Syringe

Syringes can be emotive and polarising objects. For many they produce an intense bodily response; a modern syringe is often attached to a needle, so looking at one can bring to mind personal memories of sharp pain, fear, blood and bruising. They are also symbols of a structured, ordered medical system and, therefore, imagined deviations from it. Pictured in a hospital, they connote treatment and healing. In today’s medical guidance, syringes come out of clean, sterile plastic without being contaminated and are handled by experts who are trusted to use and dispose of them appropriately.5

The same object found outdoors becomes a symbol of danger and disease. For many, a syringe on the street connotes drug use, bloodborne illness and generalised threat that is often disproportionate to the actual risk, as though the object has a will of its own.6 The ‘syringe tides’ of the 1980s also put these perceived risks into the context of environmental damage; the Port of London Authority website still lists ‘hypodermic needles’ as one of the potential dangers to which visitors to the Thames foreshore must be alert.7

Reading the pewter syringe through this symbolism brings to light the relationships between medicine, risk and control in its own time. Perceptions of sickness and health changed greatly across the 1700s and 1800s, and approaches to the treatment of sexually transmitted infections changed with them. Until 1795 seamen were fined up to 15 shillings - several days’ wages - for having contracted a venereal disease. This - combined with the stigma associated with mercurial treatments and a fear of social consequences - encouraged them to conceal symptoms from naval doctors and seek treatment from the broader medical marketplace, where patent treatments with vague assertions of medical authority ​​thrived.

As the British Navy expanded during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, naval surgeons sought to gain greater influence over sailors’ health, in part by making efforts to standardise treatments and practices across vessels. The fine was dropped, but the concealment of seamen’s symptoms was used to justify a more rigidly defined role for medical providers, suggesting that sailors were not responsible or knowledgeable enough to choose treatments for themselves, ‘like children in need of control’.8 The syringe, in this context, can draw attention to patients’ experiences, highlighting the boundaries between care and control.

The symbol of the syringe shows how questions about who gets to be an expert on harm and health, and which practices are ‘acceptable’ acts of bodily autonomy, are trans-historic. In the UK today, access to care for stigmatised groups like drug users, disabled people, homeless people, sex workers and trans people - particularly around sexual health and abortion - is limited, compelling many to seek treatment outside the formal medical system. This is increasingly the case in the context of recent cuts to Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) and efforts to privatise NHS services.

Within marginalised communities, alternative structures of medicine and knowledge-sharing become necessary. Needle exchanges and safe injection sites, for example, emerged from drug users’ unions and AIDS activism in response to their communities’ unmet needs.9 Similarly, DIY hormone therapy is - globally - the most common way that trans people access hormones due to medical gatekeeping.10 These are parallel histories to those of conventional medicine. The anonymity of the syringe as an object can serve to direct attention away from orthodoxy and towards those it excludes.

There are used and unused syringes in the Museum of Transology’s collection.11 Archiving these objects and acknowledging the breadth of their history is itself an act of containment, but one that asserts the importance of understanding their use, users and context as part of the historical record. Perhaps future mudlarks, spotting a plastic syringe on the foreshore, will be able to ​find these modern histories of exclusion, resistance and harm-reduction too.