| Sumario: | There is, of course, in Great Britain and elsewhere in Europe and North America, a wealth of historical evidence for the earlier existence of such a belief, both in medical folklore and legal discourse. The notion is usually 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 remained potent within medical folklore. The question arises of why this so-called pernicious delusion involving sexual offenses against children should have figured so prominently within legal and medical discourses in early twentieth-century Scotland. Its wide- spread invocation was of course part of a more general crisis of confidence in public order and public morality. As in many other countries at the turn of the century VD had become a metaphor for physical and moral decay, for the forces of pollution and contamination that appeared to threaten the institutions of social order and racial progress. Alarm over the issue of VD, especially its more repugnant forms of transmission, therefore offered an opportunity to express concern about changing standards of conduct and the moral values of society. Given the supposedly willful nature of its spread and its threat to social hygiene, sexually transmitted disease also provided a powerful justification for the social construction and proscription of "dangerous sexualities."
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