Chapter 1: What were the most feared diseases in early modern London?
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Chapter 2: How was syphilis perceived in society during this time?
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Chapter 3: What sources did Dr. Weiser use to research syphilis?
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Chapter 4: How did people in London seek cures for syphilis?
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Londoners in the 17th and 18th centuries were no strangers to infectious disease. Plague, tuberculosis, typhus, measles, and smallpox all reared their pestilential heads at some point or another. But alongside these well-known and highly broadcast afflictions lurked another disease, so feared and so stigmatized that it was sometimes known as the secret disease.
Chapter 5: What role did gender play in the stigma of syphilis?
We know it today as syphilis. Syphilis, or the pox as it was also called, was among the most feared diagnoses in early modern London. not just because there were no effective cures and it could lead to painful sores or even death. If your pox infection became public knowledge, you would likely face deep stigma and shame. You may even be ostracized from your friends and family.
With so much at stake, it's no wonder people went to great lengths to manage or conceal their condition. In The Dreaded Pox, Sex and Disease in Early Modern London, author Dr. Olivia Weiser, associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, peels back the curtain on the most intimate facets of Londoners' lives centuries ago.
Drawing from a wide variety of sources, from court records to recipe books, pox cure advertisements to personal diaries, Dr. Weiser transports readers back in time to the dirty streets of London. Where might an impoverished maid seek help for her infection? How might a gentleman choose between the many ready-made concoctions in the city's alleys?
Chapter 6: How did syphilis affect social standing and relationships?
Who were behind these lauded tinctures and ointments that provided nothing more than hope? The dreaded pox is a fascinating glimpse into the daily lives of early modern Londoners as they navigated a world where sex and shame were so deeply entangled.
While today we have more scientific knowledge and the ability to treat and cure many sexually transmitted infections, that world is still familiar to us in many ways, which leads us to ask how far we have actually come and how much further we still need to go. I had such a great time chatting with Dr. Weiser, and I'm so excited to share our conversation with you all.
So let's just take a quick break and get right into it.
So
Dr. Weiser, thank you so much for joining me today.
Thanks for having me.
I cannot wait to dive into the world of venereal disease in the London of past centuries with you. It's going to be a great time.
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Chapter 7: What parallels exist between historical and modern views of STIs?
And I'm curious, though, could you tell me what drew you to this area and this era of scholarship?
A lot of people know that there was a ton of venereal disease in this time period. So this was a rampant disease. And we know a lot about the disease because just so many people seem to be affected by it. There are some historians who predict that if you were a grown-up living in London in the 1700s, you would have up to a 20% chance of getting infected, which is an astounding number. Yeah.
I don't know whether that's true. I trust them, but it's just appalling how prevalent this disease was. So we know a lot about the disease. We know a lot less about what it was like to live with it.
Chapter 8: How does Dr. Weiser's research shed light on contemporary issues?
So that was kind of the historical problem that I faced. What was it like to endure this disease? What was it like just for a normal person living in the city? And so the answer to kind of do that work, I tried to look in non-medical places. So I tried to look outside hospitals, outside.
I did look in consultation rooms, but I tried to look in everyday sites in the city to try to recover just lived experiences with this disease. And what I ended up writing was a book that's as much about the history of a city as it is about the history of a disease.
Which is what I love so much about it. You really transport readers to this era before germ theory, where London is growing at such a rapid pace and sex is changing. All of these different components are changing, but also at the same time, we have these sentiments of shame and secrecy that surround not only sex, but then of course anything that's tied to sex, including this disease.
And we've been talking about this disease. What is pox? What could pox be used to describe or label in terms of our modern classifications of disease?
It's a great question and one that I get a lot. And my easy answer, if it's really helpful to have some sort of modern disease equivalent in your head thinking about this topic, my easy answer is syphilis. It's most likely that's the disease we're talking about. The more kind of historically accurate answer is it could be any number of STIs. What we would call STIs.
So, you know, you think chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis. It could be any of those. And they used this term venereal disease as this umbrella category that was expansive. So all of these, what we now differentiate as different STIs were kind of all STIs. encompassed within that one term.
They, in the past, pre-derm theory, like you mentioned, they didn't differentiate these categories the way we do. But it can be helpful to kind of have that in your mind to just think about like, what was happening to these people's bodies? You know, like what were they, what were their symptoms? What were they enduring?
You talked about how pox was, or venereal disease, was so common in this era. I mean, like 20% possible lifetime risk, which is mind-blowing, again. Why was it so high? Like, how was sex changing in London during the 17th and 18th centuries?
A lot of historians of sexuality have argued that sex was changing a lot, that people have used the word revolution, like a sexual revolution in this time period. And there is a lot of evidence that sex was changing, that people were just having more sex outside of marriage. There was many, there's much more evidence of men having sex with other men.
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