{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.028132250580046404, 'fraction_numerical': 0.014501160092807424, 'mean_word_length': 4.93631669535284, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Antje Kampf, Mapping Out the Venereal Wilderness: Public Health and STD in New Zealand 1920–1980, Ethik in der Praxis/Practical Ethics Studies, Band 28 (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2007), pp. iii + 272, €29.90, paperback, ISBN: 978-3-8258-9765-9.

Do not be deterred by the German publisher’s misspelling of ‘venereal’ on the front cover, for it is catalogued correctly. Nor should you dismiss this careful and intelligent history of the public health response to sexually transmitted diseases in New Zealand as a peripheral study. New Zealand may be geographically remote and was once socially conservative, but its social policy for much of the twentieth century has been distinctive and instructive. It is more egalitarian than its Australian neighbour, and its record on race relations, while far from sufficient, has been vastly better. These are social characteristics that shaped the way doctors, nurses and administrators dealt with the problems of STDs. Finally, this book is not for purist cultural historians of disease: rather it is a careful review of discourses, policy and practice within the government medical service and public health authorities from 1920 to 1980, just as HIV/AIDS was entering public consciousness and health concerns in Australasia. 
 
New Zealand did not have a severe STD problem: the frontier society of ocean wanderers, escaped Australian convicts and adventurers that would have suffered high infection rates was long past by 1920. By then, they had a magic bullet for syphilis, and the practical experience of coping with the high STD rates in overseas servicemen during the First World War. There needed to be a new rational approach: notification, clinics and treatment. None the less, the cultural assumptions remained of individual moral deficiency and of aberrant women (in particular those who hung around the ports) who were a reservoir of infection to entrap males sowing their wild oats. Kampf includes a detailed case study of venereal disease and the Maori that builds an unexpected (to an outside reader) finding that race was less significant than class in stereotyping or deforming public-health responses. 
 
Military venereal disease is a major focus of the book, in particular the lessons learned from the First World War for the more sensitive management in the Second. Civilian infections and the fears over ‘amateur’ and professional prostitution in wartime are investigated separately. (The long distances from the fronts enabled home populations to be protected from infected soldiers more effectively.) The study is enriched by the attention paid to the patient’s perspective and his or her agency in seeking better treatment. 
 
Post-war, this is largely a story of a medical profession gradually learning to ‘think socially’ rather than ‘morally’: to start to understand how to identify ‘at-risk groups’; to reduce the stigma and fear which might deter the seeking of treatment; to trial more effective sexual education and public health campaigns. As Kampf concludes, by the 1980s, after travelling a ‘rocky and winding’ road, a new generation of sexual health physicians had arrived at a place where their patients were clients, their tools were biomedical and psycho-social and they worked in multi-disciplinary teams. The next phase of the story will be New Zealand’s response to the challenge of HIV/AIDS. This is a book of interest to historians and to sexual health practitioners.