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

Abstract

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: [End Page 62]

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