A three-part series exploring three moments in history when the British have been swept with wave of hysteria, gripped by a moral panic or frozen with terror.

Today the fear of Aids, smallpox and anthrax is constant but our 19th-century ancestors had their own horrors: syphilis and gonorrhoea were spreading through the population rapidly. Joanna Bourke tells the story of a moral cleanup. The readers are David Collins and Simon Armstrong.