Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society The Horrible History of Gonorrhoea About this episode Possibly the first recorded sexually transmitted disease, gonorrhoea is still one of the most common.
We're back on the itchier side of history today to find out more about the story of this difficult-to-spell affliction.
Kate is back with Cat Irving, Human Remains Conservator for Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh. Together they discuss the odd and off-putting treatments offered for gonorrhoea over the centuries.
This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
If you'd like to get in touch with the show you can contact us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] .
Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.
You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK.
All music from Epidemic Sounds.
Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.
Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:37 Speaker 01 Finding the right size rug can be hard. Enter Ernesta. Designer-quality, custom-sized rugs, cut to the exact size of your room and delivered in as little as two weeks. Not sure of the size or the material? Start with five samples for just $10 today to see them in your own light and match to your decor. Plus, get $50 toward any rug of your choice. Visit ernesta.com today. That's E-R-N-E-S-T-A dot com.
1:05 Speaker 02 Hey, it's Hannah Berner from Giggly Squad and the holidays are around the corner, which means I'm officially entering my Hostess Hannah era with Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. You guys know I love cats and fostering, but when I'm hosting, I do not want my house smelling like cats. I want people focusing on my hosting skills. That's why I love Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. It delivers long-lasting odor control and forms compact clumps that make cleanup easy, so that's one less thing I need to worry about when people come over. Be guest-ready with Arm & Hammer Cat Litter. Find it now at Walmart or Amazon.
1:37 Speaker 03 Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera. Demonic possessions. Cursed mirrors. Bigfoot. Poltergeists. Exorcisms. Near-death experiences. Unsolved mysteries. Missing persons. Each week, we explore the deepest, Darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.
2:14 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. This is Betwixt the Sheets. I am me, you are you, and I bet you know what's coming next. Here it is, the fair do's warning. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. We are actually talking today about the history of gonorrhea. Okay, so it's a spicy one, but really, this is more of a stomach warning. Like, if you are listening to this and you're about to have, you know, some cheese on toast or possibly a pizza or a pasta dish, I don't think that this is going to go very well with it. So I would just give us a miss if I were you, or at least finish the food first. Right, on with the show.
3:02 Kate Lister? A battle is burning, literally burning, across the world. The enemy has brought down many armies, indiscriminately scandalized communities for centuries, and generally wrought havoc. And now, it's getting even stronger to the one weapon we have that can defeat it. That's right, it's gonorrhea.
3:30 Speaker 04 What are you, a funny man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
3:35 Speaker 05 I make perfect compliments of whatever my boss needs by just turning him up and pushing his butt.
3:47 Speaker 04 Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
3:50 Speaker 06 Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derek.
3:58 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheet, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Cases of the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea are surging across the world. In Europe, there has been an increase of more than 300% since 2014. And to make that even scarier, gonorrhea is now becoming antibiotic resistant. There's only one antibiotic left that works, and that's starting to fail us. That is some scary shit right there. But when was gonorrhea first recorded? How long has it been with us? Why do we call it the clap? And what bonkers treatments have been used to try and get rid
4:40 Kate Lister? of it over the years? Well, we are going to find out today with returning guest and all round badass, Cat Irving, the human remains conservator from Edinburgh's Surgeon Hall Museum. All right, let's get those gloves on and get into it.
4:58 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheet. It's only Cat Irving. How are you doing?
5:04 Speaker 07 I'm very well. How are you, Kate?
5:06 Kate Lister? I am doing fabulously. The last time I saw you, we bumped into each other at an airport, didn't we?
5:10 Speaker 07 Yeah, Naples Airport, an ungodly hour in the morning.
5:14 Kate Lister? I was so tired that day. I half thought that you might have been some kind of sleep deprived hallucination, just wandered through the airport.
5:22 Speaker 07 I don't think I'd done anything to my hair or sort of like, you know, washed makeup out of my face at that point. So, you know, it wasn't a good time for me.
5:29 Kate Lister? You looked fabulous to me. But had I been a bit more all together and not running empty, I might well have sat you down and spoken to you about the very topic we're talking about today, which is the history of gonorrhea. Just, our listeners, just tell us about some of the work that you do so they know who you are, because it's so interesting and so fabulous.
5:49 Speaker 07 Well, I am a human remains conservator. I work at Surgeon's Hall Museums in Edinburgh, where I look after a collection of about 10,000 human remains, which ranges from full skeletons down to teeny tiny erosicles and literally everything in between. And a lot of these show various types of diseases. And that's how I became very, very interested in a lot of different types of pathologies and how it presents itself on the body.
6:15 Kate Lister? It's an amazing museum. We were doing some filming up there with History Hit and it was all they could do to actually get me in front of the camera and actually do the proper work because I was just running around. I just wanted to look at everything. I was like, there's, there's a leg over here with a bullet in it. Somebody's ear is, oh my God. It's absolutely wild. But we're talking about gonorrhea today. So I suppose the first thing I should ask you is a really starter question. What is it? What is gonorrhea?
6:40 Speaker 07 Gonorrhoea is a sexually transmitted disease. It's been around for a long time. I mean, there are thought that there's a mention of gonorrhea in the Bible. And the Lord spake unto Moses and to Aaron, saying, speak to the children of Israel and say to them, when a man hath a running issue out of his flesh, because of his issue, he is unclean. And so some people have suggested that the running issue is gonorrhea. Because one of the symptoms of gonorrhea in a man is that you produce pus out of your penis. So they thought that that's what they were talking about here.
7:16 Kate Lister? Wow.
7:16 Speaker 07 And Galen, a doctor from about 200 AD, he actually gives us the term gonorrhea. And he says it's an involuntary escape of semen. So he's describing the pus.
7:27 Kate Lister? Okay.
7:28 Speaker 07 Gonorrhoea actually means flow of seed.
7:30 Kate Lister? Nice. Nice. Now, we've spoken to one another about syphilis on a few occasions. And I remember everything that you said, but I definitely remember when you said it's a spirochete and that the, the actual bacteria that, that causes it is quite pretty. What is gonorrhea? Is that a spirochete as well?
7:47 Speaker 07 It's not a spirochete. It is a bacteria, but it doesn't have that pretty shape.
7:51 Kate Lister? Right.
7:52 Speaker 07 Of course, we'll only find out at the end of the 19th century about the bacteria itself. So, you know, at this point, they've got no idea what's actually causing it. In fact, you know, that these things that they're describing as gonorrhea in, you know, possibly in the Bible, possibly by Galen, they may actually be something else.
8:10 Kate Lister? Ah. So whatever, it's old, it's sexually transmitted. Can women get it too? How does it present in women?
8:17 Speaker 07 Women get it too. Sometimes you will get a discharge as a woman. Not always. So it Doesn't tend to be as obvious, you know, for women, the things tend to be a bit less. So a bit less showy, shall we say, so you might feel a sort of pain during sex, you might get pain in the bottom of your abdomen. Sometimes you have difficulty peeing, but less commonly than in men. And of course, in the long term, it can cause things like pelvic inflammatory disease, which can then affect your fertility, but not things quite so obvious as in men.
8:52 Kate Lister? So it can cause pelvic inflammatory disease. Is this a disease that will clear up of its own accord without, I'm presuming that the course of treatment now is an antibiotic. But if you don't have that, as they didn't in the past, is it something that that will run its course and go away? Or is it like syphilis, once it's there, it's fucking there?
9:09 Speaker 07 It's not like syphilis, you know, it's not as bad as syphilis. And later on, we can talk about some of the ways that it presents in Surgeon's Hall's collection, which is different to syphilis. But in the long term, you know, if it doesn't clear up, if you don't have treatment, it will clear up. You know, it's infection, it's not getting deep inside you like syphilis does. But in women, as I say, pelvic inflammatory disease, it can cause long term problems with, you know, sort of periods, things like that. Your fertility in men, it can cause something called stricture of the urethra.
9:39 Kate Lister? Well, oh.
9:40 Speaker 07 It's basically scarring along the urethra, which can cause problems with peeing. And obviously, if you have problems with peeing, then that can have other backup issues, literally backup issues. Cause urine isn't coming out the bladder, so you can get bladder stones. You know, there are possibilities, if it's really severe, that your bladder will actually burst.
10:00 Kate Lister? Oh, that's horrible. Is gonna be one of the ones that makes it sting to pee, or is that something else?
10:07 Speaker 07 Yes, it will.
10:07 Kate Lister? Or is?
10:08 Speaker 07 Sting to pee. As I say, it doesn't happen in all cases, but a lot of cases, you do get that. Women, less so, but sometimes.
10:17 Kate Lister? And it's still with us today, isn't it, gonorrhea? It's still very common.
10:20 Speaker 07 It's still very common and it's getting worse.
10:24 Kate Lister? Really?
10:24 Speaker 07 Yeah, cases are on the rise. In 2023, they had the highest recorded numbers of gonorrhea cases since records began in 1918. And that's incredible because one of the problems is that while we can treat with antibiotics now, it's becoming very, very, very antibiotic resistant.
10:44 Kate Lister? I've heard of that. Yeah, there was a case in Leeds of antibiotic, they call it super gonorrhea, didn't they?
10:50 Speaker 07 Yes, and that's becoming increasingly prevalent. So a lot of the antibiotic things like penicillin that were used to treat gonorrhea don't do anything now. You know, they're not having the same effect. And one of the things with that is that gonorrhea has kind of had a little bit of relationship with other bacteria in the throat. So they've passed some of their resistant genes over. So yeah, we're getting more and more antibiotic resistance in gonorrhea.
11:14 Kate Lister? Shit. Oh, yeah, wrap up, everybody, wrap up. It is one of the oldest recognised sexually transmitted diseases, isn't it?
11:24 Speaker 07 Yeah. I mean, the first real mention, you know, I've said about some of those ancient things. In 1161 in England, you actually get laws which are passed to stop the spread of the perilous and formative burning. So again, that's gonorrhea in law in 1161. France passes similar laws a bit later.
11:42 Kate Lister? What kind of things were these laws stopping people doing?
11:45 Speaker 07 Well, that's quite interesting because it seems very vague what's going on.
11:50 Kate Lister? Just stop doing it.
11:51 Speaker 07 Yeah, yeah, effectively. We're recognizing it's coming from sex, you know, largely that they're blaming the women for it.
11:58 Kate Lister? I was just about to ask you that, yeah.
12:00 Speaker 07 Yeah, of course. Yeah. And especially once you get into World War One and World War Two, you know, it's all terrible women that are causing our good soul not being able to fight. Again, syphilis and gonorrhea, the same thing throughout history. It's women's fault.
12:15 Kate Lister? It's women's fault. So they have this idea, I'm not sure if this is the idea. Did they understand that it can be spread by both men and women? Or did they just have this idea of it's the women who I'm trying to like, understand what the joined up thinking is around this. Did they think that only women could spread it? Or like, what was that?
12:34 Speaker 07 Yeah, I mean, I think there was something because women weren't showing symptoms in the same way that men were. You know, they would sometimes
12:41 Kate Lister? Yeah.
12:41 Speaker 07 Difficulty with peeing, things like that, but it's not as obvious. You know, the things that are going on, they could often attribute to other things. It's not like all of a sudden you have sex and then you've got a big swollen pussy penis. So which that seemed very much like, oh, well, you went to this woman and then this is the problem. So there was, there was definitely, they could see something going on there.
13:03 Kate Lister? And you can see this throughout the entire history of sexually transmitted infections, that they are blaming badly behaved women. And I've often looked at it and thought like, there's always a rationale, even if it's a bonkers one, even if it's deeply misogynistic and completely off the chart. There's some way that they've rationalized this. And I think it's just that they blame women more for it. But like, as you've just said, maybe if they're not as symptomatic, that would actually make a bit more sense, wouldn't it? All right, so let's talk treatment then. So you've got gonorrhea. Look, give me some other names for it as well. This is, this is the one that's known as the clap, isn't it?
13:39 Speaker 07 The clap, yeah. And there are a couple of theories about why it's known as the clap.
13:43 Kate Lister? But all of them are horrible.
13:45 Speaker 07 Some people think it's from the medieval red light district in Paris, which was called Le Clapier, which rabbit holes from lots of small huts, which sex workers were working out of. So some people think that's why it's called the clap. You know, you went to Le Clapier, you got this problem.
14:02 Kate Lister? That would make sense.
14:03 Speaker 07 Yeah. Some people think it's from the feeling that you got as you tried to pee. You know, you were trying to pee and you just got this kind of clapping sensation.
14:12 Kate Lister? Yeah, okay.
14:13 Speaker 07 But the one that does, even with the fact that I don't have a penis, that makes me sort of squeeze my legs together a bit, is the idea that, you know, to get rid of that pus that you were producing in your penis, what you did, you clap.
14:26 Kate Lister? Oh, no.
14:28 Speaker 07 Yeah.
14:28 Kate Lister? You clap the penis in between your ha- oh.
14:32 Speaker 07 Some people say closing a book on it.
14:35 Kate Lister? Kat, I'm not medical, but that's not going to work, is it?
14:38 Speaker 07 I feel that that's going to make things worse in many ways.
14:42 Kate Lister? Do you came up with that? That is the wife of somebody who's gone out and got a dose. And I totally read about this. This is what I've got to do. Put it in this book.
14:50 Speaker 07 Well, just do this. You'll be fine. You'll be okay after that.
14:54 Kate Lister? Oh, that is, that is brutal. All right. So the clap, how might you have treated it? What were some of the cures? Not that they were cures, but what were they, what would they have done for you?
15:05 Speaker 07 Well, for a long time, there was a lot of debate whether gonorrhea and syphilis were actually the same thing. A lot of treatments, a lot of early treatments were mercury, you know, as we talked about with syphilis. And obviously mercury has its own problems. You know, and the Mary Rose, the ship, there are syringes that they think were for putting mercury into the penis of some of the sailors.
15:31 Kate Lister? Nice.
15:32 Speaker 07 That was one of the treatments. Another treatment was silver, particularly once they start to realise that syphilis and gonorrhea are actually different things. They will tend to use mercury more for syphilis and silver for gonorrhea. And at first it's silver nitrate and you could have this as a sort of solution. You might drink it. You, you might bathe your genitalia in it. There was also a solid form of it and solid silver nitrate was often called lunocostic. And that word caustic should give you the impression that this is not good. So lunocostic would also be used for things like burning off warts. And you could, you could introduce this into the urethra itself.
16:14 Kate Lister? So there's a lot of stuff going down urethras with injections.
16:18 Speaker 07 And that's going to get worse. Don't worry, Kate.
16:20 Kate Lister? Oh, God. Can I, right, I'm endlessly fascinated by this one and I'm pretty sure I've asked you this before, but like mercury was used for syphilis and gonorrhea for centuries. And obviously it doesn't work. We don't use it today. It doesn't work. But what did it do that made people think that it worked? Or was it just like they made a mistake for hundreds of years? Cause I kind of think it must have done something that at least created the illusion it was helping somehow.
16:46 Speaker 07 Well, mercury does have an antimicrobial effect. So if you go to the right time, you might be able to kill those bacteria off. But there's also the fact, like we talked about with syphilis. Syphilis has a period where you have a chanter and the chanter will just go away of its own accord. But that doesn't mean that the bacteria has gone away. So you might put some of this mercury onto your chanter and then it disappears. And you go, oh, well, that's it. That's it done.
17:13 Kate Lister? Yeah.
17:13 Speaker 07 Put a mercury lotion on it and then that goes away. Oh, I'm fine now. And then you don't associate the symptoms you get much later with what happened, you know, five years ago. After, you know, after you've been having sex.
17:25 Kate Lister? Silver's a weird one, isn't it?
17:26 Speaker 07 Silver, silver's really, really interesting because silver has actually become a bit of a kind of an alternative therapy again today.
17:34 Kate Lister? Has it?
17:35 Speaker 07 Yeah, so, you know, since the 1990s, there have been people who've been using colloidal silver for various things.
17:41 Kate Lister? Oh, this is ringing a bell, actually.
17:43 Speaker 07 Yeah, I went to get some eye drops for my dog recently. And we were in the car on the way back and my husband was, was looking at the bottle. And he was saying, oh, these, these have got silver in them.
17:54 Kate Lister? Okay.
17:55 Speaker 07 Silver does have, again, an antimicrobial effect. It will kill bacteria to a certain extent. But one of the other things about silver is that you actually have no use for it in your body. You know, it's not a thing that your, your body uses. It's not a thing you take in. It's also not a thing that your body has any way of excreting.
18:12 Kate Lister? Right.
18:12 Speaker 07 You know, you have your, your pint of lager or whatever. Your body metabolizes that through your liver and you get rid of the waste products. Your body has ways of getting rid of most things. Silver, it doesn't. The kidneys don't do anything, the liver don't do anything. So it builds up. And if you have a buildup of silver in your body, it deposits in various places and various membranes around the body. And it starts to take on a slight grey, bluish appearance. So if you have long term chronic exposure to silver, it can actually turn you blue.
18:44 Kate Lister? That's not the desired effect, is it?
18:46 Speaker 07 No, and this is permanent. There's no way of getting rid of it.
18:49 Kate Lister? Blue forever?
18:50 Speaker 07 Blue forever. So we have a kidney here in Surgeon's Hall, which is from somebody. It just says that they had been taking silver medicinally for some time. I'm going to imagine that's some sort of sexually transmitted disease treatment, though we don't have that specified. But you can see it's got that bluish tinge to it. And if you go online, if you Google it, you will see people who have taken silver for the long term with blue skin.
19:17 Kate Lister? Was it just used to treat venereal disease, or is silver being used to treat other stuff?
19:22 Speaker 07 It was used as a sort of a kind of generic treatment, but it really was like thought to be the thing for gonorrhea in the 19th century. In the late 19th century, a German scientist comes up with a new form of silver medicine, a silver protonate. And that becomes the standard treatment for gonorrhea until we get antibiotics being used widely in the 1940s. And a really, really interesting thing is that sexually transmitted diseases were a major problem with soldiers during both the First World War and the Second World War. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of man hours were lost because people had to be discharged, again, double entendre there. Discharged because of having sexually transmitted diseases.
20:04 Speaker 07 And one of the sort of prophylactic things they did during the Second World War, if there was sort of like anything that you'd done, which might result in you having gonorrhea, was that you would have the silver protonate injected into the urethra. And then you would tear penis and testicles covered in calamel lotion. Calamel contains mercury. And then you would wrap the whole thing in wax paper, basically like baking paper. Whether or not this is having an effect, I mean, that's kind of second to the fact that everyone is going to know what you've been up to. Because you're going to have a crinkly cock, you know, that's going to, as you move around, people are going to know.
20:43 Kate Lister? Oh, go we, I read a description of how they treated, it was one of. These syphilis or gonorrhea or something in, I think it was the First World War. And it was the, I didn't read about the wax paper, that's, that's new information. But it was that they basically filled the bladder with disinfectant and water, which they injected to the urethra as well.
21:04 Speaker 07 Yeah, they really liked it to be warm water as well, like sort of 50 degrees. So, you know, that's going to be an added level of discomfort. The greater quantity that you could get up them, the more successful they thought this treatment would be.
21:17 Kate Lister? You can see now, because when you hear statistics like over 50% of men fighting on the front had to take time away for an SDI, probably our friend gonorrhea or syphilis. You kind of think like, why, what were they doing? And I guess it's because they were lying in hospital being subjected to this.
21:33 Speaker 07 Yeah, I mean, it's awful, isn't it? You know, it's, it feels like some form of torture in so many ways.
21:39 Kate Lister? I bet it was punitive as well on purpose, though.
21:42 Speaker 07 Yes, yeah, I definitely think there was that element as well.
21:45 Kate Lister? It would have been done to humiliate people too, to stop them from doing it.
21:49 Speaker 07 Yeah, I mean, yeah, you kind of think that, again, sort of the idea of having to go through this is going to put you off more, isn't it? It's, it's going to kill any, any desire.
22:04 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Kat and gonorrhea after this short break.
22:21 Kate Lister? Autumn is underway at last, which means the nights are closing in and everything in nature feels like it's just slowing down, except us, of course. For most of us, me included, the world still has a lot of demands on us that can feel like a lot to deal with. There will be a time in all of our lives when we could use therapy. But often, when you try to do that, it's still way harder than it should be. Finding a therapist is hard enough, but finding one who actually takes your insurance? That's where most online therapy platforms fall short. Many don't work with insurance at all, which means you're stuck paying the full cost out of pocket or paying for an expensive monthly subscription.
23:06 Kate Lister? Ruler does things differently. They partner with over 100 insurance plans, making the average co-pay just $15 per session. That's real therapy from licensed professionals at a price that actually makes sense. Thousands of people are already using Ruler to get affordable, high-quality therapy that's actually covered by insurance. Visit ruler.com/sheets to get started. That's R-U-L-A dot com forward slash S-H-E-E-T-S, Sheets. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.
23:44 Speaker 01 A rug shouldn't just fit your room. It should make your home feel finished. Ernesta creates designer-quality rugs, custom-fit to the exact size of your space, so every room feels beautifully pulled together. Explore Ernesta's range of options, all ready to be custom-cut, finished, and delivered to your door in as little as two weeks. Start with five samples for just $10 and get $50 toward your rug when you order. Visit ernesta.com today. That's E-R-N-E-S-T-A dot com.
24:15 Speaker 02 Hey, it's Hannah Berner from Giggly Squad, and the holidays are around the corner, which means I'm officially entering my Hostess Hannah era with Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. You guys know I love cats and fostering, but when I'm hosting, I do not want my house smelling like cats. I want people focusing on my hosting skills. That's why I love Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. It delivers long-lasting odor control and forms compact clumps that make cleanup easy so that it's one less thing I need to worry about when people come over. Be guest-ready with Arm & Hammer Cat Litter. Find it now at Walmart or Amazon.
24:51 Speaker 03 Hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights?
24:55 Speaker 07 Well, look no further than the award-winning After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal with me, Maddie Pelling.
25:02 Speaker 03 And me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre.
25:07 Speaker 07 From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals to witch trials and folklore, feel transported back in time on After Dark. Out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.
25:19 Speaker 03 And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from History Hit.
25:36 Kate Lister? When do we start getting antibiotics and penicillin and things that can actually tackle this properly? And how does that have any kind of impact on soldiers? Because that seems to have been a really, really big concern. And that's what was driving medical advancement, it seems to me, is nations around the world going, we've got to keep soldiers fighting fit. They can't be taking time off because they've got a droopy willy.
26:02 Speaker 07 I mean, there were huge campaigns, as I said, you know, trying to keep the soldiers away from dangerous women, in scare quotes.
26:10 Kate Lister? Bast women, loose women.
26:11 Speaker 07 Yeah. But in the 1920s, Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin. But the problem at that point is, you know, they recognise its potential, but there isn't a way of mass producing it. Got this idea, but they don't really know what to do. So it's only really in 1940s, you know, the beginning of the 1940s, they start to get methods of making more and more penicillin. So the very first uses of penicillin were actually to try and treat syphilis and gonorrhea for soldiers. And then, you know, after the war, when that's not the priority, it starts to get rolled out to the general public.
26:53 Kate Lister? Yeah. And it works, doesn't it? It is the much fabled silver bullet. And when you think of what people have been going through before, I mean, you know, just to go back briefly to the horrendous description of young lads lying in hospital beds, having their bladders filled full of disinfectant and then their willy wrapped in, what was it, wax paper and chamomile lotion. And like, the idea that you can just take a pill.
27:17 Speaker 07 I mean, it must be amazing. Yeah. I mean, you said silver bullet. It's better than that silver bullet that you had the opportunity to stick up your knob and burn things out. So it's definitely, definitely the improvement.
27:30 Kate Lister? And how long does it last? Because I often think, like, maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but it seems like there was this brief period of about 10 years when HIV hadn't arrived, all STIs could be treated effectively with a dose of antibiotics. The pill turns up, so now you can have some. There must have been just like a brief period where it was like, oh my God, we can, we can just fuck each other. This is amazing.
27:55 Speaker 07 Yeah.
27:56 Kate Lister? Doesn't last. How long until they start noticing antibiotic resistance coming through?
28:02 Speaker 07 Antibiotic resistance really starts to become a problem by the time you get into the end of the 20th century. So they're starting to get less and less antibiotics which have the potential to sort it out. And at first, that's not too much of a problem because you're getting less STIs in general because, you know, there's no treatment for HIV/AIDS. So people are being a wee bit more careful with things. So the spread of STIs does drop. But, you know, now we've got good treatments for HIV and AIDS, we've got PrEP, things like that. People start to be a bit less cautious and that's driving this rise of gonorrhea and syphilis.
28:42 Kate Lister? And largely, well, it's not a favourite fact because it's not a good thing, but one of the demographics seeing the largest spike in it are the over 60s.
28:50 Speaker 07 Yeah. I mean, that's it, isn't it? You know, at that point, you don't have to worry about the pregnancy thing. So you.
28:57 Kate Lister? I think that's it. So in your specimen collection in Edinburgh, what items have you got? That you said that you've got blue kidneys. What else have you got that is from the history of gonorrhea? What? Give us a horrible description.
29:10 Speaker 07 Yeah, well, it's really interesting because obviously, you know, you've came up here and I've shown you some of the remains that we have, which shows syphilis. And syphilis looks horrific. And you can see it on almost every part of the body. You know, we've got sort of palettes, you know, in the mouth where they've got holes in. We've got big swollen bones. We've got skulls with huge ulcers, things like that. It's horrific. And it's really dramatic on the body. What we have with gonorrhea is shelf upon shelf upon shelf of penises with strictures.
29:45 Kate Lister? What's a stricture, Kat? Tell us what a stricture is.
29:47 Speaker 07 It's this kind of narrowing of the urethra that stops you being able to pee. And it's effectively kind of scar tissue building up because of the infection. And we have a doctor called Charles Bell. He was an Edinburgh boy, but he ended up doing a lot of his work down in London. And he became really, really interested in stricture of the penis. So a lot of the examples, and as I said, we have a lot, I think it's something like 47.
30:15 Kate Lister? It's a lot of penises in jars. It's amazing.
30:17 Speaker 07 Yeah, just, as I said, just shelves of them. It feels like they go, you know, it's just you're just confronted with a wall of them and one particular portion of the store. He's really interested in this condition. In fact, he writes a book about it. A trita is on diseases of the urethra, the vesica urinaria, which is the bladder, the prostate and the rectum. And when it comes to stricture of the penis, he says the most common cause is gonorrhea. Though he does say that there might be a few other things that causes it, you know, if you have injury to the penis or something like that. This book's also got some really horrific chapter titles. Like, there's one of them, which is symptoms to be dreaded as indicating a bursting of the urethra.
30:58 Kate Lister? Oh, my God. Oh.
31:00 Speaker 07 And effectively, what he says is that things you really need to be worried about in case your urethra is going to burst is, you know, if you try really hard to pee and only a few drops come out, if the urine feels scalding hot. And then he says, if you put your legs together and you feel like there's a tumor there, even though there isn't a tumor, this is the point when you've got to be worried about your urethra bursting.
31:21 Kate Lister? And what would they do for that? What would Dr Bell have done for that?
31:25 Speaker 07 Well, your, your typical instrument in your fight against the urethral stricture is something called a bougie.
31:32 Kate Lister? Doesn't sound good.
31:33 Speaker 07 It's not. Takes its name from a pot in Algeria, and this pot was known for producing a really fine wax.
31:41 Kate Lister? I knew it.
31:42 Speaker 07 Bougie is actually the French word for candle. And so one of the main ways that you get this instrument is from a thread that's been dipped in some wax to make a, a sort of rod which you can adjust the thickness of, which would also be a little bit flexible. So you can probably see literally where this is going. So this would be something that you can, you could take various thicknesses and introduce them up to try and clear any blockages.
32:08 Kate Lister? And would that work?
32:10 Speaker 07 Well, I mean, you know, you can push things out of the way. You can get something so that the urine can actually flow. But of course, there is the possibility that as you're doing that, you're causing more scar tissue, which is then going to cause further problems down the line. And of course, with this bougie, you could wrap it in linen so that you could then soak this in medicine, and I'm going to again use scare quotes for medicine, so that you can then stick that up to deliver the medicine to the correct place. The common medicine that was used was something called caustic. And again, this was something that you would literally burn the stricture away with. And this could be a lunar caustic that we talked before, or it could be basically potassium hydroxide,
32:54 Speaker 07 which is a very strong alkaline. So again, literally burning away anything that's going to stop that urine from getting out.
33:03 Kate Lister? See, I thought that when we were going to come and talk about gonorrhea, it would be like, yeah, it, it, you know, gives you a bit of a delay or maybe there's a bit of discharge. But like the long-term effect of this is incredibly serious.
33:15 Speaker 07 Yeah.
33:15 Kate Lister? That is grim. Which brings me to talk about, we've got to talk about the future of gonorrhea then, because it's becoming antibiotic resistant. As you said, I think, well, you can tell me, but is there only one type of antibiotic that is now effective against gonorrhea?
33:30 Speaker 07 Well, that's exactly it. There's only one type of antibiotic that can be used. And even that is starting to have limited effects with certain cases. So there is a possibility that in the not too distant future, we may have no treatment whatsoever.
33:44 Kate Lister? Like, nothing at all?
33:45 Speaker 07 Yeah, and we may be going back to these times of having to catheterize people, things like that, if there are problems.
33:52 Kate Lister? I mean, there must be people researching this, researching antibiotic resistance.
33:56 Speaker 07 Yeah, I mean, there's hope now that we can maybe find a vaccine. You give it to everyone at a certain age in school and we'll all be okay. So that would be a great, great thing.
34:06 Kate Lister? That would be, wouldn't it? But we are actually facing a future where there might be no treatment and this disease can be doing the horrible things that it's done in the past once more. So, like, everybody, wrap up, make sure that you're wearing condoms and just behave yourselves. As a final question, Kat, what do you think we have got to learn from the history of gonorrhea that is useful for us going forward?
34:30 Speaker 07 Oh, well, you know, I mean, I think the idea is don't blame women for everything. That's a good one when you're looking at these histories of STDs because that has been a common thing. There's an interesting story, which I think is quite nice about gonorrhea, about John Hunter, the surgeon. He thinks that syphilis and gonorrhea are the same thing, so he experiments. He gets some gonorrhea pus and he introduces it onto a penis of somebody who doesn't have either syphilis or gonorrhea.
34:57 Kate Lister? Right.
34:58 Speaker 07 One on the foreskin, one on the glands. He thinks that where you're infected, that's what's going to affect whether you get syphilis or gonorrhea. And he discovers that the result is you get both. So he thinks this is proving that they're the same thing. It turns out that the person likely just had both diseases.
35:15 Kate Lister? Oh, God.
35:16 Speaker 07 Of course, there is the question as well, did he actually do this to his own penis?
35:21 Kate Lister? It sounds like something he would do, the amount that I know about this man.
35:24 Speaker 07 Yeah, so he, there's a chance that he did give himself both syphilis and gonorrhea. So again, I think the idea of being slightly careful about your scientific experiments is a good lesson when you're looking at gonorrhea.
35:38 Kate Lister? Kat, you have been horrifying, but marvelous, as always. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
35:45 Speaker 07 You can find me on Blue Sky Instagram as Anatomical Cat and you can find links from there to my website.
35:52 Kate Lister? And go and see the museum collection because it is just, it's just absolutely mind blown. But don't do it when you've got a hangover. That is not a good place to be. Thank you so much for coming to talk to us. You've been fabulous.
36:03 Speaker 07 Thank you. It's a pleasure as always to talk to you, Kate.
36:12 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Kat for joining me. And for those of you that are still listening to this, well done for getting through that. If you were impressed by what you heard, then maybe you could like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If there's another subject you'd like us to explore, or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, for History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
36:56 Speaker 03 Would you believe us if we told you there was a podcast that was haunted? Well, there is. It's called Two Girls, One Ghost. We didn't want to believe it at first, but we can no longer ignore it. Two Girls, One Ghost is the most haunted podcast in America. We're talking ghosts caught on camera. Demonic possessions. Cursed mirrors. Bigfoot. Poltergeist. Exorcisms. Near death experiences. Unsolved mysteries. Missing persons. Each week we explore the deepest, darkest, spookiest places in the world. Tune in to Two Girls, One Ghost wherever you listen to podcasts. Listen at your own risk.
Previous Real Wives of Dictators | Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao's Wife Next History's Worst F*ckboys: Lord Byron Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated