Abstract
The first comprehensive attempt to discover the prevalence of venereal diseases (VD) in the United Kingdom took the form of a Royal Commission on Venereal Disease (RCVD), which was established in 1913 and made its report in 1916. The final report of the RCVD recommended that centres should be set up for the treatment of VD, with 75 per cent of the cost to be met by central government and the remainder from local rates.1 The establishment of clinics relied on cooperation between local authorities and voluntary hospitals, but this was to prove a problematic relationship in Northern Ireland,2 as it had done in other parts of the United Kingdom.3 The situation in Northern Ireland, however, was exacerbated due to the complex political situation, particularly the establishment of the new state of Northern Ireland. The 1920 Government of Ireland Act partitioned Ireland and set up two governments and two parliaments, one for the six counties that were to form Northern Ireland and another for the 26 southern counties that became the Irish Free State. The Anglo-Irish treaty, which was signed in December 1921, brought to an end the three-year conflict between the British forces and those fighting for independence. The treaty gave Ireland the status of a dominion within the British Commonwealth and established the Irish Free State. Northern Ireland was permitted to opt out of the agreement and retain its status granted in 1920, to remain part of the United Kingdom.
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Notes
Roger Davidson, Dangerous Liaisons: A Social History of Venereal Disease in Twentieth-Century Scotland (Amsterdam, 2000), p. 50
David Evans, ‘“Tackling the hideous scourge”: The creation of Venereal Disease treatment centres in early twentieth-century Britain’, Social History of Medicine, 5 (1992), p. 424.
Susannah Riordan, ‘Venereal Disease in the Irish Free State: The politics of public health’, Irish Historical Studies, 35 (2007), p. 347.
For more on the situation in Northern Ireland see, Leanne McCormick, Regulating Sexuality: Women in Twentieth-Century Northern Ireland (Manchester, 2009), chapter 4.
See for example, Elizabeth Malcolm, ‘“Troops of largely diseased women”: VD, the Contagious Diseases Acts and moral policing in late nineteenth-century Ireland’, Irish Economic and Social History, 26 (1999), pp. 1–14
Sandra L. McAvoy, ‘The regulation of sexuality in the Irish Free State, 1929–1935’, in Elizabeth Malcolm and Greta Jones (eds), Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland, 1650–1940 (Cork, 1999), pp. 253–66
Philip Howell, ‘Venereal Disease and the politics of prostitution in the Irish Free State’, Irish Historical Studies, 33 (2003), pp. 320–41
Riordan, ‘Venereal Disease in the Irish Free State’; Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940 (Cambridge, 2007), chapters 4 and 5.
Peter Baldwin, Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 494.
Mary Daly, A Social and Economic History of Ireland Since 1800 (Dublin, 1981), p. 206.
D.S. Johnson, ‘The Northern Ireland economy, 1914–1939’, in Liam Kennedy and Philip Ollerenshaw (eds), An Economic History of Ulster, 1820–1939 (Manchester, 1985), p. 213.
Greta Jones, “Captain of All These Men of Death”: The History of Tuberculosis in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Ireland (Amsterdam and New York, 2001), pp. 178–9.
Prof. Lindsay was Professor of Medicine at Queen’s University, Belfast, and had also been involved in the Belfast Eugenics society. There were close links between the National Council for Combating Venereal Disease (NCCVD) and the eugenics movement. For more on the Belfast Eugenics Society see Greta Jones, ‘Eugenics in Ireland: The Belfast Eugenics Society, 1911–1915’, Irish Historical Studies, 28 (1992), pp. 81–95.
For more on the wider context of VD propaganda films see, Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925 (London, 1988).
Susan Lemar, ‘“The liberty to spread disaster”: Campaigning for compulsion in the control of Venereal Diseases in Edinburgh in the 1920s’, Social History of Medicine, 19 (2006), pp. 7–10.
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© 2010 Leanne McCormick
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McCormick, L. (2010). Venereal Disease in Interwar Northern Ireland. In: Cox, C., Luddy, M. (eds) Cultures of Care in Irish Medical History, 1750–1970. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230304628_10
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