The “Medical Plot Thickens”: Bad Medicine and Good Health in the Contagious Diseases Acts Repeal Campaign

Britain's Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) mandated the use of medical detention and speculum exams to manage bodies common prostitutes thereby reduce sexually transmitted diseases among enlisted men. Repeal advocates challenged gendered power structure but also used melodramatic frameworks produce a broader critique nineteenth-century centralizing orthodoxy argue for unregulated traditional approaches medicine. Across variety repeal speeches documents, idealized alternative health practices in order challenge institutionalized modern medicine governmental interests that extended its authority. J. Garth Wilkinson's Forcible Introspection Women Army Navy by Oligarchy, Considered Physically (1870) exemplifies multivocal intertextual medicolegal plots melodrama as it cast professionalized corrupt, villainous, collusion with state while presenting authentically preventative, curative, democratic.