Why last night's VD-laced episode of Victoria should worry modern audiences

The Victorians feared the moral and physical implications of venereal disease, but the problems of untreatable infection and inadequate health provision are all too familiar to modern viewers

• Spoiler alert! Plot points from Victoria are revealed in this blog

In an age before antibiotics, contact tracing and the NHS, a diagnosis of venereal disease (VD) had devastating consequences. Today, confirmed cases of syphilis are at their highest in England since 1949, strains of gonorrhoea are resistant to last-line antibiotics and the NHS faces mounting financial pressures. We are far from meeting the WHO's goal of ending sexually transmitted infections (STIs) as a major public health concern. Rather, the problems of untreatable infection and inadequate health provision that were all too familiar to the Victorians are again very real.

This is perhaps why viewers of ITV's Victoria last night could share the apprehensions of Prince Ernest of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (played by David Oakes). Hesitating on a damp, grey London morning outside the consulting rooms of a discreet doctor, he clearly suspects the worst.