Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this Podcast will
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Speaker 1: to the exactly right media YouTube channel so you never
Speaker 1: miss a new episode drop. Londoners in the seventeenth and
Speaker 1: eighteenth centuries were no strangers to infectious disease. Plague, tuberculosis, typhus, measles,
Speaker 1: and smallpox all reared their pestilential heads at some point
Speaker 1: or another. But alongside these well known and highly broadcast
Speaker 1: afflictions lurked another disease so feared and so stigmatized that
Speaker 1: it was sometimes known as the secret disease we know
Speaker 1: it today as syphilis. Syphilis, or the pox, as it
Speaker 1: was also called, was among the most feared diagnoses in
Speaker 1: early modern London, not just because there were no effective
Speaker 1: cures and it could lead to painful sores or even death.
Speaker 1: If your pox infection became public knowledge, you would likely
Speaker 1: face deep stigma and shame. You may even be ostracized
Speaker 1: from your friends and family. With so much at stake,
Speaker 1: it's no wonder people went to great lengths to manage
Speaker 1: or conceal their condition. In The Dreaded Pox, Sex and
Speaker 1: Disease and Early Modern London, author doctor Olivia Wiser, Associate
Speaker 1: professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, peels
Speaker 1: back the curtain on the most intimate facets of londoner's
Speaker 1: lives centuries ago. Drawing from a wide variety of sources,
Speaker 1: from court records to recipe books, poscure advertisements to personal diaries,
Speaker 1: doctor Wiser transports readers back in time to the dirty
Speaker 1: streets of London. Where might an impoverished maids seek help
Speaker 1: for her infection? How might a gentleman choose between the
Speaker 1: many ready made concoctions in the city's alleys, who were
Speaker 1: behind these lauded tinctures and ointments that provided nothing more
Speaker 1: than hope. The Dreaded Pox is a fascinating glimpse into
Speaker 1: the daily lives of early modern Londoners as they navigated
Speaker 1: a world where sex and shame were so deeply entangled.
Speaker 1: While today we have more scientific knowledge and the ability
Speaker 1: to treat and cure many sexually transmitted infections. That world
Speaker 1: is still familiar to us in many ways, which leads
Speaker 1: us to ask how far we have actually come and
Speaker 1: how much further we still need to go. I had
Speaker 1: such a great time chatting with doctor Wiser, and I'm
Speaker 1: so excited to share our conversation with you all. So
Speaker 1: let's just take a quick break and get right into it.
Speaker 1: Doctor Wiser, thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: I cannot wait to dive into the world of venereal
Speaker 1: disease in the London of past centuries with you. It's
Speaker 1: going to be a great time. And I'm curious, though,
Speaker 1: could you tell me what drew you to this area
Speaker 1: and this era of scholarship.
Speaker 3: A lot of people know that there was a ton
Speaker 3: of venereal disease in this time period. So this was
Speaker 3: a rampant disease, and we know a lot about the
Speaker 3: disease because just so many people seem to be affected
Speaker 3: by it. There's some historians who predict that if you
Speaker 3: were a grown up living in London in the seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 3: you would have up to a twenty percent chance of
Speaker 3: getting infected, which is an astounding number.
Speaker 2: I don't know whether that's true.
Speaker 3: I trust them, but it's just appalling, like how prevalent
Speaker 3: this disease was. So we know a lot about the disease,
Speaker 3: we know a lot less about what it was like
Speaker 3: to live with it. So that was kind of the
Speaker 3: historical problem that I faced. What was it like to
Speaker 3: endure this disease? What was it like just for a
Speaker 3: normal person living in the city.
Speaker 2: And so the answer to kind of.
Speaker 3: Do that work, I tried to look in non medical places,
Speaker 3: So I tried to look outside hospitals, outside, I did
Speaker 3: look in consultation rooms, but I tried to look in
Speaker 3: everyday sites in the city to try to recover just
Speaker 3: lived experiences with this disease.
Speaker 2: And what I ended up writing was a book.
Speaker 3: That's as much about the history of a city as
Speaker 3: it is about the history.
Speaker 2: Of a disease, which is what I love so much
Speaker 2: about it.
Speaker 1: You really transport readers to this era before germ theory,
Speaker 1: where London is growing at such a rapid pace and
Speaker 1: sex is changing. You know, all of these different components
Speaker 1: are changing, but also at the same time we have
Speaker 1: these sentiments of shame and secrecy that surround not only sex,
Speaker 1: but and then of course anything that's tied to sex,
Speaker 1: including this disease. And you know we talked about we've
Speaker 1: been talking about this disease. Is what is pox like?
Speaker 1: What what could pox be used to describe or label
Speaker 1: in terms of our modern classifications of disease.
Speaker 3: It's a great question and one that I get a lot.
Speaker 3: And my easy answer, if it's really helpful to have
Speaker 3: some sort of modern disease equivalent in your head thinking
Speaker 3: about this topic, My easy answer is syphilis. It's most
Speaker 3: likely that's the disease we're talking about. The more kind
Speaker 3: of historically accurate answer is it could be any number
Speaker 3: of STIs what we would call STIs, So you know,
Speaker 3: you think chlamydia, gottar rhea, syphilis, it could.
Speaker 2: Be any of those.
Speaker 3: And they used this term venereal disease, this umbrella category
Speaker 3: that was expansive, so all of these what we now
Speaker 3: differentiate as different astis were kind of all encompassed within
Speaker 3: that one term. They in the past pre germ theory,
Speaker 3: like you mentioned, they didn't differentiate these categories the way
Speaker 3: we do. But it can be helpful to kind of
Speaker 3: have that in your mind to just think about, like
Speaker 3: what was happening to these people's bodies, you know, like
Speaker 3: were they what were their symptoms, what were they enduring?
Speaker 1: You talked about how pos was or venereal disease was
Speaker 1: so common in this era. I mean you like twenty
Speaker 1: percent possible lifetime risk, which is mind blowing. Again, why
Speaker 1: was it so high?
Speaker 2: Like what?
Speaker 1: How was sex changing in London during the seventeenth and
Speaker 1: eighteenth centuries.
Speaker 3: A lot of historians of sexuality have argued that sex
Speaker 3: was changing a lot that people have used the word.
Speaker 2: Revolution like a sexual revolution.
Speaker 3: In this time period, and there is a lot of
Speaker 3: evidence that sex was changing, that people were just having
Speaker 3: more sex outside of marriage. There was many there's much
Speaker 3: more evidence of men having sex with other men, the
Speaker 3: development of what we're called molly houses, like kind of
Speaker 3: like the proto gay club, and so there is evidence
Speaker 3: that there's just more sexual activity.
Speaker 2: In this time period. My sense from writing this book.
Speaker 3: Is and a lot of what I see changing is
Speaker 3: more due to the changes of the city as opposed
Speaker 3: to changes in sexual behavior that the city. Because it's
Speaker 3: such a London specific story and I think it would
Speaker 3: be a very different book if it were a different
Speaker 3: geographical location. It's a very London story because the city
Speaker 3: was changing demographically, commercially, it was just growing so exponentially
Speaker 3: in this time period. There's this huge influx of people,
Speaker 3: this urban, dense mobile population, a huge influx in consumerism,
Speaker 3: and all of that creates this kind of chaotic environment
Speaker 3: where on a concrete level there was just a lot
Speaker 3: of transactional sex happening, and then a lot of disease,
Speaker 3: and then also a whole market that kind of develops
Speaker 3: to treat it. So the kind of short answer is, yes,
Speaker 3: just more people are having sex. And also I think
Speaker 3: what's really changing is this urban center that accommodates this
Speaker 3: kind of hot bed of sexual activity and disease.
Speaker 1: As you describe sex, it was transactional nature, but it
Speaker 1: was also a private matter, like it wasn't necessarily something
Speaker 1: that was discussed openly, and venereal disease was also called
Speaker 1: the secret disease, which kind of denotes again it's shameful nature.
Speaker 1: And so given these intense pressures to remain silent about
Speaker 1: sex or about the pox, I'm guessing it's not something
Speaker 1: that was openly written about for many people, whether in
Speaker 1: diaries or not. And so I'm curious about your sources
Speaker 1: and what types of sources did you find helpful in
Speaker 1: researching for this, and how often did you have to
Speaker 1: read between the lines.
Speaker 3: A lot I had to read between a lot of
Speaker 3: lines I did. My initial take was exactly what you mentioned.
Speaker 3: I'm going to look in private writing people. Certainly, if
Speaker 3: you're dealing with such a stigmatizing kind of life altering ailment,
Speaker 3: surely you wrote about it. And it was really hard
Speaker 3: to find people writing about their firsthand experiences in personal writing.
Speaker 3: So I found lots of examples of people describing other
Speaker 3: people in letters or diaries, much harder to find first
Speaker 3: person accounts. That makes sense for all the reasons you
Speaker 3: just said, it's this deeply stigmatizing disease. People didn't want
Speaker 3: to admit they had it. They would use euphemisms. So
Speaker 3: what I did was I tried to think creatively, what
Speaker 3: are other kinds of sources I can use to get
Speaker 3: at that experience outside of personal writing. So I looked
Speaker 3: to recipe books to try to kind of recover what
Speaker 3: people were doing at home in these semi private moments.
Speaker 3: How we're people trying to treat themselves privately. I looked
Speaker 3: to court records to try to get access to kind
Speaker 3: of non elite people giving testimony in court where the
Speaker 3: disease comes up in court. So I tried to also
Speaker 3: use sources that we know that historians have used for
Speaker 3: decades to talk about this disease and study this disease,
Speaker 3: like advertisements for patent drugs, so what we would call
Speaker 3: over the counter cures, but I tried to look at
Speaker 3: them in a new way. So the kind of typical
Speaker 3: way historians use these sources is they look at how
Speaker 3: healers are promoting themselves, how they're marketing their drugs. I
Speaker 3: decided to look at the address printed at the bottom
Speaker 3: of the ad, which is where the healer said you
Speaker 3: can come by my pill or come get my elixir.
Speaker 3: And it wasn't always at their house. It was sometimes
Speaker 3: an address to a bookstall, or a chocolate shop or
Speaker 3: a bakery. And I decided to make a map of
Speaker 3: where you can find cures for this disease. So it's
Speaker 3: just one example of using a historical source we know
Speaker 3: about that's been used many many times, but just trying
Speaker 3: to use it in a new, more creative way to
Speaker 3: get at a different slice of the story.
Speaker 1: Let's take a quick break, and when we get back,
Speaker 1: there's still so much to discuss. Welcome back everyone. I've
Speaker 1: been chatting with doctor Olivia Wiser about her book The
Speaker 1: Dreaded Pox, Sex and Disease in Early modern London. Let's
Speaker 1: get back into things, not just what this disease, the
Speaker 1: effect of this disease on someone's body, but the effect
Speaker 1: that it had on their social standing, on their relationships,
Speaker 1: on how they viewed themselves. And there was early on
Speaker 1: in your book a really fascinating kind of series of
Speaker 1: diary entries where Samuel Peeps writes about his brother and
Speaker 1: there's this kind of question of does he have a
Speaker 1: venereal disease? Is he dying of venereal disease? Is he
Speaker 1: getting the all clear? And just these intense emotional perspectives
Speaker 1: of how someone's relationship is changing based on a diagnosis.
Speaker 1: And I thought that was just a really fascinating glimpse
Speaker 1: into the effect that this disease could have on someone's life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it's a great example of how those third
Speaker 3: party you know, before I was saying, oh, it's so frustrating,
Speaker 3: I can't get a first person account. Peeps isn't writing
Speaker 3: about himself, He's writing about his brother. But it still
Speaker 3: has so much to offer us in terms of kind
Speaker 3: of insight into just the emotional toil of a diagnosis.
Speaker 3: Because of course Peeps is just worried about himself. He's
Speaker 3: worried about number one. What is this going to do
Speaker 3: to my reputation? We have the same last name? What
Speaker 3: are we going to do? So? And I just love
Speaker 3: this diary by Samuel Peeps. It's just really intimate and
Speaker 3: candid in a way that we don't often see in diaries.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's fun. I was like, we need a
Speaker 2: TV show based on.
Speaker 3: This diary's I support that. I would watch it. I
Speaker 3: would love to consult on it. Just on the record.
Speaker 2: Thank you great, well, I think we have an idea
Speaker 2: in place. Let's go.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And in addition to these, you know, court records, advertisements,
Speaker 1: personal diaries, the pox also makes an appearance in creative
Speaker 1: work from this era, whether and it's in a song
Speaker 1: or a book or a play or an opera or
Speaker 1: something like that. When it does make an appearance, what
Speaker 1: did it signify?
Speaker 3: It almost always signified debauchery or vice or illicit behavior.
Speaker 3: And I mean it when you look in court records
Speaker 3: that have nothing to do with sex, court records for
Speaker 3: you know, I looked at a lot for marriage separation,
Speaker 3: things that aren't sexual necessarily, it comes up as just
Speaker 3: like a slander for just bad illicit negative. It's often
Speaker 3: used to describe women. So the disease typically kind of stereotypically.
Speaker 2: Was blamed on women.
Speaker 3: And there's lots of medical debates about how women there's
Speaker 3: something about women's bodies physiologically that make them prone to
Speaker 3: not only spreading the disease but somehow like creating fomenting
Speaker 3: it in their hot wombs. And so this phrase pocky
Speaker 3: horror was used all the time as just kind of
Speaker 3: like a general slander to just connote bad immoral behavior.
Speaker 3: You know, there are lots of debates where did it
Speaker 3: come from? Is it from the New world? Is it
Speaker 3: from the old world? And there were a lot of
Speaker 3: assumptions that at first it comes from women. It must
Speaker 3: be you know, women are to blame obviously time and again.
Speaker 3: And then as the you know, Londoners at least are
Speaker 3: seeing all these new kinds of people that they had
Speaker 3: never seen before in diseases, and plants come into the
Speaker 3: metropol from these New World explorations, it kind of shifts
Speaker 3: a little bit, and there's this layering of well it
Speaker 3: also this disease also must originate in women's bodies who
Speaker 3: are from hot climates, something about their hotness, their heat.
Speaker 3: And then there's all these debates that it must come
Speaker 3: from the New World. It couldn't possibly come from here,
Speaker 3: and it's being brought from the New World, and therefore
Speaker 3: we need to ingest the plants from the New World
Speaker 3: as our treatment because they will be suited best to
Speaker 3: treat this disease. So there is lots of talk about
Speaker 3: who to blame, and there's a whole nother discourse about like,
Speaker 3: you know, the English call it the French disease because
Speaker 3: it comes from France, and the French called the Italian
Speaker 3: disease because you know, and everyone's passing shift the blame, yeah, exactly,
Speaker 3: passing the blame around. So there's definitely debates about it,
Speaker 3: and they never settle on one answer.
Speaker 2: It's always up for debate exactly, of course, of course.
Speaker 1: And so even when this idea of where it came
Speaker 1: from shifted, it still was women at the source of it.
Speaker 1: They were like were men ever blamed or was it
Speaker 1: ever thought like this is his fault for you know whatever.
Speaker 2: It's such a good question.
Speaker 3: And if you look in the obvious places, and by
Speaker 3: obvious I mean historical documents that are about the disease
Speaker 3: that say venereal disease on the cover, or the Great Pox,
Speaker 3: these are all euphemisms for the same kind of nexus
Speaker 3: of diseases.
Speaker 2: It's always women. It's always women.
Speaker 3: But when you start looking at non medical sources, at
Speaker 3: the kinds of sources I've been talking about, so for example,
Speaker 3: court records or women trying to sue for a separation
Speaker 3: like basically a divorce, you see that it's not at
Speaker 3: all a case that there's a difference between what I
Speaker 3: would say is the discourse, like the narrative, the story
Speaker 3: people tell, and the reality on the ground, and the
Speaker 3: reality on the ground when you look at medical cases
Speaker 3: of who's coming to get treated, and when you look
Speaker 3: at court records and who's talking, it's so clearly not
Speaker 3: women who are being blamed. It's time and again my
Speaker 3: husband went to the bathhouse, slept with a prostitute, came
Speaker 3: back infected me. I mean, it's so different from what
Speaker 3: the discourse is in these other kinds of texts.
Speaker 1: We've talked about how this is an era pre germ theory,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean that contagion was not a concept.
Speaker 1: And so, you know, just based on what you said,
Speaker 1: it was clear that people saw the connection. It was like, okay,
Speaker 1: well we know the root of transmission. How much did
Speaker 1: just the act of sex? Was that everything? Or was
Speaker 1: it also a role of constitution, type of sex? You know,
Speaker 1: what were the set of circumstances that people believed led
Speaker 1: to somebody else developing or transmitting pocs.
Speaker 3: They absolutely understood the sexual connection. It was a different
Speaker 3: kind of connection than what we have in our minds.
Speaker 3: So we have in our minds you have sex with
Speaker 3: someone who has an STI and you contracted. They had
Speaker 3: a much more complex understanding of the role of sex
Speaker 3: within just daily life, and so it wasn't necessarily just
Speaker 3: sex with an infected person.
Speaker 2: It could have been.
Speaker 3: Too much sex, or the wrong kind of sex, or
Speaker 3: not the kind of activity that is healthy for your
Speaker 3: particular constitution. So it was a much more kind of
Speaker 3: complicated interaction. And then layered on top of that, there
Speaker 3: was also this belief that you could get this disease.
Speaker 2: From non sexual interaction.
Speaker 3: So there were two kind of forms of this disease,
Speaker 3: and I'm saying disease as if it's this one thing
Speaker 3: and it's just this kind of collection of symptoms. One
Speaker 3: was what we might have in our minds, and this
Speaker 3: is what they called the great pox, a true pox
Speaker 3: is what they called it. And this is a more
Speaker 3: severe form of venereal disease that you would get from
Speaker 3: penetrative sex. And then there's this milder form, and that's
Speaker 3: where we see words like clap and gnarrhea, which are
Speaker 3: not kind of one to one. They don't correlate to
Speaker 3: what we think of when we say those words today.
Speaker 3: This was considered to be a milder form of the disease,
Speaker 3: and you could get it from sharing a drink, a glass,
Speaker 3: you could get it from there's one example I found
Speaker 3: where someone shares a glove with somebody, or you can
Speaker 3: get it from share a bed, and just like sweating
Speaker 3: in the sheets. So the idea was that this milder
Speaker 3: form of the disease you got from spreading pockey matters
Speaker 3: what they called it, and that could be from sexual activity,
Speaker 3: but it could also be from these non sexual activities.
Speaker 3: And then to make it even more complicated, another way
Speaker 3: you could get that mild form of the disease is
Speaker 3: through not the spread of pocky matter, but just from
Speaker 3: trauma to your genitals. So there's one man who talks
Speaker 3: about falling off his horse and getting a clap, and
Speaker 3: another case I found where someone talks about getting hit
Speaker 3: in the groin with a stone and he gets the clap.
Speaker 3: So I think the modern mind is like, wait, well,
Speaker 3: what did he really have? And I don't know. I
Speaker 3: just don't know. Maybe who knows. We'll never know. But
Speaker 3: it gets very complicated when you especially when I was
Speaker 3: looking at court records, where all of a sudden, the
Speaker 3: difference between getting this disease from a stone versus someone
Speaker 3: sexually assaulting you is huge, Right, That's a felony versus
Speaker 3: a misdemeanor versus nothing. So it becomes really important in
Speaker 3: certain contexts to kind of parse these types of diseases.
Speaker 1: In your book, you describe the pos as seeming modern
Speaker 1: for its moment, and you call it the first modern disease.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me more about what you mean by
Speaker 1: the first modern disease and how this perception is kind
Speaker 1: of reflected in writing from the time.
Speaker 3: I use that word to kind of capture the way
Speaker 3: we think of disease, and I think it's something that
Speaker 3: we take for granted that a disease is a biological
Speaker 3: entity that affects all of us more or less the
Speaker 3: same way. So if you and I both are given
Speaker 3: the same diagnosis, will probably manifest the same set of symptoms.
Speaker 3: If you and I have the same set of symptoms,
Speaker 3: we'll probably be diagnosed with the same disease. That this
Speaker 3: idea that diseases are fixed, that they are all affecting
Speaker 3: all bodies more or less similarly, and that they are
Speaker 3: treated and progressed more or less similarly. This is a
Speaker 3: modern concept that's born in the nineteenth century. So this
Speaker 3: book that I wrote is before any of that. It's
Speaker 3: way before germs, the discovery of germs and germ theory.
Speaker 3: But it's also before this kind of conceptual what I
Speaker 3: would call revolution in thinking about diseases as stable, uniform entities.
Speaker 3: So this time period, diseases, like we've been talking about,
Speaker 3: they're fluid, they're a group of symptoms. You and I
Speaker 3: could have the same symptoms and get completely different diagnoses.
Speaker 3: Because you are in Denver and I am in Boston
Speaker 3: and you live near a swamp and I don't, or whatever,
Speaker 3: you had oatmeal for breakfast, whatever, right, Like, any number
Speaker 3: of factors will be given completely different diagnoses and will
Speaker 3: have completely different treatments. So this time period, this pre
Speaker 3: modern era, diseases are fluid, they're individual, and they just
Speaker 3: are symptom based, so they're very subjectively understood. And so
Speaker 3: when I say this is the first modern day disease,
Speaker 3: what I found in doing this research is that this
Speaker 3: venereal disease looks more like our modern that kind of
Speaker 3: post nineteenth century way of thinking about disease. And it's
Speaker 3: not because of some revolutionary idea about disease progression or
Speaker 3: some discovery of a bacteria or some kind of medical breakthrough.
Speaker 3: It's just because the disease was so shameful, and that
Speaker 3: it's the shame of the disease that leads healers, for example,
Speaker 3: to look to bodies in ways that look bizarrely modern,
Speaker 3: looking for patterns across bodies and ways that we don't
Speaker 3: see until much much later in the nineteenth century, or
Speaker 3: because of the shame of shopping for a cure, patients
Speaker 3: look to over the counter cures, these kind of one
Speaker 3: size fits all treatments that again are kind of out
Speaker 3: of step with time.
Speaker 2: So by looking in these.
Speaker 3: Kind of non medical places, the kind of composite image
Speaker 3: of the disease that I was able to piece together
Speaker 3: looks more like a ninety teenth century kind of like
Speaker 3: a modern disease then the other diseases of that moment.
Speaker 3: And that's because of the stigma, not because of the science.
Speaker 1: I was just thinking about this the other day, how
Speaker 1: this huge transition into putting diseases into boxes, standardizing them. Everyone,
Speaker 1: as you said, has the same signs and symptoms, has
Speaker 1: the same diagnosis, has the same treatment, and is expected
Speaker 1: to have the same.
Speaker 2: Disease, you know, progression course.
Speaker 1: And I feel like now we're finally like in modern
Speaker 1: medicine today or like cutting edge is like it's all
Speaker 1: about precision medicine, it's all about seeing each individual.
Speaker 3: And so we've almost in a way come full circle totally.
Speaker 3: They're so that's why I love studying this time period.
Speaker 3: It's so unfamiliar, and yet the parallels are so mind blowing.
Speaker 3: I mean, I think it's absolutely we have this kind
Speaker 3: of tailored medicine today that in many ways almost mirrors
Speaker 3: the kind of clinical encounters that I'm finding in this
Speaker 3: pre modern era.
Speaker 2: And the same with the market.
Speaker 3: Right, I was talking about those advertisements and making that map.
Speaker 3: What was so interesting making that map, What I found was, Oh,
Speaker 3: these cures were sold everywhere. There was not like a
Speaker 3: neighborhood where you would go get one of these cures.
Speaker 3: They were sold everywhere, and they were sold out of
Speaker 3: these anonymous non medical places, bookstores, bakeries, chocolate chops. And
Speaker 3: to me, coming back to this point about parallels to today,
Speaker 3: it's almost like the leading edge of what we've achieved
Speaker 3: today where you can just be in your pajamas online,
Speaker 3: purchase whatever embarrassing thing you want to purchase, and no
Speaker 3: one will ever know. And it's like we have achieved
Speaker 3: the ultimate anonymous shopping experience. But we see this very
Speaker 3: early history of it in the sixteen hundreds.
Speaker 2: Let's take a quick break here.
Speaker 1: We'll be back before you know it. Welcome back, everyone,
Speaker 1: I'm here chatting with the wonderful doctor Olivia Wiser about
Speaker 1: her book The Dreaded Pox. Let's get into some more questions.
Speaker 1: It was anonymous out of necessity, right, because of this
Speaker 1: disease was so shameful, And I just kept thinking about
Speaker 1: how the doctors that were handing out these diagnoses held
Speaker 1: this tremendous amount of power in the knowledge that they had,
Speaker 1: and just to kind of get a perspective on what
Speaker 1: that power was or how impactful this diagnosis could be.
Speaker 1: If someone's diagnosis was made public, what kinds of consequences
Speaker 1: might they face, and how did that differ based on
Speaker 1: things like their initial social standing, or their gender, or
Speaker 1: their race, Like how did all of these things kind
Speaker 1: of combine and to be like, the consequences are different
Speaker 1: for each individual person.
Speaker 3: It mattered more for women than for men, for sure,
Speaker 3: And it comes back to what we were talking about earlier
Speaker 3: about blame. There was a double standard in this society.
Speaker 3: It was a deeply patriarchal society, and a woman's reputation
Speaker 3: was intimately tied up in her sexual reputation. So a
Speaker 3: diagnosis of this disease, if you're a married woman, there
Speaker 3: would be suspicions of adultery. If you were a servant,
Speaker 3: let's say, an unmarried single woman working in someone's home
Speaker 3: as a servant.
Speaker 2: You would probably lose your job.
Speaker 3: And there's a case that I talk about at length
Speaker 3: in the book. That's exactly exactly what happens a servant.
Speaker 3: She's suspected of having this disease. She's a caretaker of
Speaker 3: small children in the home of merchant, and the children
Speaker 3: end up getting this venereal disease, and the doctor who
Speaker 3: comes decides there's nothing sexual, there's nothing on tooward happening here,
Speaker 3: just it's one of those mild forms of the disease
Speaker 3: that she spreads to the children by sharing a bed
Speaker 3: with them through pocking matter. So she's sweating in the
Speaker 3: bed and somehow they're getting the disease. But the problem
Speaker 3: is she has it. She has the pox, and she
Speaker 3: denies it, and they finally confront her and they find
Speaker 3: hidden under her bed a box full of medicines that
Speaker 3: are just for the pox, that are very clearly for
Speaker 3: the pox. They're made of mercury and ingredients that you
Speaker 3: obviously use to treat this disorder. And she's basically succumbs
Speaker 3: to all the pressure and is like, okay, you got me, Yes,
Speaker 3: I am poxed, and she she loses her job. So
Speaker 3: there are absolutely severe repercussions for a diagnosis. And the
Speaker 3: flip side is if you're a man and you're diagnosed.
Speaker 2: It's not a big.
Speaker 1: Deal, right, It's like, well, this wasn't your fault.
Speaker 2: We understand. It happens to everyone. Boys will be boys,
Speaker 2: Boys will be boys. Yeah, good stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know, speaking of I think another part of this,
Speaker 1: you know, boys will be boys, different consequences for different genders.
Speaker 2: You explore what happens in the short.
Speaker 1: And long term with the diagnosis of pox with two
Speaker 1: individuals Betty and John, these hypothetical kind of people who
Speaker 1: have a brief sexual encounter at Bartholomew Fair and which
Speaker 1: results in John getting the pox. Can you tell me
Speaker 1: more about Betty and John and how they might have
Speaker 1: found themselves at the fair? What would have happened Immediately after?
Speaker 1: I loved this little thought experiment of walking through what
Speaker 1: happens to these two people after this.
Speaker 3: Encounter, I discovered Betty, who is a fictional character from
Speaker 3: a ballad. So these are songs that were typically sung
Speaker 3: in taverns like drink basically drinking songs. They were pinned
Speaker 3: up in coffee houses and taverns, and they were set
Speaker 3: to music. And I searched through the ballads to try
Speaker 3: to find out how does vineeral disease come up in
Speaker 3: these songs, and I found the story of Betty, who's
Speaker 3: a prostitute who's plying her trade at the Bartholomew Fair,
Speaker 3: which is this annual cloth fair in the north of
Speaker 3: London every August. So I kind of did something that
Speaker 3: is a little controversial among historians, which is I took
Speaker 3: this document and I kind of extrapolated from it and
Speaker 3: made up a story using actual historical sources. So I
Speaker 3: used medical cases and account books and letters to kind
Speaker 3: of piece together what would it have been like to
Speaker 3: be John, this fictional person I made up.
Speaker 2: Well, I didn't make him up.
Speaker 3: He was in the ballad who's infected by a prostitute
Speaker 3: at the fair. So there is a lot of historical
Speaker 3: kind of evidence undergirding what I'm doing, but it is
Speaker 3: a fictional story, and I just, you know, John in
Speaker 3: the ballad is described as this country roof.
Speaker 2: This guy, this young guy is like in the.
Speaker 3: Big city for the fair, trying to you know, have
Speaker 3: a couple of fun days where he buys a bunch
Speaker 3: of trinkets to bring home to his family. And the
Speaker 3: thought experiment I do is, first of all, I looked
Speaker 3: at maps and I tried to figure out like, Okay,
Speaker 3: how would he enter the city? What would he have
Speaker 3: seen and smelled when he came into the city. What
Speaker 3: would it have been like for this guy to show
Speaker 3: up at this fair, which was a pretty chaotic, overwhelming
Speaker 3: place full of stimuli, where he's probably seeing things he's
Speaker 3: never seen before, Venetian women walking on tightropes or playing pipes,
Speaker 3: or rides and.
Speaker 2: Food and smells.
Speaker 3: So I tried to kind of imagine what it would
Speaker 3: have been like to be him, and then also the
Speaker 3: flip side, what it would have been like to be Betty,
Speaker 3: this woman who was probably living in a precarious situation.
Speaker 3: She probably lived in a home with other women who
Speaker 3: were selling their bodies to make ends meet. How she
Speaker 3: would have approached him. They probably went behind a tent.
Speaker 3: So I kind of just tried to imagine what it
Speaker 3: would be like to do this, and then the you know,
Speaker 3: the repercussions of it, like John realizing that he was
Speaker 3: infected and that he loses all of his money, right,
Speaker 3: so she picks his pocket as they're doing the deed,
Speaker 3: which comes up again and again in ballads, So and
Speaker 3: then I kind of just imagine, like, Okay, well, what
Speaker 3: symptom would have had first, probably it would have burned
Speaker 3: when he went to the bathroom, and he probably would
Speaker 3: have seen something in his underwear, and what would it
Speaker 3: have looked like? So then I tried to kind of
Speaker 3: look to medical text to piece together what people said
Speaker 3: it looked like, what did your excretions look like? It
Speaker 3: gets pretty grizzly, I.
Speaker 2: Mean it does.
Speaker 1: It was also so fascinating to think of, like how
Speaker 1: much would he have known beforehand about what to look for,
Speaker 1: or the questions to ask, or if he would have
Speaker 1: had to consult like a dear friend to be like, hey, man,
Speaker 1: have you ever seen anything like this? I've got something
Speaker 1: going on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it was called the secret disease that
Speaker 3: you meant. You mentioned that name in part because secrets
Speaker 3: was slang for genitals, so women's genitals were called.
Speaker 2: Her secrets like privates. Yeah, exactly exactly.
Speaker 3: But it was also called a secret disease because people
Speaker 3: didn't want to talk about it and it was shameful,
Speaker 3: and it was also secretive, like it was the great beguiler.
Speaker 3: Like you, it could be your symptoms could be chalked
Speaker 3: up to completely different disorders. If that's what you wanted.
Speaker 3: So a lot of people did consult their friends and
Speaker 3: kind of ask around and read They're these all these
Speaker 3: books that exist at the time that are basically like
Speaker 3: this is how you tell whether or not you're clapped,
Speaker 3: or whether or not you might have a more innocuous
Speaker 3: disease like the whites, which is basically a pre modern
Speaker 3: yeast infection, but it can look like a clap. So
Speaker 3: there's like medical texts, popular medical books that people would
Speaker 3: probably not very many people could afford to purchase, but
Speaker 3: maybe you would borrow or access or purchase if they
Speaker 3: could afford it to try to parse out these symptoms.
Speaker 3: And there was a whole industry around this question.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean absolutely there was.
Speaker 1: And so let's say that you know, John self diagnoses
Speaker 1: or has a friend gives him advice and says, you know,
Speaker 1: I think you I think this is what you've got.
Speaker 1: You've got the poxman. Where does he go next? Like,
Speaker 1: as you said, you've got these these advertisements where you
Speaker 1: can get a clap cure pox treatment all over the city.
Speaker 1: Like where would he see these advertisements? How would that
Speaker 1: knowledge get to him? And then how would he find
Speaker 1: the right one for him?
Speaker 3: So if it really depends on how much money you have.
Speaker 3: So if you're very poor, you have nothing, you wouldn't
Speaker 3: be able to buy anything, you wouldn't be able to
Speaker 3: hire somebody, so you would probably go to what was
Speaker 3: called a pox hospital, a pretty punishing, unpleasant place. We
Speaker 3: know a lot about pox hospitals because hospitals have a
Speaker 3: lot of records, so we have like pretty amazing histories
Speaker 3: about these institutions. And then if you're really well off,
Speaker 3: you would probably hire somebody. You would probably hire a
Speaker 3: surgeon or a healer, or just like someone random without
Speaker 3: any credentials who claims they can heal this disease. You
Speaker 3: might move into their house, maybe because you want to
Speaker 3: undergo a lengthy treatment that causes a lot of conspicuous
Speaker 3: side effects sweating, spitting, and you don't want to do
Speaker 3: that in public, so you might move into their home.
Speaker 3: Maybe they have a sweat bath, a bathing house you
Speaker 3: can use, or and this person would tailor customize their
Speaker 3: treatment plan just for you, just for your bodily constitution,
Speaker 3: your situation, your symptoms.
Speaker 2: That would be very expensive.
Speaker 3: So then there's everybody else, And I decided John was
Speaker 3: in the everybody else category. He's new to the city.
Speaker 3: He probably doesn't have a lot of money. Well, he
Speaker 3: has no money because she picked his pockets, so he
Speaker 3: is kind of lumped in with everyone else, which is
Speaker 3: the kind of the population I was trying to recover.
Speaker 3: We know the most about those two ends, the very
Speaker 3: poor and the very well off, because that's where they're
Speaker 3: the most sources. But everybody else would probably go to
Speaker 3: the bookstall, lining the Royal Exchange, or the apothecary shop,
Speaker 3: or the chocolate shop or wherever to try to get
Speaker 3: one of these.
Speaker 2: Over the counter cures.
Speaker 3: They're cheaper, they're more accessible, they're quicker, they're not as conspicuous,
Speaker 3: and they're just more accessible. And the chaos of the
Speaker 3: city can make the shame of the shopping experience not
Speaker 3: as big of a problem. And then there's people John
Speaker 3: wouldn't fit into this category. Then they're the people who
Speaker 3: would make their own cures at home, who would need
Speaker 3: to have not just the resources to do that, but
Speaker 3: the know how to do that, and it's complicated work.
Speaker 1: I want to talk more about these clap cures. These
Speaker 1: people who found themselves producing and selling these treatments. How
Speaker 1: did they find themselves designing and selling these treatments.
Speaker 3: Some of them say their secret recipes passed down from
Speaker 3: my grandfather, you know, they claim to have some sort
Speaker 3: of lineage. Others who are new to the city, because
Speaker 3: remember this is the time where there's just this huge
Speaker 3: influx of immigrants to the city to make money. This
Speaker 3: is a really growing urban area, claim oh, I learned
Speaker 3: this on an Italian warship, or I learned this from
Speaker 3: treating the Turkish emperor's brother. So they kind of claim
Speaker 3: to have foreign knowledge, exotic foreign knowledge. So they're all
Speaker 3: different ways people claim they get the knowledge to produce
Speaker 3: these things. At the end of the day, it seems
Speaker 3: like a lot of people were just making more or
Speaker 3: less the same stuff. Like I don't know what was
Speaker 3: in a lot of them because they don't say they're secretive.
Speaker 3: I don't know how different the different pills and tinctures
Speaker 3: that were being sold really were. But I do know
Speaker 3: from looking at what's what we do know about how
Speaker 3: they were made.
Speaker 2: They were horrifying.
Speaker 3: A lot of them had turpentine in them. A lot
Speaker 3: of them had mercury, which would cause that prodigious sweating.
Speaker 3: It would cause mercury poisoning. Right, would we know to
Speaker 3: be mercury poisoning. You would make your teeth fall out
Speaker 3: if you ingested it. You know, makes you spit a lot.
Speaker 3: So there's one person who said they spit. They salivated
Speaker 3: five pints a day if you and then it would
Speaker 3: also be used as an ointment as a solve, and
Speaker 3: you would rub it on your body and it would
Speaker 3: make you sweat. And the idea was this was logical
Speaker 3: within the day. The idea was, Oh, if you have
Speaker 3: stuff coming out, that's the poison, that's the venom coming out.
Speaker 2: That's good, that's healthful, this is good.
Speaker 3: So you know, we see it and we think that's
Speaker 3: a terrible idea, do not eat mercury and turpentine. But
Speaker 3: they had a really different medical logic.
Speaker 1: To show that, hey, this is doing something to you,
Speaker 1: therefore it must be doing the.
Speaker 3: Right thing to exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: Thinking about the number of advertisements that you found and
Speaker 1: this map that this beautiful map that you made, I
Speaker 1: just love it so much. I think it also just
Speaker 1: shows that it was a kind of a good business
Speaker 1: model to go into this. At twenty percent of a
Speaker 1: lifetime risk of developing venereal disease, that means a lot
Speaker 1: of cures are going to be sold.
Speaker 2: Yes, and I think that, you know, we know this
Speaker 2: to be true.
Speaker 3: Like a lot of people had this disease and a
Speaker 3: lot of people got in on the game to treat
Speaker 3: it because you could make money doing it. It was
Speaker 3: and a lot of the ways these guys who were
Speaker 3: selling these cures were trying to kind of compete with
Speaker 3: each other is they would accuse each other of greed,
Speaker 3: of doing exactly what you're saying, just Oh, you're just
Speaker 3: a cobbler. You don't have a medical background, you don't
Speaker 3: have a secret tincture that was passed down to you
Speaker 3: from your grandfather like me. You're just like a tinker
Speaker 3: who's trying to get in on the game. So they
Speaker 3: knew that, and they use that as you know, a
Speaker 3: way of kind of fighting with each other.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, I mean competition must have been quite stifferent,
Speaker 1: and with so many different people out there, you had
Speaker 1: to stand out in some way or another. But then
Speaker 1: there was also, as you said, this flip side of
Speaker 1: people who were making home remedies based off of recipes.
Speaker 1: What do these recipes look like not in terms of
Speaker 1: like what ingredients were there, but where were they found,
Speaker 1: what types of books or were they just scraps of paper?
Speaker 1: How would someone come across this knowledge.
Speaker 3: These were found in what were called recipe books, and
Speaker 3: we think of cooking recipes when you use the word recipe,
Speaker 3: but these recipe books would usually be combinations of cookery, medicine,
Speaker 3: and cosmetics. Sometimes they would be organized, sometimes they'd be
Speaker 3: all one of those three categories.
Speaker 2: Sometimes they would be a mix.
Speaker 3: And they were basically very practical how to guides, and
Speaker 3: they'd be organized. Sometimes they'd be indexed. So these were
Speaker 3: incredibly valuable books. There were collections of domestic knowledge of
Speaker 3: non learned, everyday household medical knowledge, and cookery and cosmetics,
Speaker 3: and they were passed down.
Speaker 2: They were valued possessions. They were often bequeathed to kin
Speaker 2: and you can see.
Speaker 3: In the handwriting of them the layers of people who
Speaker 3: passed down these documents and amended them. You can see
Speaker 3: the handwriting change, or people write in the margin, this
Speaker 3: didn't work, or I tried this, or changing the quantities
Speaker 3: or the ingredients, so you can kind of see it
Speaker 3: in the handwriting and the crossing outs over time. Oftentimes
Speaker 3: we don't know who wrote them or who the original
Speaker 3: compiler is, so it can be a little confusing, but
Speaker 3: there are tons of these that exist in archives, and
Speaker 3: I just started going through them and looking for Okay,
Speaker 3: we're people treating themselves at home for this really stigmatizing disease.
Speaker 3: Do we see recipes? And we do, there are lots
Speaker 3: of them.
Speaker 1: You touched a bit on this in terms of who
Speaker 1: would be able to go out and buy a cure
Speaker 1: versus treat at home, but who did have the resources
Speaker 1: and then know how who had these access to these
Speaker 1: recipe books to make these at home remedies.
Speaker 3: What I love about recipe books is it's one of
Speaker 3: the places, at least in the history of medicine in
Speaker 3: the pre modern era, where we see a lot of
Speaker 3: women writing. So it's harder to find a lot of
Speaker 3: women practitioners. We know there were a lot of female practitioners,
Speaker 3: but they didn't keep case books in the great numbers
Speaker 3: the same way men male practitioners did, so it's just
Speaker 3: harder to find historical evidence of female practitioners writing things down.
Speaker 3: Recipe books are one of these places where there's just
Speaker 3: a lot written by women. There's a lot of recipes
Speaker 3: by men too. It's not an all female genre by
Speaker 3: any means, but we get more women writing about medical
Speaker 3: practice than we get otherwise, and a lot of these
Speaker 3: women A you need to be literate, so that means
Speaker 3: it's by default the highest levels of society. Right, if
Speaker 3: you're impoverished, if you're barely making ends meet, if you're
Speaker 3: Betty at the fair selling sex, you're not going to
Speaker 3: probably have a recipe book or keep a recipe book.
Speaker 3: So these are pretty middling to upper status women who
Speaker 3: have the time and the literacy skills and the resources
Speaker 3: because to make these recipes, they are not They are
Speaker 3: no joke. They are complicated and very technical and in
Speaker 3: many ways not that different from what you would buy
Speaker 3: at the bookshop or what you would get if you
Speaker 3: hired a healer and lived at his house for three weeks.
Speaker 3: They require sometimes equipment, glassware, cookware, and this was a
Speaker 3: time when people didn't have a lot of stuff, so
Speaker 3: it wasn't nothing. And then you had to source all
Speaker 3: the ingredients, which could be hard to get. So I
Speaker 3: think we in our minds think, oh, well, surely you
Speaker 3: grow them in you're a garden, And yes, you could
Speaker 3: grow if you had a garden, right we're talking about
Speaker 3: urban London. But if you did have a garden. You
Speaker 3: could probably grow a lot of these things that you
Speaker 3: needed for these recipes, but you also probably had to
Speaker 3: go out into the city and source some pretty hard
Speaker 3: to get ingredients. Some of them required amber grease from whales,
Speaker 3: some required gold dust, So this was not just something
Speaker 3: any old person could do.
Speaker 1: A lot of this diagnosis, it seems to be self diagnosed.
Speaker 1: People were recognize symptoms in themselves and then saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: I think I have this, I'm going to go find
Speaker 1: treatment myself. But then there were some people who consulted
Speaker 1: or who had accessed or were able to consult a physician,
Speaker 1: and it was very striking and not surprising necessarily, I think,
Speaker 1: given the time, But like how physicians almost seem to
Speaker 1: operate on the basis of assuming that their patient was
Speaker 1: lying about what was going on. Can you tell me
Speaker 1: more about what that experience would be like from a
Speaker 1: patient perspective, who goes and consults with a doctor about
Speaker 1: symptoms of venereal disease that they're not sure what they are.
Speaker 3: It's hard to say what was going on in patient's
Speaker 3: minds because of course, we only have the writing from
Speaker 3: the other side, right, We only have the practitioners writing.
Speaker 3: So it's a fun thought experiment, and my guess is
Speaker 3: that often they legitimately didn't know what they had, and
Speaker 3: I think more often they did know, and they were
Speaker 3: trying to get and I don't want to say they
Speaker 3: were lying, but they were trying to get the most
Speaker 3: out of the situation. And that could be to try
Speaker 3: to save face, or to save their reputation or say
Speaker 3: of their marriage or whatever. That could be just trying
Speaker 3: to get the treatment they thought they needed without the diagnosis.
Speaker 3: So you see this time and again of them of
Speaker 3: patients trying to kind of.
Speaker 2: Get a scurvy.
Speaker 3: It was usually scurvy because there was something about the
Speaker 3: symptoms that one could really easily be replaced by the other.
Speaker 3: Get the diagnosis that's innocuous, that doesn't have the shame,
Speaker 3: doesn't have the stigma, but that comes with the treatment
Speaker 3: that does the work of treating this. Because they're treating symptoms,
Speaker 3: right this is before the treatment of actual disease. So
Speaker 3: I think there is a little bit of truth to
Speaker 3: this sense that you get from reading the case books
Speaker 3: by practitioners that there is a little unreliability from the patients.
Speaker 3: But we can never know because it's all through the
Speaker 3: eyes of these practitioners who are very keen to make
Speaker 3: themselves look good.
Speaker 1: Right, which is then part of that is like, well,
Speaker 1: I am an excellent doctor because I saw past the
Speaker 1: patient's lies and their efforts to conceal exactly. We've touched
Speaker 1: on this a little bit throughout, and I want to
Speaker 1: end just by kind of asking more about these parallels
Speaker 1: that you have seen throughout researching for this, throughout your experience,
Speaker 1: you know, in this in this early modern London, what
Speaker 1: parallels you see between veneer disease then and disease now,
Speaker 1: or just medicine then and medicine now, and some of
Speaker 1: the things that you observed throughout this process.
Speaker 3: I think we already talked about the market forces, you
Speaker 3: know that this kind of early version of the capitalization
Speaker 3: of medicine. I think the biggest parallel I found. You know,
Speaker 3: I was writing this during COVID, most of it during
Speaker 3: the COVID times when it was pretty bleak, and I
Speaker 3: just kept thinking about stigma and shame. And I know,
Speaker 3: you know, COVID's not an STI It's really different, but
Speaker 3: there was stigma.
Speaker 2: There was this kind of.
Speaker 3: Like, well, were you wearing a mask, did you did
Speaker 3: you take a pc R? You know, like there were
Speaker 3: kind of assumptions people had about proper behavior, and so
Speaker 3: I did spend a lot of time thinking about, like
Speaker 3: how do we blame people for diagnoses, and like what
Speaker 3: does it mean to have to get that positive test
Speaker 3: back and think like, oh, man, I should have done
Speaker 3: this differently, or it was my fault.
Speaker 2: I didn't do the right thing.
Speaker 3: So I think I make a lot of connections to
Speaker 3: HIV in the in the book, I think because it's
Speaker 3: just the most obvious parallel for me thinking historically about
Speaker 3: STIs and shame and silencing and how shameful diseases silence suffers.
Speaker 3: You know, the famous activism of the aid's movement in
Speaker 3: the eighties was silence equals death. And I don't want to,
Speaker 3: you know, glibly compare the pox in the seventeen hundreds
Speaker 3: and sixteen hundreds to HIV, because there's immense differences. But
Speaker 3: I think that role of shame in silencing us and
Speaker 3: the work of recovering everyday lives of like how we
Speaker 3: cope with shameful diseases is a transhistorical truth something that
Speaker 3: you know, I'm reading these people's letters suffering from these
Speaker 3: diagnoses and how am I going to you know, tell
Speaker 3: my family, what am I going to do? And hiding
Speaker 3: in the spa town to get treated in secret, And
Speaker 3: it does feel like there are these kinds of connections
Speaker 3: to that kind of suffering, that shamefulness and silencing that
Speaker 3: we see in nineteen eighties New York or today. There
Speaker 3: are many parallels that I that I saw doing this work.
Speaker 3: And I think that's the cool thing about studying this
Speaker 3: time period is it's so different from ours, it's so unfamiliar,
Speaker 3: and yet there are these parallels that kind of shine through,
Speaker 3: and it gives us kind of the clarity for thinking
Speaker 3: about the world we live in.
Speaker 1: Some things being timeless in some ways, and the shame
Speaker 1: of disease regardless of the type. But you know, I
Speaker 1: know that some disease carries with it more shame than others.
Speaker 1: But I just want to thank you so much for
Speaker 1: such a fascinating book, such a wonderful conversation. It has
Speaker 1: been so enlightening to chat with you and get more
Speaker 1: into the nitty gritty of venereal disease.
Speaker 2: So thank you, Thank you so much. I appreciate this.
Speaker 2: This is really fun.
Speaker 1: A big thank you again to doctor Olivia Wiser for
Speaker 1: taking the time to chat with me. If you enjoyed
Speaker 1: today's episode and would like to learn more, check out
Speaker 1: our website this podcast will kill You dot com. We're
Speaker 1: I'll post a link to where you can find the
Speaker 1: dreaded pos Sex and Disease in Early modern London, as
Speaker 1: well as a link to doctor Wiser's website where you
Speaker 1: can find her other incredible work. And don't forget you
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