IT is difficult to imagine a case more deserving of detailed historical analysis than that of John Roberton (1776-1840), a surgeon who practised as a specialist in the treatment of venereal disease in two European capitals' yet is linked to a subject, medical police, which, on close examination, occupied a fraction of his known professional life. Despite his widely published popular works on ve...

Although the question of equal rights for members of the female sex was raised during the founding of the New England colonies (as, for example, when Anne Hutchinson challenged the Puritan theocracy of Boston), such equality has yet to be fully reached in America in fact (or in law) in 1977. The 1970s witnessed a growing agitation for “women’s rights” and, with the enactment of Title IX of the ...