All right, hello, beautiful people, and welcome to another episode of the Filth in America podcast where we talk about all things public health history. On today's episode, we're going to talk about a topic that I get asked about a lot, one of the stories I've done in my class and I've done in other public lectures that I get really the most requests for, and that is the legalization of prostitution as a public health measure story. And when we say legalization in this context, we're talking about a situation where prostitution was illegal and it was made unillegal for public health purposes as opposed to some places that still exist out west of the United States where prostitution was never made illegal in the first place. So that will be our topic for today, an interesting topic, a fun topic, but one that really, I think, not only showed the importance of creative thinking in public health, but also gave us some scientific information and helped us understand sexually transmitted infections better than we did before that. So with that, we'll jump right in. So our story this time takes place in Civil War era, Nashville. Now, a lot of folks, when you get the high school version or even some of the books about the Civil War, you don't hear about Nashville as much as some other cities. And that's really unfortunate because Nashville was one of the most important cities in the Civil War. Why is that? Well, during the Civil War era, there's basically just a few ways to move things, right? You have animal power, you can put things on carts, wagons, and pull them with horses or mules. You got people power, right? You can carry it yourself, or you've got rivers and railroads. Rivers and railroads were the preferred just because the amount of volume that they can carry. The math works out that just for food, a 40,000-man army in Civil War area requires about 240,000 pounds of food moved to it a day. That's every day. That's a huge amount. So it's really hard to move this with wagons or people power, as you might imagine. So river boats and railroads are really the key to supplying an army. Now, that 240,000 pounds wouldn't take into consideration all the ammo and clothing and equipment and other things that have got to be moved. So the transportation logistics is really, really, really important in this era. And indeed in all era, you know, there's the famous saying that amateurs study battles and professionals study logistics in the Civil War. That's just as true as any other time. And so in the Civil War era, we gotta remember that the Civil War at the outset is the federal government of the United States, particularly President Lincoln, trying to re-establish his political control over these rebellious areas. And how do you do that? He's gonna send the army to do that. So somebody's gotta physically go somewhere and say this is ours, because the people there are saying it's not yours anymore. So the transportation stuff really at the outset of the war is the key. And so military officers on both sides really start looking at transportation. And Nashville enters the picture largely for that reason, right? It's a fairly important city before the war in terms of commerce and transportation. There are railroads and in South doesn't have the volume of railroad that the North does at that time, but there are major railroads coming into Nashville. There is, of course, a river, the Cumberland River, coming into Nashville. The Tennessee River is not too far away. And the thing about those two rivers that's important is that they cross the state twice. They come down and cross the state and go back north again. So it's really useful for getting into the state, getting around. So it becomes pretty obvious early on to military planners that Nashville is going to be the key. And then you've got the symbolic and political aspects of Nashville, right? It is a Confederate capital. The governor of Tennessee is a guy by the name of Isham Harris, who was talked about for the presidency of the Confederacy. Nashville was also discussed to be the capital of the Confederacy. So there's a lot going on. It's a well-known city, and all of these factors go together to really, really, really increase the importance of Nashville, especially if you're going to send soldiers. You've got to have a base of operations to bring supplies into via river or railroad and then put them on carts. In central Tennessee, the roads tend to emanate out from Nashville, kind of like a spider, with the city being the body of the spider and the legs sticking out. So it was really going to be, everyone knew, the key. And so early on in the war, the Federal Army looks to attack into Nashville. The Confederacy is rapidly trying to defend Nashville. As it works out, after the falls of forts Henry and Donaldson, the river route, and really most of the routes to Nashville for the Federal Army laid open, and the Confederate Army moves back. And the soldiers of the time rapidly realize that while Nashville is this developed city, they need to repurpose it and make it a military outpost. So they start tearing down buildings, making huge warehouses. All the soldiers that are ultimately going to fight in Tennessee, then later in other parts of the Western Confederacy. And in their way of thinking, anything west of the Appalachian Mountains was the West, and so this was the Western Confederacy. You also are going to have hospitals for wounded soldiers coming back from the battlefields where they're going to have longer-term care for the wounds. And of course, as the war progressed, the casualty numbers just pile up, and you need more and more and more hospitals. So all of this centers around Nashville for the West. So it becomes really one of the more important cities. It becomes arguably one of the most fortified cities in the world. And they the Federal Army in particular is bringing huge numbers of troops through Nashville. And now remember, as the war goes on, particularly for the Federal Army, but in general, if you were a 19-year-old coming through the Army in the Civil War, you probably hadn't been very far from where you were born. Most people were born, lived, and died within 20 miles of their home. And so they're on this great adventure, far away from home for the first time in many cases, but you're still in the Army. Your job is going to go somewhere. And I think the casualty figures and the casualties that start really piling up as the war goes on. Shiloh has 22,000 casualties in the space of a two-day battle, and it really wasn't even all the two days, which is more casualties than all of the previous American wars combined. So as the war drags on and on and on, soldiers in Nashville, indeed soldiers across the Civil War, recognize that their future was not particularly certain. And so when you think about it, what do young folks that are about 19, 18 years old, who are away from home the first time, facing a fairly uncertain future on the battlefields, what do they want? They want the same things that they might want today. They want booze, they want women, they want to have a good time, not to mention they are paid in cash, right, into the Army of the time. So as they come through Nashville, this may be the last city, the last major outpost that they go through before being on campaign and on the march. So Nashville becomes the place that many of these soldiers look for all types of entertainment and indulgence. Now, like many cities of the time, Nashville is not only a business center, it is a religious center. Most of the churches, the large churches, the Methodist Church, Episcopal Church in particular, have huge presence. The soldiers did tend to attend those pretty frequently. Again, if you're not sure how much longer you got on earth, that's probably a place that people are going to go. But Nashville also, even immediately prior to the war, has a pretty significant and thriving prostitution industry. Now remember, prostitution is in fact illegal in Tennessee and in Nashville, but in an area called Smoky Row, a six-block area, which is, for those familiar with Nashville, uh centered around the downtown area, 2nd to 4th Avenue, which is where a lot of the honky dogs and bars that Nashville is famous for are today. There were quite a few prostitutes engaged in activities in that area, really all the way back as far as we have census data. In fact, there were some 207 women that listed their occupation as prostitute in the 1860 census. This is while prostitution is illegal, but it was known, it was, I don't want to say tolerated, but it was known it's mostly a homegrown industry there, with about 113 of these 207 women indicating that they were native Tennesseans. Their average age was 29 years old. There were 20 widows. The majority of the ones counted were white women, 198, but there were some of mixed race and other situations. So it was a it was a pretty broad group of women engaging in these activities. Now, at the time they had euphemisms form, just as we do today. They were called soil doves or fancy women or nymphs to pave, which loosely translates to girls of the pavement. Sometimes they were referred to in newspaper in the frail but fair women of Nashville. But most commonly, especially in official documents, you just see prostitutes referred to as public women. Now, the authorities in Nashville, like many of the governments in the anabellum United States, kind of adopted informal disciplinary systems that really didn't provoke much in the way of discussion of sexuality or prostitution or really what's going on. It was kind of just this tacit acknowledgement that this was going on, but really no overt discussion about what we should do about it, just an acknowledgement that this happened. And this is you see in a lot of the cities of the pre-Civil War era. In Nashville, beginning about 1855, the city council issued sporadic ordinances against prostitution. They would forbid things like preventing lewd women from using vulgar language to passerbys or preventing women specifically from exposing themselves in doorways. As was the case in a lot of cities, in Nashville in particular, they they arrested brothel madams. They all had different areas that they worked in or ran a business in. One of them was Nanny McGuinness, and they arrested her in a pattern that was typical of the way they handled these prostitution issues at the time. They arrested her at monthly intervals, fined the madam according to the number of prostitutes they housed in their brothel, and then released the madam after she paid the fine for each prostitute. So it was an effective taxation. Every 30 days, they'd round up the madam and the brothels, and they'd charge them so much per prostitute, $50 or whatever it was. $50 is pretty typical. She could then pay that, and everybody's back in business. This kind of was an elastic penal system. It did, of course, treat brothel occupants better than street walkers. They kind of knew how this was going to work. The brothels themselves were somewhat, quote, hidden from public view. They might be in establishments or buildings that look respectable to a casual observer. Typically the police didn't go into the brothels and arrest the folks taking advantage of the businesses in there, but that was typically only in extraordinary circumstances. Most of the time is this kind of this well-known pattern in these brothels, which were known as houses of ill fame, houses of ill repute, body houses, another good name I like, parlor houses. Others, as you might imagine, show really abject poverty. One of the larger brothels that we know about was owned by Rebecca and Eliza Higgins, which is at 101 to 103 North Front Street. Rebecca actually owned, according to the tax books, a real property valued at $24,000 and some personal property amounting to some $1,500. Now remember, this isn't $1860, right? This is a huge amount of money for the time. She had 28 people living in the house, of whom 17 were prostitutes. Interestingly, one was a carpenter, one was a bricklayer. There were six children in schools that lived in this particular brothel, two were of preschool age. And there was a kind of a handyman, a 22-year-old black guy named Tom Trimble. There was also another madam named Mag Seat. She had 11 prostitutes working for her. We don't really know the address. We have different ones attributed to her for her, but she was a 25-year-old Tennessean who seemed to keep a little more youthful group. She had six of her 11 girls, which were teenagers, and the rest were in their early 20s, but the oldest was 24. Over around at 72 North Front Street with Martha Reeders, where 10 prostitutes lived, and there were also two preschool children. She was 31 in 1860, and she reported owning personal property about $15,000. Now, it's important to note that at the time, you know, there wasn't the ownership laws that we have today. In many cases, women are not able to own property, but yet these women did. They were pretty well known, and these are pretty large sums, pretty significant business activities for the time. However, these large houses were often the exception more than the rule. There were a variety of different kinds of houses. There were about 69 houses in the city. 19 of them were operated by one woman. 25 of the houses had two women in them. 12 of them had three women working. So they're generally smaller operations. There was this kind of relaxed toleration that we talked about. And law enforcers and religious representatives, in fact, oftentimes lived in these brothels with known prostitutes. There was one owned by a lady named Jenny Rogers, who had a brothel with three other women. Her house was actually next to a Methodist clergyman's family. On the other side of her thing, was a tavern, which itself had four separate prostitutes working in there. There was Sarah Hughes, who was a 42-year-old married prostitute who also lived with another older woman in a flat between a policeman's family and a university professor. So you really had all types of folks mixed together. And like I said, there was really a relaxed toleration that went on before the war. Nashville falls to Federal forces early in the war and immediately begins to be governed in a military fashion. A military governor of Tennessee is appointed, Andrew Johnson, who, of course, was a senator from Tennessee, the only senator who did not resign his seat when his state seceded. And of course, as many folks know, Johnson would go on to be vice president and then assume the presidency when Lincoln was killed. And as we said, Nashville rapidly is transformed after its occupation throughout 1861. Forts are built, more and more soldiers are coming in. And with the flood of these soldiers coming into Nashville, demand for these public women soared. The political, economic, and social structure of Tennessee as a whole is really pressured by Federal forces and ultimately collapsed. And with it, the informal control measures went away either under military governance or just because the court systems in the Confederate-held parts of Tennessee fell apart. So the supply, the number of women engaging in prostitution dramatically increased to meet the demand. By 1862, the number of prostitutes known reaches about 1,500, and they were all busy. And it becomes among the enlisted soldiers coming through Nashville kind of a rite of passage. In fact, we have a diary from a guy in Ohio, Benton Dubbs, who recalled that while he was in Nashville, there was an old saying that no man could be a soldier unless he'd gone through Smoky Row. They really are concerned about their future, and this was meeting a demand in a lot of different ways. And as the number of soldiers grow, certainly by 1863, you have more soldiers in Nashville than there had been total residents before the war. And other consequences of all of this solicitation of prostitution starts happening. By the spring of 1863, the commander of the Army of the Cumberland, uh, Major General William Rosecrans, and most of his staff were really in a frenzy over one particular result of all of what they called the cavorting in Nashville. The Army, as they said, had a social enemy to contend with. This toleration was noted by another officer, Brigadier General Granger, that officer that he noted that officers and medical personnel repeatedly petitioned him to save the Army from a fate worse than to perish on the battlefield, that of venereal diseases. He claimed to be daily and almost hourly beset by such problems, and that may have been a little bit of an exaggeration, but venereal diseases started posing a real problem for the troops in the Army generally. Now, this has oftentimes been the case, as we've said on this podcast multiple times. It's important to know that what we call DNBI disease and non-battle-related injuries oftentimes are the much, much, much greater cause of casualties and problems during wars and the cause of a lot of lost time among military personnel. And the Civil War is no different. At least 8.2% of Union troops in the Army as a whole were infected with either syphilis or gonorrheas before wars end. Now, that just that alone is nearly half the battle injury to 17.5%. So, and when you think about it, that two million people, two million soldiers served in federal uniform, that's a huge number of people getting these diseases. Now, of course, that's not gonna uh account for those who could contracted one of these diseases and didn't know uh they might have had a milder case or simply didn't mention it. Those infected Infections could, of course, cause quite a problem. This is the pre-antibiotic era. There's really limited treatment options. A disease like syphilis actually progresses through different phases. We talk about primary, secondary, and tertiary syphilis and syphilis in particular when it's reached that secondary or that tertiary phase is untreatable at the time. But the other problem is that oftentimes being infected with these diseases would also make you more vulnerable to other common camp diseases. And in fact, especially with the case of syphilis, but but other venereal diseases, they can be fatal in and of themselves. So at Nashville, the numbers of people that are incapacitated by these diseases really continues to grow. And you think about it, if you've got a fever and burning with urination or other weakness and problems related to gonorrhea or syphilis, you're really far, far less able to go march miles and miles and miles. You're much, much, much less able to fight effectively in these large pitched battles. And of course, that's all before you throw in the other diseases that you're going to be more vulnerable to. So if you would get things like dysentery, which was really, really common, or cholera, these other things on top of this, it's really a problem. In Nashville, some units had as many as 40% of their soldiers affected. And if you think about that, 40%, that's a huge force readiness issue. And as the war goes on, and it really becomes more of a war of attrition, where you the number of soldiers that you can put on the battlefield is going to how is going to determine how this thing goes. That's what they're trying to do. If all of a sudden you can't put 40% of your soldiers, that's a huge, huge problem. Both Army and civilian physicians try to manage the problem. Many of them set up clinics near Smokey Row where all this was going on. But with that number of people, the problem becomes more than they can handle pretty rapidly. And the treatments themselves really could also sideline a person. And you say, well, what are these treatments? I thought they couldn't treat them. And that's true. They didn't have antibiotics, but they did have treatments. The treatments were, I think, unpleasant. Most of them involved heavy metals, for example, mercury. If you presented to a physician with, say, gonorrhea or early syphilis, they might prescribe running of mercury up your urethra. So they would take a syringe with no needle, uh, put it at the tip of the penis, and uh inject mercury up the urethra and into the bladder where you would uh hold it and its toxicity would potentially kill the bacteria that were causing the infection. As horrible as that sounds, I think you're absolutely right. We have some medical textbooks uh at the time that say that patients could usually tolerate the treatment without screaming. The thing about it was oftentimes you had to do this multiple times to treat the illness. You may have to do it multiple times over an extended period of time. So the physicians oftentimes showed soldiers how to administer the mercury themselves, which gave rise to an interesting expression: a night with Venus leads to a lifetime with mercury. But many of the officers are really concerned that not only does the disease, but also the treatment, while sometimes effective, oftentimes not, either way, readiness is going down. Captain Frame Wilson said in the winter of 1862 to 1863 that the Army had a social enemy to contend with, which seriously threatened its very existence, that of the women of the town. So something has to be done, right? There's just one of these things. Union officers in Nashville and many of the Army physicians were just certain that the ladies of the night were responsible for this plague of venereal diseases. And so they hit up on what seemed like the simplest solution. If you couldn't keep soldiers from visiting these local prostitutes, you could make the prostitutes non-local. So indeed, the newspaper in town, one of them, the Nashville Dispatch, reinforced this view, commenting that the women were demoralizing the Army and their removal is a military necessity. So in the first days of July 1863, Major General Rosecrans calls on his provost marshal, Lieutenant Colonel George Spaulding, to, quote, without loss of time, seize and transport to Louisville, all prostitutes found in the city were known to be here. And Brigadier General Granger echoed that Spaulding was to, quote, rid the city of the diseased prostitutes infesting it. So by July 9th, the National Daily Press has reported that the roundup of the, quote, sinful fair had begun. And other newspapers at the time report that squads of soldiers were engaged in the laudable business of heaping furniture out of the various dens and then tumbling their disconsolate owners after. So they really did what you think. They went in bayonets out, kicked in the doors, rounded up the prostitutes, and as Captain Wilson said, 1,500 of them at a single time were gathered up and placed aboard a train and were compelled to leave and conducted under guard to Louisville. Now, authorities in Louisville, as you might imagine, at first objected to receiving what they called such a formidable array of unwelcome guests, but finally consented to do so. And as Captain Wilson said, Nashville was afterward all the happier and better off for their conspicuous absence. Interestingly, Granger also sent some 300 soldiers with various venereal diseases to hospitals in Louisville as well. The thing about it is the prostitutes, the women that they had rounded up, obviously had never agreed to this plan and just realized, um, oddly that in the Army didn't, that they could just get off the train, which they did, and soon found their way right back to Nashville. Uh and so the problem was not solved for any length of time at all. Spaulding then has to search for a more effective solution. He's really despondent that his train situation, his non-localizing of the prostitutions didn't work. And he's trying to figure out what to do until he meets a guy by the name of John Newcomb. Now, Newcomb was the owner of a brand new steamboat. And uh Spaulding, to Newcomb's horror, um, ordered Newcomb with General Rosecrans' backing to take his new boat on a maiden voyage northward, ideally to Louisville, but he wasn't all that particular, with a cargo of 111 of Nashville's most infamous prostitutes as passengers. Now, Newcomb doesn't want any of this. He's like, wait a minute, this is not what I signed up for. I want to work for the Army, I want to move things around. And he said, nope, this is the cargo you're you're taking. So Newcomb and his crew were given rations enough to last the passengers to Louisville, but other than that, they were basically on their own. The newspapers, the local press in Nashville loved the story, uh, encouraging its readers to, quote, bid goodbye to these frail sisters once and for all. Of course, this too does not work out as well as you might think. First, the the soldiers that were on board with Newcomb's crew rapidly realized that they had to keep a constant eye peeled in both directions from the deck of the boat, making sure not only the women on board did not jump overboard to escape, but also had to make sure that women didn't solicit men to jump in from the banks of the river and swim out to the boat, which they very much did. And so there was this on and on battle to keep people on and off the boat, depending on who you are. Now, when this boat, conveniently named by its owner before all this, the Idaho, uh, when the that boat reached Louisville, city leaders, who by this time had had enough of the movement of prostitutes to their city, rode out to the boat. They wouldn't even let it dock. They rode out and said, you're not dumping them here. And they actually had a bunch of sheriff's deputies waiting at the landing to back up that order, uh, standing there with shotguns. They wouldn't even let the Idaho dock for supplies. And so if John Newcomb's kind of like, well, what do I do now? And they're they're very much kind of like closing a bar. I don't uh you don't you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. So the boat then has to figure out where to go, and it goes next to Cincinnati, where the same thing basically happens. There's not really any desire on the part of the authorities to welcome the addition of the already overflowing numbers the papers reported, engaged in that peculiar profession. And so uh Cincinnati won't let the boat land either, and he has to turn around. And by this time, the press all over the country began to get wind of this ongoing saga of what they called the floating whorehouse, and it becomes national news across the north. Papers all along the Ohio River followed the boat's movement, eagerly reporting every detail in the way that they did at the time. A newspaper out of Cleveland wrote that the majority are a homely, forlorn set of degraded creatures, that they managed to smuggle a little liquor on board, which gave out on the second day, but several had become intoxicated and indulged in a free fight with knives being used. So Newcomb is really not sure what to do. He has very little guidance from the Army, he's not getting any more money, he doesn't have much in the way of rations, so he goes next to St. Louis. And the mayor sent out a delegation when the Idaho arrives in St. Louis, and really even before he gets close to the city with a simple message: you're not going to make Nashville's problem our problem. So now Newcomb is basically not sure what to do, and he's just sailing up and down the Ohio River. Back in Nashville, right, the demand is still there. And one of the things that you do find is that while the frail cargo, they put it on the Idaho, was sailing the rivers, other women came in to fill the demand void. Where there's demand, there will often be supply. It became increasingly diverse numbers of women that did this. So as we talked about at the beginning, the prostitute activity in Nashville was predominantly white. While the Idaho is going up and down the river, really more and more women of color began to engage in the activity. Newspapers in Nashville began to lament that, quote, unless the aggravated curse of lechery that remained in Nashville was destroyed by rigid military or civil mandates, or the indiscriminate expulsion of the guilty sex, the ejectment of the white class of prostitutes will have been will turn out to have been productive of the sin it was intended to eradicate. Nobody's really sure what to do. And finally, the Idaho returns to Nashville after about a month. It's still got 98 of its original 111 passengers. There's really no record of what happens to the ones that are not on it when it gets back. When it arrives back in Nashville, there was a crowd at the wharf jostling to see each other. Newcomb after he offloads all the prostitutes. He insists that someone from the Army perform an inspection. So on August 8th, 1863, a staffer from General Rosecrans' staffs found that the ship's stateroom had been, quote, badly damaged, the mattresses badly soiled, and recommended that Newcomb be paid $1,000. Again, this is $1863 in damages, plus another $4,300 to cover the food and, quote, medicine peculiar to the diseased women in this class. But of course, he doesn't really get that at the time. So now Spaulding is just resigned to the fact that the prostitutes are going to apply their trade and soldiers are going to engage them wherever they happen to be. So he then reasoned that the women might as well engage in prostitution safely, and basically out of sheer desperation, he's got to figure something out. He and the Union Army create in Nashville the country's first system of legalized prostitution. Spaulding's proposal was simple. Each prostitute would register himself, obtaining for a $5 licensing fee, a license entitling her to work as she pleased. In order to get this license, a doctor who was approved by the Army, now at first it was mostly Army doctors, and then it was civilian doctors approved by the Army, would be charged to examine the prostitutes each week, a service for which each woman would pay 50 cents. This was later raised to a dollar. And engaging in prostitution without a license or failing to show up for your medical examinations would result in arrest and imprisonment for 30 days. You could no longer just pay a fine and go right back to work. So they had both carrot and stick. It was legal to do this if you paid your licensing fee and submitted to your weekly medical exams. But if you didn't, you would go to the big house and nobody wants that. During the medical exams, women that are found to have venereal diseases would be sent to hospital number 11, established in the home of a former Catholic bishop, and would be given treatments against some of these mercury-based treatments, but treatments on the list for the venereal diseases that were paid for by the fees charged for the program. Soldiers who had venereal diseases were sent to another hospital, hospital number 15. If you just Google and look at Civil War hospitals in Nashville, these hospitals actually come up. There are pictures of them widely available, and you can see the good number of folks. With this program, the City Council, which still exists, is just not necessarily running things independently of the Army. The City Council began to hope that legalization would solve their dilemma of pure of purifying the public space, as they put it. And on August 24, it voted to, quote, postpone indefinitely its lingering consideration of an ordinance proposed to prohibit lewd women from riding in hacks with soldiers. Hacks was taxicabs at the time. So by the spring of 1864, 456 prostitutes had registered. 92 of them were treated for venereal disease. Although the rest of the edict was routinely enforced early on, it was tough to get the weekly exams in, so they changed it to two weeks, largely because there were just too many prostitutes and not enough physicians. Several physicians, particularly civilian physicians from Nashville, closed down their practices and simply just went into this and really attempted to take very good care of the prostitutes. And when you registered, they wrote it in a book. We have this book. Many of them were by the city offices. So it might not have just been soldiers that they were catering to. By this that summer, the summer of 1864, one doctor remarked that he saw a marked improvement in the licensed prostitutes' physical and mental health, noting that at the beginning of the initiative, the women had been characterized by the use of crude language and little care for their personal hygiene, but were soon virtual models of cleanliness and propriety. In fact, one of the head surgeons, Robert Fletcher, claimed that after the first six months of regulation, only 13 of the nearly 31,000 soldiers in Nashville hospitals that had been admitted for some sort of venereal disease had contracted their infections in Nashville. That means thousands of thousands of soldiers had gotten it somewhere else and come to Nashville. Only 13 had gotten it here in Nashville. And in fact, a New York Times reporter visiting Nashville at the time was just as impressed. He records that the expenses of the program from September 1863 to June 1864 totaled just over $6,000, with income from the licensing fees from the lewd woman reaching $5,900. So it was basically a self-funding experiment that began to get very, very good reviews from folks, including many of the physicians who weren't really excited about it to begin with. But we see they kind of begrudgingly admit, like, hey, this uh this actually kind of worked. You know, once fearful of the law, particularly military law, you know, the the Nashville prostitutes began to take to the system with significant enthusiasm. Uh doctors record that the their patients who were prostitutes felt grateful to no longer have to turn to, quote, quacks and charlatans for expensive and oftentimes ineffective treatments. They could get the care that was the standard of care at the time. Prostitors eagerly showed customers their licenses to show that they were disease-free. We do have several of these licenses that still exist, so we can see them. Of course, the madams could no longer pay off fines to evade the law. And of course, paying local authorities became more difficult and at the same time, somewhat unnecessary. There were only 12 arrests in the first month, uh, 28 arrests in the second, but after that, there's really no records of arrests, and indeed public women from other areas come into Nashville to ply their trades. And it was so successful that it began to get uh set up in other southern cities, uh. The prostitution problem was also big in other northern cities that were uh kind of the last stop, uh, cities like Louisville and Washington, D.C., but there's no evidence that they ever really considered doing this, uh. And so they continue to have the disease and prostitution problems that Nashville had dealt with. Interestingly, from a public health standpoint, there was also another breakthrough. The medical officers who now inspected and, of course, hospitalized both men and women for venereal diseases, could really take note of how the disease spread. Now, the dominant ideology before and immediately after the war was the prostitute was the cause of numerous infections. It was clinical, remember, there's no germ theory of disease. So it was this kind of behavior that causes the problems and then spreads to the male companions, and there it could affect innocent wives and children and so on. But a guy, especially a guy by the name of Dr. William Chambers, who was one of the physicians that was really responsible for a good number of these medical inspections and actually made house calls to prostitutes when appropriate, noted a curious phenomenon in February 1864. Prior to February, as we said, the hospitals had recorded a fairly constant rate of infected patients. But then as re-enlisted veterans from other parts of the United States poured into the city, you know, no doubt taking advantage of some of their furloughs that they got with reenlistments, all of a sudden an astonishingly high number of soldiers checked into the male venereal disease wards. And soon after, Chambers noted a corresponding epidemic among registered prostitutes. That is to say, there wasn't a whole lot of disease, and the disease rates among the prostitutes went up after all this influx of people came into the city. So since he had been Regularly examining the women up to that time, he knew that they had been disease-free before this great influx. And although very few of his colleagues listened, Chambers conducted experiments and wrote down his observations and concluded that the soldiers had actually transmitted the venereal disease to their otherwise uncontaminated female partners. It was a very different way of looking. This was a contagious disease in his mind, not purely a moral one. The program still has some limitations. The brothels, which became common, did see much, much less venereal disease, but opium overdoses were still common. Other deaths, intentional or otherwise, still happened. It didn't really deal with those kinds of social issues. Fights in the brothels were common, and it took a lot of effort to keep control of folks in there. As the pace of the war slows after December 1864, which is when the Battle of Nashville occurs, which is the end of large-scale combat operations in the Western theater. Now you've got a lot of soldiers on there with a lot of time in their hand, hands they're not necessarily going to get sent forward to be killed on the battlefields of the Civil War. And so they spend time in these brothels more and more, engaging more drug use, more drinking and more fights, and so on. And so by the end of the war, there's this whole area, it's really west of the Capitol in Nashville, all the way down to Smokey Run, and becomes known as Hell's Half Acre for all this not only debauchery, but fights and all this stuff. And the residents of Nashville, no longer pressured by the problems of venereal diseases, start finding these brothos increasingly objectionable. And I think this is kind of the story of public health, right? The acute problem goes away, and then people get tired of the measures that got it to go away and start looking to move beyond or to get beyond that particular situation. There were riots that started to break out in one of these brothels. After one of these beer riots, a fire broke out that engulfed much of the area, and the newspapers say, well, you know, while we're sorry for the people that lost their home, we congratulate the citizens of Nashville of ridding themselves of Hell's Half Acre and these problems. After the war ends and the Army leaves and civil governance is restored, the program of legalized prostitution is in fact ended. Despite the success of the program and dropping the number of infections among both soldiers and prostitutes, Chambers' findings were not widely accepted for many years. Again, the German theory of disease is not widely accepted in the U.S. It isn't until much, much, much later that the Pacific Medical Journal argued that legalized prostitution not only helped rid Rosecrans' army of an ureal disease, but it had a positive impact on other armies. Everybody kind of just goes away and forgets this chapter. Colonel Spauding goes back to Michigan, or he becomes the postmaster and later a mayor, becomes a lawyer and a congressman. General Rosecrans, of course, he makes a tactical error at the Battle of Chickamauga, which caused lots of people. He gets fired as a general, gets sent out to the Department of Missouri. After the war, he takes up politics. He too becomes a congressman in the 1880s. One guy who had a little more difficulty recovering after the summer of 1863 was John Newcomb, the guy who owned the Idaho. Nearly two years after the Idaho made its voyage up and down the river, he still hadn't gotten his recommended reimbursement from the government. And so out of frustration, he basically submits his claim directly to Secretary of War Edwin Staunton, after which he was, in fact, given the money, and he was given a certification that the removal of the Nashville prostitutes had been, quote, necessary for the good of the service. The problem was the boat, of course, now was tarnished with this name, which had been the national news, and Newcomb couldn't use it. So he basically sails it down to New Orleans and abandons it. He sells it for when he gets and just dumps it there. And that was kind of the inauspicious end of this first public health experiment in legalizing prostitution, which was incredibly successful and then incredibly rapidly forgotten. So that's all I have for you today. Stay healthy out there. Bye bye.