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A small Catholic Magdalen Asylum in 1809 was founded in Peacock Lane, Cork, by a Mr. Terry. A Matron governed the institution under the direction of a committee of ladies, that so many difficulties were encountered that it was eventually decided to place the Home in the care of a religious community. The Irish Sisters of Charity were invited to undertake the work and following extensive negotiations, and the completion of their new Convent, St. Vincent's, which was built on the Asylum's grounds, they finally took charge of the Home in June 1846. The Contagious Diseases legislation is discussed in detail. Two Homes which had been opened in Cork in Ireland, a Catholic Magdalen Asylum (1809) and a Protestant Refuge (1810), are also described.

In 1869, with scant debate or dissent, the newly reformed Parliament passed the Third Contagious Diseases Act (CDA) which, extending those of 1864 and 1866, aimed to diminish the spread of venereal disease in the armed forces by providing for the medical examination of prostitutes in garrison towns and, if infected, their compulsory treatment. The CDA has been read as exemplifying the new disciplinary structures of the mid-19th-century state that produced knowledge about ‘fallen women’ by categorizing and regulating sexual behaviour and thereby policing the boundaries between the ‘respectable’ and ‘unrespectable’ poor. The repeal campaign has been seen as a major conductor of feminist consciousness yet, paradoxically, though studies have focused on the movement's defence of women's liberty and critique of the exclusively masculinist state; little attention has been paid to the sources or the implications of their political conceptions of the state per se. While, for many, the CDA typified the dangers of state power for women, some women were beginning to target the state as a site for the exercise of their expertise and authority. This chapter shows how the CDA posed challenging matters of principle and priority for the first generation of professional female nursing and medical practitioners.

This chapter shows how in the context of the growth of a new paradigm of medical knowledge based on anatomical dissection hospital medicine became more important than bedside medicine in colonial India and female (as also the male) patients were subjected to an institutionally validated gaze. The earliest institutions devoted to women’s health were lock hospitals, which treated prostitutes suspected to be suffering from venereal diseases. The Contagious Diseases Act of 1868 required the prostitutes to register who were subjected to different kinds of crude and obnoxious medical examinations and were kept under filthy conditions in lock hospitals. Lying-in hospitals also treated female patients belonging to different communities. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, the number of female patients attending hospitals remained very low—a fact which strengthened the view in different circles that Indian women were averse to treatment by male physicians.