London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

A leading expert in the history of science and medicine will today challenge the conventional view that it was the discovery of the gonococcus, or micro-organism which causes gonorrhoea, which led to the recognition of the seriousness the disease in women.

Professor Michael Worboys, of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, at Manchester University will argue today in a seminar at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine that recognition of the disease's effects on women - it can cause inflammation of the womb, fallopian tubes and ovaries, infertility and even death - was due to the tireless efforts and campaigning activities of obstetricians, gynaecologists, women doctors and certain feminists, especially suffragist Christabel Pankhurst, rather than the discovery of the gonococcus and the improved biomedical understanding of the disease.

The name 'gonorrhoea' comes from the Latin for 'discharge of semen', and in the 1860s, surgeons regarded it as a disease that largely affected men, with some even believing that women were non-susceptible. By the first two decades of the 20th Century the disease had been 'unsexed', and was understood to affect both sexes equally.

Professor Worboys comments: 'This story shows that women's campaigns on female sexual health have a longer history than is usually supposed and how the medical profession was slow to adopt new knowledge until put under campaigning pressure.'

The Seminar, Unsexing disease: bacteriology and gonorrhoea in Britain, 1870-1920, has been organised by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine's History Unit and is being held in Room 51/105, Bedford Square, London WC1, at 5.30 pm today, Thursday 20 March 2003.

A limited number of media places are available. Please contact Lindsay Wright in the School's Press Office on 020 7927 2073 or lindsay.wright@lshtm.ac.uk if you would like to attend.