"This Pernicious Delusion": Law, Medicine, and Child Sexual Abuse in Early-Twentieth-Century Scotland

"The Abominable Superstition"

In January 1913, Robert James C., a thirty-seven-year-old coal miner, was indicted in the High Court, Glasgow, on a charge of raping his nine-year-old niece and of the aggravated offense of communicating to her "gonorrhoea and other venereal disease with which his private parts were at the time affected." ¹ In preparation for the trial, Crown Counsel specifically requested the Procurator Fiscal to question prosecution witnesses about "whether there exists a common superstition . . . that intercourse with a virgin is a cure for venereal disease." ² The inquiry elicited a revealing consensus among medical witnesses. Dr. J. M. Thompson of Aidrie responded: "It is a common belief among the lower classes that connection with a virgin will cure a venereal disease." Similarly, Dr. Elizabeth Smith, Physician to Glasgow Lock Hospital, considered it to be "a widespread idea . . . in all the lower classes that contact with an untouched virgin [would] cure the disease." The evidence of Dr. James Devon, H.M. Prison Surgeon, was even more sweeping:

[T]here is a curiously persistent and widespread belief that a man who suffers from venereal disease can get rid of it by having connection with a virgin. I have been surprised at discovering the existence of this belief in people generally well informed as well as among the comparatively illiterate. . . . I have tried to find evidence for the theory that it is a belief traceable to certain districts but I have discovered it among people of different places and of different occupations--so different that now I should scarcely be surprised to come across it anywhere. ³

There is, of course, in Britain and elsewhere in Europe and North America, a wealth of historical evidence for the earlier existence of such a belief, both in medical folklore and legal discourse. ⁴ The notion is usually portrayed as a superstition of the "lower orders," but also frequently associated with xenophobic, if not racial, stereotyping. ⁵ In twentieth-century Scotland, a range of contemporary sources echoed the testimony of the High Court prosecution witnesses that belief in the curative powers of sexual congress with a virgin remained potent within medical folklore.

As Carol Smart has vividly documented, evidence before the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases (1914-16), especially from rescue workers and from surgeons working in the Lock Hospitals, testified to the extent of child infection contracted as a result of sexual assault and the continuing role of "the abominable superstition that intercourse with a virgin cures venereal disease in a man." ⁶ The Medical Women's Federation presented similar testimony in evidence to the Joint Select Committee on the Criminal Law Amendment and Sexual Offences Bills in 1920. ⁷

More immediately, the prevalence of "this appalling idea," "this strange belief, widespread and of old origin," is a common theme in the evidence presented to the Departmental Committee on Sexual Offences against Children and Young Persons in Scotland (1924-25). Psychologist J. J. Murray identified this belief, along with feeblemindedness and a general predisposition to "viciousness," as a major factor in motivating sexual offenders, and a range of police witnesses echoed this view. ⁸ Indeed, one of the Committee's recommendations insisted: "It should be made known publicly that this is an ignorant superstition, which has no foundation in fact," a task that devolved to the Scottish Committee of the British Social Hygiene Council. ⁹

Significantly, this "ignorant superstition" also figured in leading contemporary texts on forensic medicine. Thus, in the first five editions of his Textbook on Forensic Medicine (1902-31), John Glaister, Professor of Forensic Medicine and Public Health at the University of Glasgow, maintained:

It is a fact beyond dispute, owing to the prevalence of a widespread belief amongst persons of the lowest classes, that coitus with a healthy young person...