The early nineteenth century saw the emergence of institutional psychiatry across Europe. Aware that Sweden had fallen behind in this development, Parliament decreed in 1823 that a number of specialised institutions for the care of the insane were to be established. The Vadstena asylum, opened in 1826, was the first such institution in Sweden.   The aim of this study is to examine medical interpretation of and responses to erotic behaviour in psychiatric practice at the Vadstena asylum in the period 1849-1878. The book places the theme of the erotic, a topical subject in nineteenth-century public debate, in the context of psychiatry as an emerging specialty in Sweden. The book explores how erotic behaviour was conceptualised as disease, and the nature of therapeutic intervention in erotic cases, in order to present a more nuanced image of nineteenth-century medical attitudes to sexuality. By highlighting the superintendency of physician Ludvig Magnus Hjertstedt, and linking his account of an 1845 study tour through Europe to medical practice at Vadstena, the study situates responses to erotic patients in a period when psychiatry claims authority over human sexuality.   In methodological terms, the study applies critical questions inspired by revisionist scholarship to a body of empirical source material. Focusing on a single institution, and conducting in-depth readings of case notes – with regard to language, form, and function – allows the study to highlight the everyday practice of the asylum physician in his encounters with male and female erotic patients, including the use, importance and diagnostic integrity of the concepts nymphomania, erotomania and masturbation. Hjertstedt’s travel journal provides insight into the physician’s medical philosophy, informing the analysis of diagnostic and interpretive procedures, while connecting medical practice at Vadstena to its European paragons.     The results indicate that while the use of specific diagnostic terms to describe erotic behaviour was infrequent, therapeutic and managerial intervention shows that sexual acts and expressions of desire were considered disturbing and dangerous symptoms in both male and female patients. The analysis thus makes visible a gap between psychiatric theory and asylum practice, emphasising uncertainties and complexities inherent in the latter. While erotic behaviour could be considered indicative of illness, it might also be interpreted as a lack of character or a result of insufficient moral instruction. The asylum’s regime of work and moral instruction was designed to restore health as well as sound values and appropriate behaviour in its patients, indicating a medical culture at Vadstena which was both curative and normalising.

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<p dir="ltr">This dissertation argues that shifting secular conversion therapy practices and theories in North America between 1910 and 1980 consistently relied on both queer affective experience and anti-queer and anti-trans animus to justify often brutalizing medical interventions. Canadian and American conversion therapists’ pathologizing views of queer sexual behavior and gender identity were shaped by complex interplays between cultural, legal, social, and medical perspectives, but predominately worked to uphold heteronormative social structures leading to discrimination, hate, and harm towards queer people in both countries. Focusing on affect thereby encourages scholars to recognize how conversion therapies in all their variable historical permutations are both medical <i>and </i>cultural practices that have attempted to use queer patients’ affective needs for acceptance, love, safety, and validation in ways advancing anti-gay and anti-trans social narratives in purportedly therapeutic settings since the early twentieth century.</p><p dir="ltr">This research uses a transnational approach that is at once sensitive to national differences between the American and Canadian queer experience while looking to draw connections between conversion therapy’s development and individual experiences of this practice in two national contexts over time. It additionally pays careful attention to the ways social power hierarchies based on race and class informed individuals’ affective experiences of conversion therapy between 1910 and 1980.</p>

This thesis examines the regulation of women in public space in Liverpool between 1908 and 1957. It considers the complex relationship between the laws used to police solicitation, governmental debate about female prostitution and local purity campaigners’ concerns with the moral vulnerability of young, working-class, urban women. It is argued that the ways in which prostitution was understood and managed had an impact upon all women’s access to and use of public space, together with wider definitions of female morality and immorality. The thesis adds to historical understandings about the implications of prostitution regulation in the twentieth century, by moving away from London-focused histories to offer a detailed analysis of the ways in which national debates about vice were taken up at local level and with what consequences. I begin by exploring the problems with policing prostitution in the early-twentieth century and argue that increasing concern about the difficulty in differentiating prostitutes from ‘ordinary’ women provoked anxiety amongst law makers and government officials alike. It is argued that the debates canvassed by the 1927 Macmillan Committee indicate the degree to which moral codes about female sexuality informed official approaches to prostitution. The thesis considers the implications of these broad debates in Liverpool. Focusing on the work of the Liverpool Vigilance Association (LVA), it is proposed that fears about the moral threat of prostitution fuelled the organisation’s belief in the necessity of preventative patrol work centred on the moral surveillance of young, working-class women. This thesis shows that in interwar Liverpool, women’s movements were circumscribed first and foremost by their gender. Traditional, nineteenth-century ideas about women’s place within the domestic sphere created a sense among local purity campaigners that female morality was being threatened by women’s visibility in urban spaces. Other aspects of social status, such as class, race and employment experiences, heightened the interest of the LVA in targeting distinctive groups of women. The thesis demonstrates that in their efforts to regulate women’s movements through the city of Liverpool, local purists singled-out working-class and immigrant (especially Irish) women, as they believed them to be the most susceptible to corruption. This thesis draws on a wide range of archival sources, especially Home Office Records relating to the Public Places (Order) Bill and the establishment of the 1927 Macmillan Committee, as well as the LVA archive, in order to show how national and local policies on prostitution were both interdependent and distinct.