“Embarrassing Bodies” – the male doctor/female patient encounter

This post is based on a paper given at the “Embarrassing Bodies” conference, organised by Birkbeck, University of London

In 1858, Dr Edward Lane – owner of the Moor Park hydropathic establishment in Surrey – was named as co-respondent in one of the first divorce cases to be heard under the Matrimonial Causes Act. Henry Robinson, a civil engineer, alleged that the married Lane had committed adultery with his wife, Isabella, while she was staying at Moor Park as both a friend of the family and a patient. The events may be familiar to some as they form the subject of Kate Summerscale’s Mrs Robinson’s Disgrace (2012). Ultimately, the case rested on whether Isabella’s diary – which detailed apparently erotic encounters betweenher and Lane – was admissible as evidence (as the prosecution claimed) or discredited as the product of a delusional mind (the argument put forward by her defence). When Lane was dismissed as a co-respondent and brought back as a witness, he denied that anything untoward had taken place.

Widely reported in the national press, the case also attracted the attention of medical journals. Their interest was not simply that the man implicated was one of their own; the trial tapped into broader anxieties about the difficulties faced by practitioners in the course of their work. As it unfolded, there emerged key questions about the male doctor’s access to, and intimacy with, his female patients. The British Medical Journal branded the case “an extraordinary example of the dangers to