Reasons for Compulsory Confinement.

Were the plan feasible, I should agree with the proposal, that in preference to this compulsory legislation, large hospitals should be opened for the treatment of diseased women on their own voluntary application, but experience teaches us that they will not come. At the present moment, notwithstanding the inadequate accommodation in proportion to the disease existing among prostitutes, provided by the London hospitals, numbers of the beds at these institutions remain unoccupied, owing to the disinclination of those women to enter the wards of their own accord, therefore the adoption of compulsory measures seems unavoidable.

It is now many years ago since I called public attention to the error committed by philanthropists and medical men in treating prostitutes as out-patients. I regret to say that what I wrote and published, regarding our civil hospital arrangements, twelve years ago, applies equally at the present day. I, however, now go farther, and venture to question whether it is desirable for our civil hospitals to treat prostitutes as out-patients at all.

Every man who frequents the street, after nightfall, must meet many a woman, apparently sound and healthy, who, patched up by voluntary charity in the morning, knows no other way—nay, whose only possible resource—to get her necessary food, or bed at night, is to sally forth into the streets. The ministers of charity may have cased her pain in the morning, dressed her sores and given her drugs, but in a month she will be no nearer soundness than had she been taken care of by the State within the walls of the hospital for one week; and within that month what a scourge upon society will the surgeons not have kept afoot by their exertions? Here is the power of charity again working to waste.

We have seen, that, to confer any permanent benefit page 16 on society, and on sanitary grounds, when a woman is diseased, an early detection of her complaint is necessary, and that when discovered she should at once he placed in confinement, so as to prevent her disseminating the plague. Moreover, she should not be allowed to leave the hospital till perfectly well and unable to contaminate any one she may have relations with. Our existing civil hospitals fulfil few of these conditions. The diseased prostitute is not sought after; she applies only when the mischief she can cause is done, and many men have been diseased, and she finds herself unable any longer to carry on her trade. If there be room in the wards to take the patient in, she occupies a bed say for many months, and even then society has no guarantee that she will remain till cured and do no more mischief. On the contrary, as soon as she pleases, the girl of her own free will (and many do so) can quit the hospital long before the surgeon gives his sanction; hence society and sanitary laws are baffled, and instead of the hospital benefiting the girl and the plague of syphilis becoming checked, the propagation of the disease is aided by both the in-and out-patient hospital system of treating our sick prostitutes.

It may be in the recollection of my readers, that some years ago it was given in evidence that prostitutes who were lying in hospitals suffering from venereal diseases, at Portsmouth, (on being sent for by the brothel-keepers) on the occasion of a ship being paid off, one and all left their beds to participate in the drinking and rioting that was a necessary consequence, to the no small detriment of Her Majesty's jolly tars, who of course became affected with the most serious forms of disease. This, I may add, took place before the existing Contagious Dis eases Act came into force, and compulsory residence in hospital (as now enforced) was carried out.

If the British public could only once conceive the idea that the treatment, cure, and temporary segregation of the syphilitic, was as much a matter of public interest as that of the lunatic, whose seclusion all counties, towns, and parishes provide for with such remarkable alacrity, not so much out of love or respect for the patient as page 17 because it is a dangerous thing to leave him at large, I think I should not long be without followers in wishing for equally public recognition of both complaints.

In another twelve months those who follow me may, I hope, have to chronicle that no prostitute in civil life will be treated week after week as an out-patient; but that she, like her sister in garrison towns and ten miles round, will, on the discovery of her diseased condition, be confined in hospital and restrained from infecting alike soldiers and civilians.