Managing the "Obscene M.D.": Medical Publishing, the Medical Profession, and the Changing Definition of Obscenity in Mid-Victorian England.

Sarah Bull

doi:10.1353/bhm.2017.0079

Abstract

summary This article examines links between mid-Victorian opposition to commerce in popular works on sexual health and the introduction of a legal test of obscenity, in the 1868 trial R. v. Hicklin, that opened the public distribution of any work that contained sexual information to prosecution. The article demonstrates how both campaigning medical journals’ crusades against “obscene quackery” and judicial and anti-vice groups who aimed to protect public morals responded to unruly trade in medical print by linking popular medical works with public corruption. When this link was codified, it became a double-edged sword for medical authorities. The Hicklin test provided these authorities with a blunt tool for disciplining professional medical behavior. However, it also radically narrowed the parameters through which even the most established practitioners could communicate medical information without risking censure.

Highlights

Managing the “Obscene M.D.”: Medical Publishing, the Medical Profession, and the Changing Definition of Obscenity in Mid-Victorian England
The article demonstrates how both campaigning medical journals’ crusades against “obscene quackery” and judicial and anti-vice groups who aimed to protect public morals responded to unruly trade in medical print by linking popular medical works with public corruption
The Hicklin test proved a double-edged sword for the medical profession

Summary

The Unruly Trade in Medical Print

Medical works have been subject to accusations of obscenity since at least the early modern period, when their increasing availability in vernacular languages aroused anxiety that their intimate descriptions the body would incite immoral behavior among nonprofessionals.[8]. The advertisements that Dugdale and other Holywell Street publishers placed under various names in a variety of newspapers—from the Chartist Northern Star and National Trades’ Journal to theatrical (The Era), sporting (Bell’s Life in London), and satirical (The Satirist) periodicals—rely on the same strategy Those published under Dugdale’s name often list medical works for sale alongside marginally racy reading material, such as English translations of Eugène Sue’s popular novel Les Mystères de Paris (1842–43).[29] Those placed under pseudonyms, such as “Henry Smith,” parallel medical works with more explicit offerings, such as the flagellation fantasy Venus’s Schoolmistress The two sections detail early opposition to these entrepreneurs’ activities, showing how it promoted ideas about the nature of “obscene” medical print that anticipated the Hicklin test’s formulation of obscenity

Obscene Quackery and Contextual Obscenity

Medical Works and the Obscene Publications Act

Professional Stakes in Obscenity Law and the Hicklin Ruling

Conclusion