ABSTRACT
This chapter builds on the findings of Philippa Levine, whose illuminating Prostitution, Race and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire compared the application of the Contagious Diseases Acts throughout much of the empire, with the exception of the Caribbean. In doing so, it seeks to broaden our understanding of how the Act operated in one of Britain’s older and formerly slave-based plantation colonies. The chapter explores the dynamics of the relationships between the doctors, matrons, nurses, and the patients at the Contagious Diseases Hospital. Doctors were central to the transformation of the women from ‘patients’ to ‘prisoners’, and to the refashioning of the hospital from a place of healing to a place of punishment. The central argument of the chapter is that although the patients were subject to the disciplinary techniques and coercive forms of power utilized by the male medical authorities, the nurses and matrons also subjected the patients to separate forms of power and discipline.
