ADDRESS TO MEDICAL WOMEN
Having been invited to speak to you on ‘The Responsibility of Women Physicians in relation to the Contagious Diseases Act,’ I have considered it a duty to accept this invitation for several reasons.
It is twenty-seven years since my attention was first imperatively called by our philanthropist, Miss Mary Carpenter, to the subject of regulating or organizing the immorality of women. Since that time I have necessarily given much thought to this subject.
I have always felt that the National Repeal Societies made a mistake in relaxing effort after the first check which the Contagious Diseases Acts suffered in 1886. The fact that, in a House of 670 members, only 245 voted on the side of a great moral question, and that 289 absented themselves, was worthy of note. It showed that the great campaign against perverted sex was then only beginning. After that first defeat the mighty forces of evil, of selfishness, of ignorance, of timidity, of hypocrisy, and of lust were sure to rally, and many genuine but short-sighted philanthropists, seeing the shocking results of unrestrained evil, would grope about for a remedy, and probablyagain be misled by a plausible but impossible method of cure.
On studying carefully the important Government Reports just published—viz., Representations from the Royal College of Physicians, from the Secretary of State for India, from the Departmental Committee, from the Army Sanitary Commission, and from Lord George Hamilton’s despatch—I recognised more fully than ever before the great and growing danger which is arising from sexual vice. That danger exists, not only through our army in India, but also through the present condition of all standing armies. Thus, by the systematic perversion of the sexual instinct, the gradual destruction of so-called Christian civilization is taking place.
I felt, moreover, that the reference made in these Reports to the employment and training of women in India to examine and treat Indian prostitutes in the military hospitals under the medical officer demanded the notice of women physicians.
Since 1870 a body of highly educated and reliable women physicians has grown up in Great Britain and Ireland—a body recognised by the State as of equal standing with their professional brethren. During that period also a most important and beneficent medical movement for the help of our Indian sisters has been established in India, known as the Dufferin Fund, and promoted by our European women physicians. All women physicians willingly help the most degraded persons who voluntarily seek their help. But any proposition that womenshould be medically trained in order to prepare the most helpless class of Her Majesty’s subjects—poor Indian women—for the use of vicious soldiers would be so gross an insult, as well as extreme folly, that I felt sure that the responsible gentlemen who authorized the Government Reports could not realize the meaning of their suggestion. But it laid upon disciplined and far-seeing medical women, who must carefully consider any practical measures which concern the relation of the sexes, the imperative duty of helping in the solution of an urgent and most difficult problem.
It is for these reasons that, as the oldest woman physician, I have thought it right to accept this invitation, and I earnestly desire to be aided in what I may suggest by the serious thought of every experienced physician.
I propose to say a few words under the three following heads:
1st. On the growing and dangerous character of this sexual evil, which produces venereal disease.2nd. On the error of Governments in their endeavours to cope with disease.3rd. On the right principle which must guide all practical methods of dealing with it.
1st. On the growing and dangerous character of this sexual evil, which produces venereal disease.
2nd. On the error of Governments in their endeavours to cope with disease.
3rd. On the right principle which must guide all practical methods of dealing with it.