ABSTRACT
It might be wise to end here. But we began by making a strong claim for the importance of history in understanding sexual politics today; how it can be used to grasp our current dilemmas and discontents. What then has been the relevance of all this? What does it really matter that in the 1830s sanitarians blamed cholera on the moral filthiness of the urban poor? Or that eighty years later a local schoolmistress with feminist sympathies confronted her superiors over sex education? To explain how and why means being explicit about the way we understand history-writing. It also means a return to the current state of play around sexual health and disease which opened the book.
