Mapping Out the Venereal Wilderness: Public Health and STD in New Zealand 1920–1980 (review)

The international scholarship on the modern history of venereal disease is now vast. Nonetheless, Antje Kampf’s recent study makes an original and valuable contribution to this literature. Her study of New Zealand in the twentieth century covers ground that is largely uncharted, while her approach also departs from the methodologies adopted by the majority of studies to date. Being an adaptation from a doctoral thesis, the book retains all the hallmarks of serious scholarly endeavor: careful and imaginative archival research, sophisticated argumentation, and detailed references, including luxurious footnotes. It is also equipped with several appendixes and a useful index.

As Kampf argues, most studies of the history of venereal disease focus particularly on state control of alleged purveyors of the disease, notably women and girls, especially those regarded as prostitutes or “amateurs.” While not denying the significance of this aspect of its history, Kampf shows that other dimensions are equally worthy of study. In particular, she traces the response of health agencies and their intersections with targeted groups and accords more attention to male and Maori patients than to prostitutes. And unlike former studies of New Zealand, Mapping Out the Venereal Wilderness is as concerned with the medical and educational discourse about venereal diseases as it is with the social and political debates. Although she was not able to gain access to patient medical records, Kampf draws effectively on research theses conducted by medical students at Otago University from the 1930s to the 1960s as well as interviews with doctors and other health practitioners to construct a picture of official attitudes to VD in this period. Interviews with former service personnel and diaries of military medical men are also particularly valuable in providing information on attitudes and practices at the time. These records are supplemented by parliamentary debates, inquiries, and reports as well as published medical journals and newspapers, which chart both the progress of diseases and treatments as well as popular and official reporting and responses. In analyzing these sources, Kampf rejects the paradigms of control and victimhood that she argues have dominated much previous scholarship on this topic. She is certainly not alone in this respect, reflecting a recent trend in the international literature, notably in the work of Roger Davidson.

The book is structured around a series of chronological chapters, each dealing chronologically with a particular theme. The first two chapters survey the period prior to the Second World War. Chapter 1 surveys medical education, the status of medical specialization of venereal disease, and the initial establishment of venereal disease clinics in New Zealand in the early twentieth century. It examines new therapies being developed and deployed to treat venereal diseases and the way these new treatments impacted upon the relationship between doctors and their patients. Chapter 2 focuses on the public health campaigns in the 1920s and 1930s. It surveys and assesses the public education campaign of these years and the debate about compulsory notification of sufferers. The book’s third chapter is a case study of the ways in which Maori communities in the 1930s and 1940s were affected by the disease, drawing on a number of official surveys particularly targeted at Maori in these years. This chapter also attempts to understand the role of racial attitudes in defining public health campaigns and the medical treatment of Maori. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with the First and Second World Wars, examining both the treatment of the military and the broader campaigns aimed at controlling the spread of disease on the home front, including the employment of the first officials to trace individuals listed by patients as the source of their infection (“contacts”). Chapters 6 through 8 address the postwar period. They survey the changes in medical treatment and the impact these changes had on the patient-doctor relationship. These years also saw the emergence of venereology as a medical field and of sociological research into understanding patient behavior...