Special Episode: Dr. Olivia Weisser & The Dreaded Pox

In a time when smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and typhus ran rampant through the streets of London, there was another disease that instilled even more fear than these other killers: syphilis. So feared and so stigmatized was syphilis that it was sometimes called “the secret disease.” A diagnosis would not only sentence you to a drawn-out and painful illness possibly resulting in death, it also labeled you as an outcast and not fit for polite company. Skyrocketing infection rates drove a corresponding rise in syphilis “cures” and an increasingly desperate public. In this TPWKY book club episode, Dr. Olivia Weisser https://www.umb.edu/directory/oliviaweisser/, associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston joins me to discuss her recent book The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London https://bookshop.org/a/3175/9781009651875. She transports readers to the hidden shops and stalls that promised a remedy to this feared disease, to the courthouses where a syphilis infection was an important piece of evidence, and to the country houses that held recipe books for those who could not purchase a cure. Tune in for a fascinating glimpse into a time and place where morality, sex, and disease were so strongly entangled. Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAu See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This is exactly right.

• 0:06Speaker 01

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  Hey, I'm Niall Rogers. This fall, I'll be driving across the country, meeting some of today's coolest and most fascinating artists. We'll explore the stories before the moments that changed everything. Because every musician remembers the moment where it all began. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:19Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Erin Welsh and this is This Podcast Will Kill You. Welcome to the TPWKY Book Club, a series where I invite authors of popular science and medicine books to the show to chat with me about their latest work. It's been such a fun series to put together, really making my inner bookworm so happy, and we've covered some great topics over the years. If you'd like to see what we've featured in the past, or get a peek at some of the books that we're planning to feature in the future, head on over to our website, thispodcastwillkillyou.com. There, in addition to finding all sorts of goodies, from transcripts to sources, you'll

• 3:02Speaker 03

  find a link to our bookshop.org affiliate page under the Extras tab. On Bookshop, you'll see a bunch of TPWKY-related book lists, including one for This Book Club, as well as The Kids Book Club, put together by Erin Updike and posted on our socials. So if you're not following us there already, you should be. As always, we love hearing from you all about these Book Club episodes and about our other episodes, your thoughts, your suggestions, we love it all. The best way to get in touch is through the Contact Us form on our website, or through the Submit Your Firsthand Account form, which you can also find on our website. Two last things before moving on to the Book of the Week, and that is to please rate,

• 3:47Speaker 03

  review, and subscribe, it truly helps us out. And second, you can now find full video versions of most of our regular season episodes on YouTube. Make sure you're subscribed to the Exactly Right Media YouTube channel so you never miss a new episode drop. 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."

• 4:32Speaker 03

  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 Weisser, Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts-Boston,

• 5:17Speaker 03

  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. Weisser 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? 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

• 5:58Speaker 03

  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. Weisser, 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.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Dr. Weisser, thank you so much for joining me today.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  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. And I'm curious, though, could you tell me what drew you to this area and this era of scholarship?

• 7:15Speaker 04

  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.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 04

  And I don't know whether that's true. I trust them, but it's just appalling, like 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. 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.

• 8:21Speaker 04

  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.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  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 and 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?

• 9:04Speaker 04

  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 historically accurate answer is it could be any number of STIs, what we would call STIs. So 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 all encompassed within that one term.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  They, in the past, pre-germ theory, like you mentioned, they didn't differentiate these categories the way we do. But it can be helpful to have that in your mind, to just think about what was happening to these people's bodies? What were their symptoms? What were they enduring?

• 10:02Speaker 03

  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? How was sex changing in London during the 17th and 18th centuries?

• 10:21Speaker 04

  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, the development of what were called Molly Houses, like, kind of like the proto-gay club. And so there is evidence that there's just more sexual activity in this time period. My sense from writing this book is, and a lot of what I see changing is more due to the changes of the city as opposed to changes in sexual behavior. That the city, because

• 11:03Speaker 04

  it's such a London-specific story, and I think it would be a very different book if it were a different geographical location, it's a very London story. Because the city was changing demographically, commercially, it was just growing so exponentially in this time period. There's this huge influx of people, this urban, dense, mobile population, a huge influx in consumerism, and all of that creates this kind of chaotic environment where, on a concrete level, there was just a lot of transactional sex happening, and then a lot of disease. And then also, a whole market that kind of develops to treat it.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  So, the kind of short answer is yes, just more people are having sex. And also, I think what's really changing is this, this urban center that accommodates this kind of hotbed of sexual activity and disease.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  As you describe, sex was, it was transactional in nature, but it was also a private matter. Like, it wasn't necessarily something that was discussed openly. And venereal disease was also called the secret disease, which kind of denotes, again, its shameful nature. And so, given these intense pressures to remain silent about sex or about the pox, I'm guessing it's not something that was openly written about for many people, whether in diaries or not. And so I'm curious about your sources, and what types of sources did you find helpful in researching for this? And how often did you have to read between the lines?

• 12:37Speaker 04

  A lot. I had to read between a lot of lines. I did, my initial take was exactly what you mentioned. I'm going to look in private writing. People certainly, if you're, if you're dealing with such a stigmatizing, kind of life-altering ailment, surely you wrote about it. And it was really hard to find people writing about their firsthand experiences in personal writing. So I found lots of examples of people describing other people in letters or diaries. Much harder to find first-person accounts. That makes sense for all the reasons you just said. It's this deeply stigmatizing disease. People didn't want to admit they had it. They would use euphemisms. So what I did was, I tried

• 13:19Speaker 04

  to think creatively. What are other kinds of sources I can use to get at that experience outside of personal writing? So I looked to recipe books to try to kind of recover what people were doing at home in these semi-private moments. What were, how were people trying to treat themselves privately? I looked to court records to try to get access to kind of non-elite people giving testimony in court, where the disease comes up in court. So I tried to also use sources that we know that historians have used for decades to talk about this disease and study this disease, like advertisements for patent drugs. So

• 14:01Speaker 04

  what we would call over-the-counter cures. But I tried to look at them in a new way. So the kind of typical way historians use these sources is they look at how healers are promoting themselves, how they're marketing their, their drugs. I decided to look at the address printed at the bottom of the ad, which is where the healer said, "You can come buy my, my pill, or come get my elixir." And it wasn't always at their house. It was sometimes an address to a book stall, or a chocolate shop, or a bakery. And I decided to make a map of where you can find cures for this disease. So it's just one example of using a historical source that we know about, that's been used many, many times, but just trying to use it in a new, more creative way to get at a different slice

• 14:46Speaker 04

  of the story.

• 14:54Speaker 01

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  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by Miguel.

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• 16:56Speaker 03

  Welcome back, everyone. I've been chatting with Dr. Olivia Weisser about her book, The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London. Let's get back into things. Not just what this disease, the effect of this disease on someone's body, but the effect that it had on their social standing, on their relationships, on how they viewed themselves. And there was, early on in your book, a really fascinating kind of series of diary entries, where Samuel Peeps writes about his brother, and there's this kind of question of, does he have venereal disease? Is he dying of venereal disease? Is he getting the all-clear? And just these intense emotional perspectives of how someone's relationship is changing based on a diagnosis.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  And I thought that was just a really fascinating glimpse into the effect that this disease could have on someone's life.

• 17:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it's a great example of how those third-party, you know, before I was saying, oh, it's so frustrating, I can't get a first-person account. Peeps isn't writing about himself, he's writing about his brother, but it still has so much to offer us in terms of kind of insight into just the emotional toil of a diagnosis. Because, of course, Peeps is just worried about himself. He's worried about, number one, what is this going to do to my reputation? We have the same last name, what are we going to do? And I just love this diary by Samuel Peeps, it's just really intimate and candid, in a way that we don't often see in diaries.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's fun. I was like, we need a TV show based on this diary, it sounds like.

• 18:26Speaker 04

  I support that. I would watch it. I would love to consult on it, just on the record. Thank you.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  All right, well, I think we have an idea in place. Let's go, yeah. And in addition to these, you know, court records, advertisements, personal diaries, the pox also makes an appearance in creative work from this era, whether, and it's in a song, or a book, or a play, or an opera, or something like that. When it does make an appearance, what did it signify?

• 18:54Speaker 04

  It almost always signified debauchery, or vice, or illicit behavior. And I mean, when you look in court records that have nothing to do with sex, court records for, you know, I looked at a lot for marriage separation, things that aren't sexual necessarily, it comes up as just like a slander for just bad, illicit, negative. It's often used to describe women. So the disease typically, kind of stereotypically, was blamed on women. And there's lots of medical debates about how women, there's something about women's bodies physiologically that make them prone to not only spreading the disease,

• 19:36Speaker 04

  but somehow like creating, fomenting it in their hot wombs. And so this phrase "pocky whore" was used all the time as just kind of like a general slander to just connote bad, immoral behavior. You know, there are lots of debates, where did it come from? Is it from the New World? Is it from the Old World? And there were a lot of assumptions that at first it comes from women. It must be, you know, women are to blame, obviously, time and again. And then, as the, you know, Londoners at least, are seeing all these new kinds of people that they'd never seen before, and diseases and plants come into the metropole from these New World explorations, it kind of shifts a little bit. And there's this layering of, well, it also,

• 20:16Speaker 04

  this disease also must originate in women's bodies who are from hot climates. There's something about their hotness, their heat. And then there's all these debates that it must come from the New World. It couldn't possibly come from here. And it's being brought from the New World, and therefore, we need to ingest the plants from the New World as our treatment, because they will be suited best to treat this disease. So there is lots of talk about who to blame. And there's a whole nother discourse about like, you know, the English call it the French disease, because it comes from France. And the French call it the Italian disease, because, you know, and everyone's...

• 20:51Speaker 03

  Trying to shift the blame.

• 20:52Speaker 04

  Exactly, passing the blame around. So there's definitely debates about it and they never settle on one answer. It's always up for debate. Exactly.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  Of course, of course. And so even when this idea of where it came from shifted, it still was women at the source of it. They're like, were men ever blamed? Or was it ever thought like, this is his fault for, you know, whatever?

• 21:18Speaker 04

  It's such a good question. And if you look in the obvious places, and by obvious, I mean historical documents that are about the disease, that say venereal disease on the cover, or the great pox. These are all euphemisms for the same kind of nexus of diseases. It's, it's always women. It's always women. But when you start looking at non-medical sources, at the kinds of sources I've been talking about. So for example, court records, or women trying to sue for a separation, like basically a divorce. You see that it's not at all the case, that, that, that there's a difference between what I would say is the discourse, like the narrative, the story people tell, and the reality on the ground. And the reality on the ground, when you look at medical cases of who's coming to get treated?

• 22:02Speaker 04

  And when you look at court records and who's talking? It's so clearly not women who are being blamed. It's time and again, my husband went to the bathhouse, slept with a prostitute, came back, infected me. I mean, it's, it's so different from what the discourse is in these other kinds of texts.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  We've talked about how this is an era pre-germ theory, but that doesn't mean that contagion was not a concept. And so, you know, just based on what, what you said, it was clear that people saw the connection. It was like, okay, well, we know the root of transmission. How much did just the act of sex, was that everything? Or was it also a role of constitution type of sex? You know, what were the, the set of circumstances that people believed led to somebody else developing or transmitting pox?

• 22:49Speaker 04

  They absolutely understood the sexual connection. It was a different kind of connection than what we have in our minds. So we have in our minds, you have sex with someone who has a STI and you contract it. They had a much more complex understanding of the role of sex within just daily life. And so it wasn't necessarily just sex with an infected person. It could have been too much sex or the wrong kind of sex. Or not the, the kind of activity that is healthy for your particular constitution. So it was a much more kind of complicated interaction. And then layered on top of that, there was also this belief that you could get this disease from non-sexual interaction.

• 23:34Speaker 04

  So there were two kind of forms of this disease. And I'm saying disease as if it's this one thing and it's just this kind of collection of symptoms. One was what we might have in our minds, and this is what they called the great pox, a true pox is what they called it. And this is a more severe form of a venereal disease that you would get from penetrative sex. And then there's this milder form. And that's where we see words like clap and gonorrhea, which are not kind of one to one, they, they don't correlate to what we think of when we say those words today. This was considered to be a milder form of the disease and you could get it from sharing a drink, a glass.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  You could get it from, there's one example I found where someone shares a glove with somebody. Or you can get it from sharing a bed and just like sweating in the sheets. So the idea was that this milder form of the disease you got from spreading pokey matter is what they called it. And that could be from sexual activity, but it could also be from these non-sexual activities. And then to make it even more complicated, another way you could get that mild form of the disease is through not the spread of pokey matter, but just from trauma to your genitals. So there's one man who talks about falling off his horse and getting a clap. And another case I found where someone talks about getting hit in the groin with a stone and he gets the clap. So.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  I think the the modern mind is like, wait, well, what did he really have? Because it and I I don't know. I just don't know. Maybe it. Who knows? We'll never know. But it gets very complicated when you, especially when when I was looking at court records, where all of a sudden, the difference between getting this disease from a stone versus someone sexually assaulting you is huge. Right? That that's a felony versus a misdemeanor versus nothing. So it it becomes really important in certain contexts to kind of parse these types of diseases.

• 25:32Speaker 03

  In your book, you describe the pox as seeming modern for its moment. And you call it the first modern disease. Can you tell me more about what you mean by the first modern disease and how this perception is kind of reflected in writings from the time?

• 25:48Speaker 04

  I I use that word to kind of capture the way we think of disease. And I think it's something that we take for granted, that a disease is a biological entity that affects all of us more or less the same way. So if you and I both are given the same diagnosis, we'll probably manifest the same set of symptoms. If you and I have the same set of symptoms, we'll probably be diagnosed with the same disease. That this this idea that diseases are fixed, that they are all affecting all bodies more or less similarly, and that they are treated and progress more or less similarly. This is a modern concept that's born in the 19th century. So this book that I wrote is before any of that. It's way before germs, the discovery of germs and germ theory.

• 26:33Speaker 04

  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 will will be given completely different diagnoses and will have completely different treatments. So this time period, this pre-modern era, diseases are fluid, they're individual.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  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 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

• 27:58Speaker 04

  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 disease that I was able to piece together, 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.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  I was just thinking about this the other day, how this huge transition into putting diseases into boxes, standardizing them, everyone, as you said, has the same signs and symptoms, has the same diagnosis, has the same treatment, and is expected to have the same disease progression course. And I feel like now we're finally like in modern medicine today, or like cutting edges, like it's all about precision medicine, it's all about seeing each individual. And so we've almost in a way come full circle.

• 29:01Speaker 04

  Totally. There's so, that's why I love studying this time period. It's so unfamiliar, and yet the parallels are so mind blowing. I mean, I think it's absolutely, we have this kind of tailored medicine today that in many ways almost mirrors the kind of clinical encounters that I'm finding in this pre-modern era. And the same with the market, right? I was talking about those advertisements and making that map. What was so interesting making that map, what I found was, oh, this, these cures were sold everywhere. There was not like a neighborhood where you would go get one of these cures. They were sold everywhere and they were sold out of these anonymous, non-medical places. Bookstores, bakeries, chocolate shops. And to me, coming back to

• 29:42Speaker 04

  this point about parallels to today, it's, it's almost like the leading edge of what we've achieved today where you can just be in your pajamas, online, purchase whatever embarrassing thing you want to purchase and no one will ever know. And it's like, we have achieved the ultimate anonymous shopping experience, but we see this very early history of it in the 1600s.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  Let's take a quick break here. We'll be back before you know it.

• 30:11Speaker 01

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• 30:44Speaker 02

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.

• 31:04Speaker 06

  I'm like a kid when I play music and I make music and I'm constantly asking questions. You know, whether it's an instrument I haven't played, or it's a melody that seems foreign. You know, there's every night you play a show and it's the same set, but it's not the same show. At a certain point, your brain kind of goes on autopilot. When I'm in the studio, or if I'm making music, that's where that curiosity kind of comes back, you know? I haven't lost it yet, but I'm also on my sophomore album. So, and you, you obviously are an expert here.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Welcome back, everyone. I'm here chatting with the wonderful Dr. Olivia Weisser about her book, The Dreaded Pox. Let's get into some more questions. It was anonymous out of necessity, right? Because of this, disease was so shameful. And I just kept thinking about how the doctors that were handing out these diagnoses held this tremendous amount of power in the knowledge that they had. And just to kind of get a perspective on what that power was, or how impactful this diagnosis could be, if someone's diagnosis was made public, what kinds of consequences might they face? And how did that differ based on things like their initial social standing, or their gender, or their race? Like, how did all of these things kind of combine into be like

• 32:36Speaker 03

  the consequences are different for each individual person?

• 32:39Speaker 04

  It mattered more for women than for men, for sure. And it comes back to what we were talking about earlier about blame. There was a double standard in this society. It was a deeply patriarchal society, and a woman's reputation was intimately tied up in her sexual reputation. So, a diagnosis of this disease, if you're a married woman, there would be suspicions of adultery. If you were a servant, let's say, an unmarried, single woman, working in someone's home as a servant, you would probably lose your job. And there's a case that I talk about at length in the book, that's exactly what happens. A servant, she's suspected of having this disease. She's a caretaker of small children

• 33:23Speaker 04

  in the home of a merchant. And the children end up getting this venereal disease. And the doctor who comes decides, there's nothing sexual, there's nothing untoward happening here. Just, it's one of those mild forms of the disease that she spreads to the children by sharing a bed with them, through pocky matter. So she's sweating in the bed, and somehow they're getting the disease. But the problem is, she has it. She has the pox, and she denies it. And they finally confront her, and they find, hidden under her bed, a box full of medicines that are just for the pox, that are very clearly for the pox. They're made of mercury and ingredients that you obviously use to treat this disorder. And she's basically succumbs to all the the pressure and is like, OK, you got me. Yes, I am poxed.

• 34:06Speaker 04

  And she she loses her job. So there are absolutely severe repercussions for a diagnosis. And the the flip side is if you're a man and you're diagnosed, it's not a big deal.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  Right. It's like, well, this wasn't your fault. We understand. It happens to everyone. Yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  Boys will be boys.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Boys will be boys. Yeah. Good stuff. Yep. And, you know, speaking of, I think another part of this, you know, boys will be boys, different consequences for different genders. You you explore what happens in the short and long term with with the diagnosis of pox with two individuals, Betty and John, these hypothetical kind of people, who have a brief sexual encounter at Bartholomew Fair and which results in John getting the pox. Can you tell me more about Betty and John and how they might have found themselves at the fair? What would have happened immediately after? I loved this little thought experiment of walking through what happens to these two people after this encounter.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  I discovered Betty, who is a fictional character from a ballad. So these are songs that were typically sung in taverns, like drink, basically drinking songs. They were pinned up in coffee houses and taverns and they were set to music. And I searched through the ballads to try to find out, well, how does venereal disease come up in these songs? And I found the story of Betty, who's a prostitute, who's plying her trade at the Bartholomew Fair, which is this annual cloth fair in the north of London every August. So I kind of did something that is a little controversial among historians, which is I took this document and I kind of extrapolated from it and made up a story using actual historical sources.

• 35:44Speaker 04

  So I used medical cases and account books and letters to kind of piece together what would it have been like to be John, this fictional person I made up? Well, I didn't make him up. He was in the ballad, who's infected by a prostitute at the fair. So there is a lot of historical kind of evidence undergirding what I'm doing, but it is. Is a fictional story and I just, you know, John in the ballad is described as this country rube. This guy, this young guy is like in the big city for the fair, trying to, you know, have a couple of fun days where he buys a bunch of trinkets to bring home to his family. And the thought experiment I do is, first of all, I looked at maps and I tried to figure out like, okay, how would he enter the city? What would he have seen and smelled when he came into the city?

• 36:29Speaker 04

  What would it have been like for this guy to show up at this fair, which was a pretty chaotic, overwhelming place, full of stimuli, where he's probably seeing things he's never seen before. Venetian women walking on tight ropes or playing pipes or rides and food and smells. So I tried to kind of imagine what it would have been like to be him. And then also the flip side, what it would have been like to be Betty, this woman who was probably living in a precarious situation. She probably lived in a home with other women who were selling their bodies to make ends meet. How she would have approached him, they probably went behind a tent. So I kind of just tried to imagine what it would be like to do this. And then the, you know,

• 37:13Speaker 04

  the repercussions of it, like John realizing that he was infected and that he loses all of his money. Right. So she picks his pocket as they're doing the deed, which comes up again and again in ballads. So, and then I kind of just imagined like, okay, well, what symptom would he have had first? Probably it would have burned when he went to the bathroom and he probably would have seen something in his underwear and what would it have looked like? So then I tried to kind of look to medical texts to piece together what people said it looked like. What did your excretions look like? It gets pretty grisly.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  I mean, it does. It was also so fascinating to think of like, how much would he have known beforehand about what to look for or the questions to ask, or if he would have had to consult like a dear friend to be like, hey, man, have you ever seen anything like this? I've got something going on.

• 38:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, it was called the secret disease that you meant, you mentioned that name in part because secrets was slang for genitals. So a woman's genitals were called her secrets.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  Like privates. Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 04

  Exactly. Exactly. But it was also called a secret disease because people didn't want to talk about it. And it was shameful. And it was also. Secretive, like it was the great beguyler, like you, it could be, your symptoms could be chalked up to completely different disorders, if that's what you wanted. So, a lot of people did consult their friends and kind of ask around and read, there are these, all these books that exist at the time that are basically like, this is how you tell whether or not you're clapped, or whether or not you might have a more innocuous disease like the whites, which is basically a pre-modern yeast infection, but it can look like a clap. So, there's like, medical texts, popular medical books that people would, probably not very many people

• 39:01Speaker 04

  could afford to purchase, but maybe would borrow or access, or purchase if they could afford it, to try to parse out these symptoms. And there was a whole industry around this question.

• 39:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, absolutely, there was. And, so, let's say that, you know, John self-diagnoses, or has a friend to, gives him advice and says, you know, I think, I think you, I think this is what you've got, you've, you've got the pox, man. Where does he go next? Like, a, a, as you said, you've got these, these advertisements where you can get a clap cure, a pox treatment all over the city. Like, where would he see these advertisements? How would that knowledge get to him? And then how would he find the right one for him?

• 39:40Speaker 04

  So, if, it really depends on how much money you have. So, if you're very poor, you have nothing, you wouldn't be able to buy anything, you wouldn't be able to hire somebody. So, you would probably go to what was called a pox hospital, a pretty punishing, unpleasant place. We know a lot about pox hospitals, because hospitals have a lot of records. So, we have like, pretty amazing histories about these institutions. And then, if you're really well off, you would probably hire somebody, you would probably hire a surgeon, or a healer, or just like, someone random without any credentials who claims they can heal this disease. You might move into their house, maybe because you want to undergo a lengthy treatment that causes a lot of conspicuous side effects, sweating, spitting.

• 40:25Speaker 04

  And you don't want to do that in public. So you might move into their home. Maybe they have a sweat bath, a bathing house you can use. Or and this this person would tailor, customize their treatment plan just for you, just for your bodily constitution, your situation, your symptoms. That would be very expensive. So then there's everybody else. And I decided John was in the everybody else category. He's new to the city. He probably doesn't have a lot of money. Well, he has no money because she picked his pockets. So he is kind of lumped in with everyone else, which is the kind of the population I was trying to recover. We know the most about those two ends, the very poor and the very well off, because that's where they're the most sources. But everybody else would probably go to the book stall lining the Royal Exchange

• 41:10Speaker 04

  or the apothecary shop or the chocolate shop or wherever to try to get one of these over the counter cures. They're cheaper, they're more accessible, they're quicker, they're not as conspicuous. And they're just more accessible. And the chaos of the city can make the shame of the shopping experience not as big of a problem. So and then there's people, John wouldn't fit into this category. Then they're the people who would make their own cures at home, who would need to have not just the resources to do that, but the know how to do that. And it's it's complicated work.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  I want to talk more about these clap cures, these these people who found themselves producing and selling these treatments. How did they find themselves designing and selling these treatments?

• 41:59Speaker 04

  Some of them say their secret recipes passed down from my grandfather. You know, they claim to have some sort of lineage. Others who are new to the city, because remember, this is the time where there's just this huge influx of immigrants to the city to make money. This is a really growing urban area. It's claim, oh, I learned this on an Italian warship. Or I learned this from treating the Turkish emperor's brother. So they kind of claim to have foreign knowledge, exotic foreign knowledge. So they're all different ways people claim they get the knowledge to produce these things. At the end of the day, it seems like a lot of people were just Making more or less the same stuff, like I don't know what was in a lot of them because

• 42:42Speaker 04

  they don't say, they're secretive. I don't know how different the different pills and tinctures that were being sold really were, but I do know from looking at what's what we do know about how they were made, they were horrifying. A lot of them had turpentine in them, a lot of them had mercury, which would cause that prodigious sweating. It would cause mercury poisoning, right? We know to be mercury poisoning would make your teeth fall out. If you ingest it, it, you know, makes you spit a lot. So there's one person who said they spit, they salivated five pints a day.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 43:17Speaker 04

  If you, and then it would also be used as an ointment, as a solvent, and you would rub it on your body and it would make you sweat. And the idea was, this was logical within the day. The idea was, oh, if you have stuff coming out, that's the poison, that's the venom coming out. That's good, that's healthful, this is good. So, you know, we see it and we think, that's a terrible idea. Do not eat mercury and turpentine. But they had a really different medical logic.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  To show that, hey, this is doing something to you, therefore it must be doing the right thing to you.

• 43:47Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  Thinking about the number of advertisements that you found and this map, this beautiful map that you made, I just love it so much. I think it also just shows that it was a kind of a good business model to go into this. At 20% of a lifetime risk of developing venereal disease, that means a lot of cures are going to be sold.

• 44:07Speaker 04

  Yes. And I think that, you know, we know this to be true. Like, a lot of people had this disease and a lot of people got in on the game to treat it because you could make money doing it. It was, and a lot of the ways these guys who were selling these cures were trying to kind of compete with each other is they would accuse each other of greed, of doing exactly what you're saying. Just, oh, you're just a cobbler. You don't have a medical background. You don't have a secret tincture that was passed down to you from your grandfather like me. You're just like a tinkerer who's trying to get in on the game. So they, they knew that and they used that as, you know, a way of kind of fighting with each other.

• 44:42Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, I mean, competition must have been quite stiff and with so many different people out there, you had to stand out in some way or another. But then there was also, as you said, this flip side of people who were making home remedies based off of recipes. What do these recipes look like? Not in terms of like what ingredients were there, but where were they found? What types of books? Or were they just scraps of paper? How was, how would someone come across this knowledge?

• 45:08Speaker 04

  These were found in what were called recipe books. And we think of cooking recipes when you use the word recipe. But these recipe books would usually be combinations of cookery, medicine, and cosmetics. Sometimes they would be organized. Sometimes they'd be all one of those three categories. Sometimes they would be a mix. And they were basically a very practical how-to guides. And they'd be organized, sometimes they'd be indexed. So these are, were incredibly valuable books. They were collections of domestic knowledge of, you know, non-learned, everyday household medical knowledge and cookery and cosmetics. And they were passed down. They were valued possessions. They were often bequeathed to kin.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  And you can see in the handwriting of them, the layers of people who passed down these documents and amended them, right? You can see the handwriting change or people write in the margin, "This didn't work." Or, "I tried this." Or changing the quantities or the ingredients. So you can kind of see it in the handwriting and the crossing outs over time. Oftentimes, we don't know who wrote them or who the original compiler is, so it can be a little confusing. But there are tons of these that exist in archives. And I just started going through them and looking for, okay, were people treating themselves at home for this really stigmatizing disease? Do we see recipes? And we do. There are lots of them.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  You touched a bit on this in terms of who would be able to go out and buy a cure versus treat at home, but who did have the resources and the know-how, who had these access to these recipe books to make these at-home remedies?

• 46:46Speaker 04

  What I love about recipe books is it's one of the places, at least in the history of medicine in the pre-modern era, where we see a lot of women writing. So it's harder to find a lot of women practitioners. We know there were a lot of female practitioners, but they didn't keep casebooks in the great numbers, the same way male practitioners did. So it's just harder to find historical evidence of female practitioners writing things down. Recipe books are one of these places where there's just a lot written by women. There's a lot of recipes by men, too. It's not an all-female genre by any means, but we get more women writing about medical practice than we get otherwise. And a lot of these women, A, you need to be literate.

• 47:29Speaker 04

  So that means it's by default the highest levels of society, right? If you're impoverished, if you're barely making ends meet, if you're Betty at the fair selling sex, you're not going to probably have a recipe book or keep a recipe book. So these are pretty like middling to upper-status women who have the time and the literacy skills and the resources, because to make these recipes, they are not, they are no joke. They are complicated and very technical, and in many ways, not that different from what you would buy at the bookshop or what you would get if you hired a healer and lived at his house for three weeks. They require sometimes equipment, glassware, cookware, and this was a time when people didn't have a lot of stuff. So it wasn't nothing.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  And then you had to source all the ingredients, which could be hard to get. So I think we in our minds think, oh, well, surely you grow them in your garden. And yes, you could grow, if you had a garden, right? We're talking about urban London. But if you did have a garden, you could probably grow a lot of these things that you needed for these recipes, but you also probably had to go out into the city and source some pretty hard-to-get ingredients. Some of them required amber grease from Wales, some required gold dust. So this was not just something any old person could do.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  A lot of this diagnosis, it seems to be self-diagnosed. People were recognizing symptoms in themselves and then saying, okay, I think I have this. I'm going to go find treatment myself. But then there were some people who consulted or who had access or were able to consult a physician. And it was very striking and not surprising necessarily, I think, given the time, but like how physicians almost seem to operate on the basis of assuming that their patient was lying about what was going on. Can you tell me more about what that experience would be like from a patient perspective who goes and consults with a doctor about symptoms of venereal disease that they're not sure what they are?

• 49:24Speaker 04

  It's hard to say what was going on in patients' minds because, of course, we only have the writing from the other side, right? We only have the practitioner's writing. So it's a fun thought experiment. And my guess is that often they legitimately didn't know what they had. And I think more often they did know and they were trying to get, and I don't want to say they were lying, but they were trying to get the most out of the situation. And that could be to try to save face or to save their reputation or save their marriage or whatever. That could be just trying to get the treatment they thought they needed without the diagnosis. So you see this time and again of them, of patients trying to kind of get a scurvy. It was usually scurvy because there was something about the symptoms that one could really easily be replaced by the other.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  Get the diagnosis that's innocuous, that doesn't have the shame, doesn't have the stigma, but that comes with the treatment that does the work of treating this because they're treating symptoms, right? This is before the treatment of actual disease. So I think there is a little bit of truth to this sense that you get from reading the casebooks by practitioners, that there is a little unreliability from the patients. But we can never know because it's all through the eyes of these practitioners who are very keen to make themselves look good.

• 50:39Speaker 03

  Right, which is then part of that is like, well, I am an excellent doctor because I saw past the patient's lies and their efforts to conceal.

• 50:47Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  We've touched on this a little bit throughout, and I wanna, I wanna end just by kind of asking more about these parallels that you have seen throughout researching for this, throughout your experience, you know, in this, in this early modern London, what parallels you see between venereal disease then and disease now, or just medicine then and medicine now, and some of the things that you observed throughout this process?

• 51:15Speaker 04

  I think we already talked about the market forces, you know, that this kind of early version of the capitalization of medicine. I think the biggest parallel I found, you know, I was writing this during COVID, most of it during the COVID times when it was pretty bleak, and I just kept thinking about stigma and shame. And I know, you know, COVID's not an STI, it's really different, but there was stigma. There was this kind of like, well, were you wearing a mask? Did you, did you take a PCR? You know, like, there were kind of assumptions people had about proper behavior. And so I, I did spend a lot of time thinking about, like, how do we blame people for diagnoses? And like, what does it mean to have, to get that positive test back and think like, oh, man,

• 51:58Speaker 04

  I should have done this differently, or it was my fault, I didn't do the right thing? So I think I make a lot of connections to HIV in the, in the book, I think, because it's just the most obvious parallel for me, thinking historically about STIs and shame and silencing, and how shameful diseases silence sufferers, you know, the famous activism of the AIDS movement in the 80s was silence equals death. And I don't wanna, you know, glibly compare the pox in the 1700s and 1600s to HIV, because there's immense differences. But I think that role of shame in silencing us and the work of recovering everyday lives of like, how we cope with shameful diseases is a transhistorical truth, something that,

• 52:43Speaker 04

  you know, I'm reading these people's letters, suffering from these diagnoses, and how am I gonna? You know, tell my family and what am I going to do and hiding in the spa town to get treated in secret. And it does feel like there are these kinds of connections to that kind of suffering, that shamefulness and silencing that we see in 1980s New York or today. There are many parallels that I that I saw doing this work. But and I think that's the the cool thing about studying this time period is it's so different from ours. It's so unfamiliar. And yet, there are these parallels that are that that kind of shine through. And it gives us kind of the clarity for thinking about the world we live in.

• 53:27Speaker 03

  Some things being timeless in some ways and the shame of disease, regardless of the type. But, you know, I know that some disease carries with it more shame than others. But I I just want to thank you so much for such a fascinating book, such a wonderful conversation. It has been so enlightening to chat with you and get more into the nitty gritty of venereal disease. So, thank you.

• 53:48Speaker 04

  Thank you so much. I appreciated this. This was really fun.

• 54:10Speaker 03

  A big thank you again to Dr. Olivia Weisser for taking the time to chat with me. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to learn more, check out our website, thispodcastwillkillyou.com, where I'll post a link to where you can find The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London, as well as a link to Dr. Weisser's website, where you can find her other incredible work. And don't forget, you can check out our website for all sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to transcripts, quarantini recipes, show notes and references for all of our episodes, links to merch, our bookshop.org affiliate page, our Goodreads list, a firsthand account form, and music by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which, thank

• 54:55Speaker 03

  you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode. And all of our episodes. Thank you to Leona Scolacci and Tom Bry Fogel for our excellent audio mixing. And thanks to you listeners for listening. I hope you liked this episode and are loving being part of the TPW KY Book Club. A special thank you, as always, to our fantastic patrons. Your support means everything. Until next time, keep washing those hands.

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