THE ‘ABOMINABLE SUPERSTITION’

In January 1913, Robert James Corbett, a 37-year-old coalminer, was indicted in the High Court, Glasgow, on a charge of raping his nine-year-old niece and of the aggravated offence of communicating to her ‘gonorrhoea and other venereal disease with which his private parts were at the time affected’. In preparation for the trial, Crown Counsel specifically requested the Procurator Fiscal to question prosecution witnesses as to ‘whether there exists a common superstition … that intercourse with a virgin is a cure for venereal disease’. The enquiry 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, HM Prison Surgeon, was even more sweeping:

There is, of course, in Britain and elsewhere in Europe and North America, a wealth of historical evidence for the earlier persistence of such a belief, both in medical folkloreand legal discourse, normally portrayed as a superstition of the ‘lower orders’, but also frequently associated with xenophobic, if not racial, stereotyping. In twentieth-century Scotland, a range of contemporary sources echoed the testimony of the High Court prosecution witnesses that belief in the curative powers of sexual congress with a virgin as a medical strategy remained potent within medical folklore.