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Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz. The London Lock Hospital in the Nineteenth Century: Gender, Sexuality and Social Reform. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015. xi + 220 pp. Ill. $64.95 (9783-0343-1727-6).
Established in 1747, the London Lock Hospital was the first voluntary hospital in London to specialize in the treatment of venereal disease. At its nineteenth- century peak, the Lock Hospital was a substantial institution capable of accommodating hundreds of both female and male patients in its primary location, as well as maintaining an important outpatient clinic and an asylum for the rehabilitation of "fallen" women.
There already exists a fine traditional medical history of the London Lock by David Innes Williams.1 Maria Ruiz's contribution is to examine the history of the London Lock from the perspective of the "cultural history of sexuality and its social policing" (p. 24). Her central argument is that the London Lock's operations not only reflected the "hegemonic ideology of the middle class" (p. 114) but represented an attempt to impose those values on a working-class population that was perceived as a threat to society. The aim of...