Based on archival research, this volume is concerned with the treatment of fallen women and prostitutes at the London Lock Hospital and Asylum throughout the nineteenth century. As venereally-diseased women, they were treated in the hospital for their physical ailments; those considered ripe for reform were secluded in the asylum for a moral cure. The author analyses the social and cultural implications arising from the situation of these female inmates at a time when women's sexuality was widely debated, using a gender-informed and postmodernist approach.
The volume covers notions of...