The connection of venereal diseases with leprosy made by the medieval authorities alluded to above, reveals their inability to distinguish between the ulcerous conditions of venereal disease and those of leprosy. The medical isolation of ‘prostitutes’ in lock hospitals is one example of the process of moral regulation. It set up structures for a wide range of related social demarcations. These included dichotomies such as the distinctions between the deserving and undeserving poor made by philanthropists throughout the nineteenth century. The question of sexual immorality was at the heart of the early discourses of social medicine. Its goals, however, reached beyond containing epidemics or disease. The medical profession became an influential pressure group in campaigns for moral reform and provided the intellectual and scientific rationale for state intervention in working-class culture. Physicians also had a personal stake in the public-health movement.