The Physician and the Fallen Woman: Medicalizing Prostitution in the Polish Lands

Abstract

A s u d d e n s p i k e i n s y p h i l i s contamination set off a public health alarm in early twentieth-century Lwow. Not only had the rate of infection multiplied fourfold between 1901 and 1903, but, even more frighteningly, the town’s elite adolescents had been struck down in disproportionate numbers. The municipal health commission, convinced that the poor women selling sex on city streets represented the primary vector of venereal infection, tightened medical regulations for prostitutes. The commission directed police physicians to “expand their sphere of activity and their power such that all means are used to guarantee the examination of every prostitute—especially those who avoid regulation and those who have been recently removed from control.” The irony of charging physicians to impose medical inspections on women not registered with police or who might not self-identify as prostitutes was seemingly lost on the report’s authors. Instead, authorities issued a series of new regulations that empowered police doctors to treat all female factory workers, seamstresses, household servants, waitresses, and other members of the urban poor as potential sex workers and to bring as many as possible under their regulatory gaze. As Lwow grew from a provincial outpost of the Habsburg Monarchy to the booming capital of the self-governing Galician crownland in the last third of the nineteenth century, these new health directives had important