behaviour of the practitioners confronting this disease. ‘The Cruel Madness of Love’ will be of interest to anyone wishing to explore the historical relationship between sexuality, morality and disease.

Madness in the Family: Insanity and Institutions in the Australasian Colonial World, 1860–1914

genitals reasonably fresh. Which alerts us to the ongoing frustration of researching this topic: it is always harder to uncover the intimate aspects of people’s lives than it is to analyse the surrounding discourses. Featherstone’s book in this sense focuses more firmly on the surer ground of discourses, skilfully charting changes over time and tracing the intricate connections between local articulations of opinions, theories and ideologies and international developments. Although neither book is published by a university press, both are evidence that this is not necessarily a reflection on the scholarly quality of the contents. The Cambridge Scholars volume has the luxury of endnotes at the end of each chapter as well as a bibliography, but no illustrations. Black Inc. allows for extensive endnotes at the end of the book, a dozen black and white images, but no bibliography. Both authors maintain that the history of sexuality is not a simple story of progress from a darkly repressive age to a modern world of enlightenment and liberation. But this is more consistent in Featherstone’s account than in Bongiorno’s, as Featherstone stops her story with the arrival of the Pill. Bongiorno’s longer time-frame allows him to explore the changes that have occurred since the early 1960s. While the HIV/AIDS epidemic did provide a temporary hiccup in this story, in general the account that emerges is a positive one, albeit ‘nuanced, contested and uneven’ (xv). While various religious groups still seek to restrict access to contraception and abortion, and to punish sex that occurs outside the context of heterosexual marriage, in general Australians now have an unprecedented opportunity to pursue their sexual pleasures and preferences without fear. Knowledge about sexuality is more readily available, as are the knowledge and technologies to achieve safe and pleasurable sex. Although stopping short of total equality, laws are more accommodating to same-sex relationships, and this reflects a greater acceptance amongst the population as a whole. But as both accounts remind us, history provides no guarantees that change is always in one direction. As I write this review, the Australian media is full of the controversy surrounding female genital mutilation in the context of migrant populations from cultures where this has been a traditional practice. These two histories remind us of the complex array of factors that affect the history of Australian sexuality and shape specific outcomes at any given time.

Stillbirth registration and perceptions of infant death, 1900-60: the Scottish case in national context1

The history of vital registration has attracted substantial attention from both social historians and historical demographers. While much of that research has touched upon issues of fertility and mortality, the contentious issue of the stillborn child—which falls somewhere between the two—has been largely neglected. Although civil birth and death registration was introduced to Scotland in 1855, stillbirth registration did not begin until 1939. Using a range of legal, medical, and statistical evidence, this article explores the history of stillbirth registration in Scotland from a social history perspective. It outlines the problems associated with lack of stillbirth registration, the processes that eventually led to registration of the stillborn child, and the wider significance of that registration.

“A Fifth Freedom” or “Hideous Atheistic Expediency”? The Medical Community and Abortion Law Reform in Scotland, c.1960–1975

The purpose of the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Bill, published on 15 June 1966, was to amend and clarify the law relating to termination of pregnancy by a registered medical practitioner. When David Steel, a young Liberal MP from the Scottish Borders, put this bill forward, some suggested that a Scottish politician had no need to introduce abortion reform since Scots law was already satisfactory in this regard. Certainly, abortion law in Scotland was more flexible than its English counterpart, and the number of prosecutions few. The line between criminal and non-criminal abortion was, however, just as indistinct, with great medical uncertainty in this area. On becoming law, the 1967 Abortion Act was the first piece of abortion-related legislation to cover Scotland, England and Wales collectively.1 None the less, for a variety of legal and moral reasons, abortion policy and practice continued to differ on either side of the Border. The sexual politics surrounding abortion law reform has, in recent years, attracted increasing attention from historians, sociologists and political scientists. Several broad strands of interpretation may be detected within the literature. Early writing on the history of abortion and the 1967 Abortion Act generally subscribed to an “heroic” interpretation of events. It was largely produced by abortion law reform activists and sympathizers to stress the significant advantages accruing from an end to surreptitious and expensive criminal abortions, and to praise the importance of the Abortion Law Reform Association (hereafter ALRA) within the process of legal reform.2 Thereafter, a range of more nuanced approaches have been advanced. For example, historians of sexuality have interpreted abortion law reform as part of a whole raft of legislation in the 1960s, including homosexual law reform and the revision of divorce law, which redefined the relationship of the State and the law to the moral domain of the private citizen.3 Other commentators have focused on the political manoeuvring surrounding the 1967 Abortion Act, often as a case study in the role of pressure groups in shaping sexual politics.4 In addition, a body of literature has investigated the role of the medical profession within abortion law reform, and the degree to which the law has influenced, and been interpreted within, medical practice.5 In particular, feminist analysis, some drawing heavily upon the work of Foucault, has been brought to bear on the implications of the “medicalization” of abortion law reform for the reproductive rights of women.6 Such writing tends to exhibit pronounced ambivalence towards the medical monopoly of abortion provision through the 1967 act.7 In many respects, this literature feeds into other areas of research centring on the impact and penetration of biomedical perspectives within individual, social and political life.8 However, while the history of abortion policy and provision in Britain has received extensive attention by scholars, such studies have mainly centred on the social politics surrounding the issue at Whitehall and Westminster. There have been no substantial corresponding studies of Scotland to date, despite the fact that, to a significant extent, Scotland possessed its own system of law, local government and medical practice, as well as arguably a distinctive civic and sexual culture. In the case of abortion law reform this is particularly surprising given that the 1967 act was to be substantially modelled on the Scottish experience. Using a range of legal, medical and governmental files, supplemented by oral testimony, this article seeks in part to rectify these omissions by examining such regional differences as they informed abortion law reform. First, it surveys abortion law as it existed in Scotland prior to the 1967 act, contrasting it with English statute law and law enforcement on the subject. Secondly, the article examines Scottish medical practice relating to abortion before the 1967 act, highlighting the work of the gynaecologist, Dugald Baird, and the influence of his liberal ideology and clinical practice in Aberdeen at a time when uncertainty and misunderstanding of abortion law prevailed elsewhere in Scotland. Thirdly, it explores the input of Scottish medicine to the politics surrounding the 1967 act, focusing on the two key medical figures of Dugald Baird and Ian Donald. Residual doubts over the inclusion of Scotland in abortion legislation and continuing anomalies between English and Scots Law after the passing of the act are then discussed. Finally, the impact of the act north of the Border is charted using Scottish evidence to the Lane Committee (1971–74), and an evaluation made of how far abortion procedures were in fact medicalized in the following decade. The article concludes by characterizing the attitude of the Scottish medical community to abortion in the 1960s as one of “reluctant medicalization”, an attitude which current historiography has generally failed to take account of when critiquing the process of “medicalization”. Many Scottish doctors, and even more Scottish nurses, strongly questioned intervention in this field both in terms of ethics and propriety. Moreover, whereas the conventional historiography largely stereotypes the response of the medical community towards abortion, this article will suggest the need for a more nuanced approach which captures the diversity and ambiguities that characterized the medical communitys response to the “medicalization”—or enforced medical monopoly—of abortion at this time.

Sexuality and the State: the Campaign for Scottish Homosexual Law Reform, 1967–80

The historiography of homosexual law reform in late-twentieth-century Britain has mainly focused on the sexual politics surrounding the Wolfenden Committee and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act (applicable only in England and Wales). Using a range of government archives and the papers of the Scottish Minorities Group (SMG), this article explores the campaign to introduce law reform for Scotland in the period 1967–80. It focuses on the interface between the SMG and Scottish governance and how it shaped the fortunes of a succession of measures designed to advance the legal status of homosexuals north of the Border. It concludes that the achievement of limited decriminalisation in 1980 was a pyrrhic victory and that the main reason for the partial and protracted process of reform was less the tactics of the SMG, or the lack of Scottish legislative autonomy, than the continuing homophobic culture within Scottish politics and society.

‘A Festering Sore on the Body of Society’: The wolfenden committee and Female Prostitution in Mid-Twentieth-Century Scotland

The proceedings and report of the Wolfenden Committee on Prostitution and Homosexual Offences (1954–7) figure prominently in the historiography of the sexual politics of late twentieth-century Britain. In terms of female prostitution, three broad but inter-related strands of interpretation may be detected within the literature. First, a largely narrative approach has located the Committee and subsequent legislation within the broader story of changing sexual mores and associated moral panic in 1950s Britain. Secondly, many social historians and sociologists have focused upon the coercive and regulatory implications of the report and the Street Offences Act of 1959,often within a Foucauldian framework of analysis. For commentators such as Jeffrey Weeks, the Wolfenden Report, by redefining the relationship of the law to the private moral terrain of the citizen, enabled a reaffirmation of the policing of public space in the interests of order and decency. Similarly, for Frank Mort, one of its most significant features was its codification of a ‘new geography of sexuality’ which both made the ‘troublesome and dangerous sexualities of prostitution’ more visible to the official mind and furnished a new ‘topography of regulation’. Meanwhile, other commentators have advanced a more specifically feminist interpretation of events. Thus, Carol Smart views the central thrust of the Wolfenden Committee’s deliberations on

Introduction: Agency and Invisibility in Constructions of Infertility

This section introduction uses Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost (2010), a powerful memoir detailing the author’s undiagnosed endometriosis and subsequent hysterectomy, to open up a discussion of the importance of power and agency in understandings of infertility in the modern era. In histories of infertility, the issues of agency and invisibility are deeply entwined. The power to act depends in part on social recognition of a ‘problem’, and the choices of those whose voices are not heard, or, even worse, are deliberately silenced, are narrowed – sometimes to the point of non-existence. The chapters in this section show how in past societies, as in the contemporary world, disparities of power marked and determined the experience of infertility. They demonstrate that while ideological constructions of gender, race and class have conditioned popular, legal, and medical approaches to infertility, stigmatized and neglected groups have managed to fight back and to challenge these constructions in unexpected ways.

Introduction: The Body Politic and the Infertile Body

This section introduction sets out the ways in which infertile bodies have been situated as objects of political concern. Since ancient times, the reproductive capacity of a people has been used as an indicator of political health. Even today, in many Western societies the fertile body is used as a symbol of national power. Historically, high-level machinations of power have often determined the individual experience of infertility, whether through castigation of those who fail to conceive, or policies of population control. This section examines the intersection between medical and cultural constructions of infertile bodies, political understandings of population and the health of the state, and the development and provision of techniques for investigating, managing, and curing infertility. It concludes that analysis of political influences on perceptions and experiences of infertility helps us to understand the boundaries of infertile individuals’ capacities for action, and their abilities to enact positive change.

Introduction: Situating Infertility in Medicine

This section introduction explores medical approaches to infertility in a variety of geographical contexts and chronological periods, considering how doctors have conceptualized, diagnosed, and responded to infertility as a condition. The chapters in this section examine the historical shaping of medical understandings of infertility, how access to treatment has been mediated by social, political, and scientific factors, and the medical construction and treatment of ‘deviant’ sexualities. Indeed, it has often proved impossible to separate medical and moral discourses. These chapters also lament an historical failure to record the patient’s voice, and suggest the very limited extent to which patient autonomy was compatible with medical authority. The section thereby offers rich insights into medical thinking and practice on infertility, and into the broad interface between medicine, science, and culture.

Introduction: Reproductive Technologies and Imagined Futures

This section introduction considers some of the ethical debates generated by the creation of new reproductive technologies, and places these in historical perspective. It contrasts ethical debates which have shaped the development of research science and access to new technologies with literary and philosophical imaginings of the potential implications of reproductive technologies and what these might mean for infertile women and non-fertile couples. In doing so, it underlines the extent to which debates on infertility have always been grounded not only in current concerns, but have involved imagined futures for individuals and societies. The chapters in this section show that our reproductive futures are likely to remain bound not merely by our scientific capabilities, but by our social values. The ‘right’ to reproduce will remain mediated by complex and historically contingent factors. The troubled historical relationship between (wo)man, technology, and modernity is likely to remain a dominant trope, in media representations as much as our imaginations