Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (review)

Frank Mort. Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830. 2d ed. London: Routledge, 2000. xxviii + 250 pp. Ill. £16.99 (paperbound).

Sexuality is a crucial means by which we construct others and ourselves, and is thus a fundamental structuring device for the social hierarchies within which we operate. Just who gets to define sexuality, therefore, matters, and perhaps nowhere has this been better argued and illustrated than in this volume by Frank Mort. First published in 1987, Dangerous Sexualities describes the evolution, plurality, and cultural power of sexual discourses in Victorian and early-twentieth-century Britain. It focuses on the means by which medicine came to play a central role in the moral regulation of vulnerable groups, such as women and the working classes, through its involvement in the construction of a public discourse on sexuality. As Mort's account makes clear, medicine's dominance of this discourse was neither a natural nor an easy process: it occurred in the face of competing claims from other groups struggling for legitimacy and social authority--most notably, the feminists. Thirteen years on, Dangerous Sexualities remains a significant and compelling reworking of the existing narrative of the history of public health in Britain.

That Mort's book never really achieved a secure place within the medico-historical canon is therefore regrettable. It may be due in part to his insistence upon the centrality of sexuality to the historical project, and his tendency to confine his historical conversations to a very specific set of scholars and ignore others--with medical historians falling into the latter group. Dangerous Sexualities is acknowledged as a pioneering work within what is now known as cultural history, and the new introduction, images, and bibliography of the second edition all serve to reinforce Mort's commitment to this field. In the introduction, for example, he situates his work among that of other theoretically like-minded historians, and outlines recent trends within the historiography of sexuality, such as the sexual mapping of urban spaces, and national and imperial dimensions of sexuality. ¹ And this is certainly fair enough. That he should devote three of his newly added images to Hannah Culwick and Arthur Munby, figures now suffering from overexposure within British cultural history, is less understandable. And while the cultural historian in me welcomes the sizable but very briefly annotated bibliography appended to the new addition, the medical historian is surprised by the inclusion of only a single historian of public health (Anthony Wohl), ² and wonders that Christopher Hamlin's work ³ does not at the very least merit mention.

None of this diminishes the book's significance to medical historians. Written and researched to a high degree, Dangerous Sexualities continues to remind us of the profit to be gained in paying closer attention to the role played by medical language in shaping culture. But it is disappointing that an author whose ambition is to move cultural history and the domain of the sexual out of the historical periphery and into the larger narratives of modern history should affect such disinterest in the very audiences he needs to win over.

Susan Ferry
Johns Hopkins University

Notes

1. Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); George L. Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985).

2. Anthony S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London: J. M. Dent, 1983).

3. Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800-1854 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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