Michelle McPhee

But it's also before this kind of conceptual, what I would call, revolution in thinking about diseases as stable, uniform entities.

So this time period, diseases like we've been talking about, they're fluid, they're a group of symptoms.

You and I could have the same symptoms and get completely different diagnoses because you are in Denver and I am in Boston and you live near a swamp and I don't or whatever.

You had oatmeal for breakfast, whatever, right?

Like any number of factors.

we'll be given completely different diagnoses and we'll have completely different treatments.

So this time period, this pre-modern era, diseases are fluid, they're individual, and they just are symptom-based.

So they're very subjectively understood.

And so when I say this is the first modern disease, what I found in doing this research is that this venereal disease looks more like our modern, that kind of post-19th century disease.

way of thinking about disease.

And it's not because of some revolutionary idea about disease progression or some discovery of a bacteria or some kind of medical breakthrough.

It's just because the disease was so shameful and that it's the shame of the disease that leads healers, for example, to look to bodies in ways that look bizarrely modern.

looking for patterns across bodies in ways that we don't see until much, much later in the 19th century.

Or because of the shame of shopping for a cure, patients look to over-the-counter cures, these kind of one-size-fits-all treatments that, again, are kind of out of step with time.

So by looking in these kind of non-medical places, the kind of composite image of the

looks more like a 19th century, kind of like a modern disease than the other diseases of that moment.

And that's because of the stigma, not because of the science.

Totally.

That's why I love studying this time period.

It's so unfamiliar, and yet the parallels are so mind-blowing.