Eros or Ethnos: Pioneering statistical survey on prostitution at the beginning of the 20th century

The earliest serious investigation into prostitution in Croatia was a survey conducted in 1907 by the physician Fran Gundrum. His study was an attempt at a comprehensive exploration of prostitution, which tried to reconstruct demographic, anthropologic, and sociologic features of prostitutes. I present an analysis of his study and argue that Gundrum consistently found himself vacillating between blaming society and charging the nature of women to explain the existence of prostitution. This ambivalence was a result of embracing both the power of Enlightenment, which believed that human morality could be improved by the process of learning, and the notion of hereditary degeneration, which regarded human improvement by reeducation as futile. Heavily influenced by his Catholic upbringing and political conservatism, Gundrum married the “scientific” notion of innate prostitution with a pervasive view of women as flirtatious and materialistic. His survey reveals the typical personality of the period, a scientific enthusiast advocating the medical control of the population and the use of statistics in realizing that goal. It was, essentially, an attempt to construct and verify widespread attitudes toward public health as a method of monitoring venereal diseases and social control in general.