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The London Lock Hospital, the first ever clinic for the “treatment” of venereal disease, opened on January 31, 1747. I put treatment in quotation marks because the state of medical technology was fucking useless. It was more about having a place to judge people for being filthy fornicators.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: January 31, 1747--
The term “lock hospital” is a throwback to leper hospitals when people were isolated and even kept in restraints. Leper hospitals weren’t needed much any longer, so let’s use them to cram full of people with syphilis, although they weren’t confined. But the government didn’t want to get involved. There was no public money to treat those with infected fun stuff. The hospitals ran on donations, and donations were prevalent because those who gave money felt they were contributing toward a greater good, because the place was all about moral reform.
Yeah they also treated people using mercury, but the only thing mercury cured was your will to live. Lasting weeks, the treatment was a fucking nightmare and sometimes lethal. The hospital was more about teaching you, regardless of gender but especially if you were a woman, to not be such a dirty slut. FYI, they considered anyone who didn’t go into their wedding night a virgin and stayed absolutely monogamous to be a dirty slut. How did the hospital accomplish such moral reform? Prayer, of course, and lots of it. It’s questionable as to how well the prayer worked in changing hearts and minds. The horrifying mercury treatments spurred massive saliva generation. It’s said the hospital was high on salivation, low on salvation. Continues below …
If you think that’s gross you should see the subscriber’s post I made yesterday about nasty stuff I learned about having ADHD. Here is the link.
Hospital policy was that once you’d been discharged, you could never be readmitted. And so, 40 years later a wing of the hospital was split off as the Lock Asylum for the Reception of Penitent Female Patients. And you thought the hospital was judgy as fuck. And yes, it was just for women, because such “fallen” women of course were mostly to blame for the venereal pox o’er the land. In addition to prayer, there was lots of needlework. The implication of the mission to reform the “morally deviant” being that if they could make money via needlework, they wouldn’t need to use sex to survive.
And prostitution was rampant because London was filled with people living on the margins. As a result, venereal disease was also common, with syphilis being the primary concern. Many saw it as divine judgement for being a sinner, but at the same time other hospitals didn’t want these people and the Lock Hospital, as draconian as it was in operation, was created in the spirit of helping those who had no other options for treatment. Part of the motivation came from concerns over the nation’s military preparedness. Lotta soldiers were getting infected.
An effective and far less shitty (but still kind of shitty) treatment for syphilis was discovered in 1910 via the use of an arsenic derivative, and a much safer treatment came in the form of penicillin in the 1940s.
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