It was during this period, according to Dickson Wright (Chapter 13) that Catherine the Great of Russia established the first VD hospital, a fifty bed institution in St. Petersburg.

We learn from Farran that in Denmark as early as 1788 an attempt was made to provide free medical service for YD. He quotes this regulation issued by the diocese of Aarhus:

“Every person, rich or poor, suffering from a venereal disease should receive free medical advice, free medicine, together with free nursing when infirmaries or premises were equipped for the patient's treatment; that patients must agree to take treatment; that those who failed to do so should be punished; that priests should notify persons known or suspected of being infected and that expenses should be defrayed by the whole diocese.”

But in the same year, Farran continues, another document states that an attempt to implement this regulation was met with this response:

“We were faced by more than a hundred men, armed with heavy flails, foaming with rage and threatening us; if we did not leave their women and children alone, they told us, they would do violence to us. So we had to content ourselves with those who submit ted to the treatment of their own free will. In this way the disease will never be eradicated.”

So the regulation was amended to provide that the first efforts were to be made by means of "gentleness and reasoning," but quoting from the same document:

“If the means be not sufficient, however, the diocesan governor is to provide the required police or military protection for those who perform the visitation”

Farran gives the Danes credit for sweet reasonableness. Even so, he says, the Danish penal law as late as 1866 provided that those who "practice sexual intercourse, knowing or supposing themselves to be infected, may be punished by imprisonment, even with hard labor."