ABSTRACT

In the late nineteenth century, colonial contagious diseases laws stretched across the British Empire, designed, as were their British counterparts, to stem a perceived rise in syphilis and gonorrhoea rates by controlling the body of the female prostitute. It has been a common historiographical claim that these ordinances were modelled on the domestic British Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869. In these latter Acts, women in scheduled military and naval districts could be apprehended on suspicion of prostitution, brought before a magistrate and thence a government medical officer, genitally inspected and then either confined in a state-funded hospital for treatment for venereal disease and/or registered as a common prostitute and required thereafter to attend for regular medical inspection.