RESUMEN
This paper applies a qualitative perspective and method to a highly quantitative dataset. Data on 4275 consecutive patients with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) who reported to the Daru General Hospital STD Clinic between 1980 and 1992 are critically examined. Prevailing public health approaches to the epidemiology of STDs presume a linguistic, social, cognitive and geographical fixity to both STDs and the people whom they afflict in ways that are empirically unsound. Some of the problems of and some of the problems with the presentation and treatment of gonorrhoea, syphilis and donovanosis are discussed. Because Daru is characterized by high levels of sexual violence, low levels of condom usage and a deeply entrenched sex industry, this total of 4275 is surely a dramatic under-accounting. In particular it misses the embodied, highly gendered nature of disease. Male and female STD Clinic patients appear to think about, feel and report their problems in greatly different ways.