Venereal Disease in the Eightteenth-Century Imagination

The good thing about venereal disease is that it isn’t serious—or at least, it certainly didn’t seem so to a good many eighteenth-century writers and artists. In Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748), the enterprising young hero casually contracts, and just as casually cures, an infection that he caught somewhere “in the course of an amour.” In Edward Kimber’s novel The Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson (1783), the protagonist laughingly recalls the gullible friend who “got into a tête-à-tête discourse with a coronet” at a masquerade, only to discover the following day that his conquest was actually “a woman of the town,” who had not only prompted him to spend a great deal of money, but also—and this is the punchline—given him “the French Disease.” And in his salacious tell-all autobiography, the “profest Rake and Whoremaster” Gilbert Langley recalls with amusement how he and his comrade, enjoying a period of unrestrained debauchery, “had almost drain’d our Pockets...and got the French Disease.” Whether Langley and his friend had “almost” contracted the infection or definitely caught it is immaterial: certainly it doesn’t prevent either man from forming designs on a beautiful young woman to whom Langley—with no further mention of the disease—soon after proposes marriage.

Admittedly, such representations emerged from a culture in which venereal disease was widely believed to be curable, or at least treatable: as the notoriously debauched Earl of Rochester put it, even the most extravagant use of prostitutes could raise no concern when “the worst you can fear is but a disease, / And diseases, you know, will admit of a cure.” Yet diaries, letters, and other historical records are full of references to debilitating and disfiguring symptoms—and even Rochester’s poetic boasts take on a grim irony given his own death from the most horrific complications of tertiary syphilis at the age of thirty-three. How could so many writers and artists have depicted venereal disease as unserious—not just dismissing it as untroubling, but deliberately invoking it as an object of amusement or celebration—when young men like Rochester were clearly dying from it?

Many historians have argued that there was a more relaxed attitude towards sexuality in the aftermath of the Restoration, but no enthusiasm for libertinage can quite account for the radical split in this period between the brutal physiological realities of venereal disease and its insouciant, even cheerful, treatment in art and literature. While Restoration and eighteenth-century culture undoubtedly supported a wide range of different attitudes towards the disease at different moments and among different groups, the many dismissive and celebratory accounts of venereal infection clearly had something other than strict medical accuracy in mind. They were informed less by the grisly details of living with an infection than by broader questions about who or what that infection might signify.

The “maleness” of venereal disease in the eighteenth-century imagination coalesced around two particular groups: officers—a term that I am using very broadly here, to denote military or naval personnel of all ranks—and gentlemen, my umbrella term for men of leisure, with or without a title. There was some rationale for this association in that both groups were believed to be inherently prone to promiscuity: titled lords and leisured gentlemen had the time and money to pursue sexual conquests and to support multiple mistresses and prostitutes; military men were believed to suffer under their removal from the stabilizing influence of domestic life, and to seek comfort in the transient pleasures of the whorehouse. Both groups were also traditionally representative of male power, with the gentleman possessing social, financial, or political clout, and the officer embodying manly ideals of physical strength and military skill. Accordingly, in connecting officers and gentlemen with venereal infection, writers and artists also strengthened an imaginative association between the disease and male power—and some works even represented the infection as a badge of sexual or social prowess.

For the elegant man of fashion, venereal disease was all the rage: according to some Restoration and eighteenth-century commentators, the infection circulated among the beau monde like a hot new commodity, signaling a lifestyle of pleasure and luxury. Some even referred to it as the “modish” or “fashionable distemper.” While remarks on the fashionableness of elite male infection almost certainly belied the prevalence of venereal disease among poorer men, it was as much the amused tone of such comments as their assumptions about the exclusive nature of infection that jarred with reality. Even a “moral drama” like Bickerstaff’s Unburied Dead (1743) played the venereal disease vogue for laughs: in the play’s opening scene, a group of undertakers laments the increasing incidence of infection—not because it is killing off the population, but because it is damaging a brisk side business in cadavers for medical dissection: “This fashionable Distemper is a great Loss to us,” complains the undertaker Quicandead; “we can seldom get a Body sound enough for the Surgeons; they object, Rotten Bones will never make good Skeletons.”

The association of venereal disease with Frenchness seemed further to cement its imaginative attribution to men of fashion, with writers comparing the alleged enthusiasm for “French pox” with the rage for other Gallic imports. In a satire on Restoration courtiers Samuel Butler joked that healthy men might even pretend to have the disease just to appear de rigueur:

By sudden Starts, and Shrugs, and Groans

They Pretend to Aches in their Bones,

To Scabs and Botches, and lay Trains

To prove their Running of the Reins;

And, lest they should seem destitute

Of any Mange, that’s in Repute,

And be behind hand with the Mode

Will swear to Chrystallin and Node.

Here, as in many other denouncements of the “fashionable distemper,” it is the Francophile aristocracy who seem to constitute the satirist's primary target. No wonder, then, that one satirist contended “People of Quality” preferred a French servant to an English one; after all, a Parisian fellow was far more likely to be able to “assist his Lord in the Cure of a fashionable distemper” than a “dull, plodding English Booby.”

Both the disease’s alleged continental origins and its association with youthful male virility made it a common feature in stories of the Grand Tour, and an ill-timed infection provided comic relief in many an upper-class male coming-of-age narrative. Indeed, among the many casual references to venereal disease in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature are anecdotes attesting to the amusing predictability of such infections among “young Gentlemen, during their Minority, and before they arrive to Years of Maturity”: in this context, venereal disease seems to be much like cystic acne, wet dreams, or any other of the cringeworthy but fundamentally untroubling conditions that characterize male adolescence.

For writers who wished to champion a leisured male lifestyle, the association of venereal disease with upper-class masculinity could also offer a surprisingly productive means of defending elite male prerogatives. In a remarkable number of Restoration comedies—William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), Thomas D’Urfey’s The Fond Husband (1677), Aphra Behn’s The City Heiress (1682), John Crowne’s City Politiques (1683), and Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift (1696), among others—male infections correlate with elevated social status, and often (seemingly paradoxically) with sexual or physical prowess as well. In Behn’s play, for example, the hero’s pox poses no impediment to his pursuit of the heiress of the title; if anything, Tom Wilding’s infection adds to his desirability as a lover, by sharpening the contrast between his own sexual confidence and the anxious ambition displayed by his uncle and rival, Sir Timothy Treat-all.

Other texts and images connected sexual infections with military and naval officers. Within this demographic, too, venereal disease was identified as a routine feature of adulthood, with surgeons dispatched to the field or ship expecting to deal with the casualties of sex as well as of war: indeed, the satirist Ned Ward wryly remarked that, aboard a naval vessel, “one Pocky Whore brings the Surgeon more Grist in than a thousand French Cannon.” Many medical texts reinforced the association by presenting officers as case studies, and some specifically remarked on the relaxed attitude to infection among the troops. To use the tactful phrase employed by army physician Donald Munro, military men were apparently “not shy in owning Complaints of that Kind.”

Condoms were not only routinely represented using military language and closely associated with military personnel; they were also rumored to have been invented by a colonel in the British army. One comic encomium on the “device,” a 1744 mock-epic entitled The Machine, or Love’s Preservative, uses the association of officers with venereal infection in order to commend condoms as a vital instrument in preserving national security. Identifying venereal disease as a threat to all British men, the poem lauds the prophylactic’s alleged creator, “Colonel Cundum,” as a hero whose invention has come to play a vital role in guarding “Albion’s Safety.”

Although the speaker of The Machine does observe that a “willing Maid” might use a condom in order to avoid an unplanned pregnancy, the poem as a whole classifies condoms as items primarily of service to men—and primarily of use in preventing venereal disease:

Happy the Man, in whose close Pocket’s found,

Whether with Green or Scarlet Ribbon bound,

A well made Cundum; he nor dreads the Ills

Of Cordees, Shanker, Boluses, or Pills;

But arm’d thus boldly wages am’rous Fight

With Transport-feigning Whore, in Danger’s Spight.

Here, as in many other works of the period, sex is presumed to involve a male and a female partner, but only the male partner seems to require a prophylactic to prevent infection—and once again, the language of military conflict is used to celebrate libertinage: the speaker compares the courage of the condom-wearing lover to that of “Great Ajax…the Grecian Chief” who, “prepar’d / With seven-fold Shield, the Trojan Fury dar’d.” By contrast, the “hot Youth” who neglects to place a “sheathing Scabbard on his Metal Blade” is stricken with sores, “Heat of Urine” and penile discharge—all the “Sad Symptoms of a Thousand Woes his Due, / For Vent’ring all unarm’d to th’hostile Field, / And slighting Safety in Minerva’s Shield.”

The same privileging of male prerogative colors The Machine’s comparison of commercial sex with warfare, as the speaker’s martial vocabulary at times implicates prostitutes as the “enemy”: one “Wench unchast” is described as having a “polluted Touch”; another “foul Fair-One” is described as living in filthy rooms; a third, soliciting men on the streets, is described as a “Nymph insidious.” Yet these epithets, while they malign “polluted” prostitutes, never extend into a condemnation of either prostitutes in general or the system of prostitution at large: quite the contrary, the poem’s opening lines commend the nation’s “Whores thrice magnificent,” celebrating not only those who pleasure kings and employ the “wanton Hours of Garter’d Lords,” but also those who “strole in meaner Plight” at Temple Bar and in Drury Lane. Like the condom, the robust prostitute is identified as a point of national pride, and the poet’s exhortations to use condoms appear to be aimed as much at preserving Britain’s tradition of transactional sex as at safeguarding the health and security of the nation’s menfolk.

Indeed, the poem concludes with a call to arms, as the speaker not only invites his male reader to go forth and “swive each Night” with the protection of a condom, but specifically suggests that he satisfy his “best” desires with an “Exstatic Harlot.” Condemning “queer” and “filthy” practices like “flogging,” “Huffling, Gigging, Semigigging, Larking,” and “Barking,” the speaker insists: “Rather than deal in such unnatural Ways / I’d risk the Pox and naked swive Nan Hayes.” This concluding pronouncement, with its imagined choice between unprotected heterosexual vaginal sex and allegedly “safer” alternative practices, at the same time that it confirms the text’s privileging of heterosexual male desire, also undermines the emphasis on sexual safety, by reinforcing the connection between venereal infection and masculine prowess. The template for “good” sex involves a virile male consumer and a compliant prostitute—and even risky commercial sex is apparently preferable to emasculating practices like masturbation, flogging, or fellatio. Paradoxically, then, despite its best efforts to promote the condom as a manly accessory, The Machine ultimately reinforces a conception of male sexuality that favors risky pre- or extramarital adventure over the safety of sex within marriage. If nothing else, the poem’s speaker suggests, at least a bad case of the pox will prove you’re not a masturbator.

This Fashionable Distemper. By Noelle Gallagher.  Lapham’s Quarterly , February  6, 2019.

Adapted from Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination, by Noelle Gallagher.

Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination is a lively interdisciplinary study of how venereal disease was represented in eighteenth-century British literature and art. By unpicking the slang, symbolism and wordplay through which VD was usually represented, it sheds new light on a subject which was often shrouded in secrecy, and will fascinate anyone interested in the history of literature, art, medicine, and sexuality.

NOTCHES: In a few sentences, what is your book about?

Gallagher: Itch, Clap, Pox explores the weird and wonderful cultural life of venereal diseases like the itch (genital scabies), the clap (gonorrhoea), and the pox (syphilis) in eighteenth-century literature and graphic art. While we have a great deal of scholarship on the diagnosis, experience, and treatment of these conditions in “real life,” Itch, Clap, Pox asks what we might learn about eighteenth-century society from considering how they were depicted in novels, poems, plays, cartoons, joke books, and the like.

NOTCHES: How did you become interested in the history of sexuality, and what drew you to this particular topic?

Gallagher: I’ve always been fascinated by human sexuality, but I was starting work on another project—a book about the intersections between satire and medicine—when I began to notice all the wacky references to venereal disease in the literature of the period, and to wonder why no one had commented on the VD subtext in works like Tristram Shandy.  So much of the material I was finding was outrageous, eccentric, shocking, or funny; eventually I decided to abandon the satire project and focus on the clap and the pox!

NOTCHES: Your book explores the representation of venereal disease in literary and visual sources. Why was this such an interesting topic for eighteenth-century writers and artists?

Gallagher: I think there were several reasons for the popularity of the topic.  One would have been the prevalence—or perceived prevalence—of venereal disease in eighteenth-century Britain—but another would have been what scholars like Kevin Siena and Margaret Healy have identified as the potency of venereal disease as a “cultural symbol.” Satires depicting the Prince Regent’s mistress as a pox-riddled prostitute or warnings about Scottish immigrants carrying “Scotch itch and Scotch pox” into England—these images have a visceral power to shock or offend us, but they also give us unusual insight into the fears preoccupying the eighteenth-century white British establishment.

NOTCHES: How far does the portrayal of VD in art and literature reflect the reality of these conditions for eighteenth-century sufferers?

Gallagher: That’s a great question.  One of the most fascinating finds for me in researching this book was realizing that there is a vast disparity between what we know about the grim realities of living with venereal disease in this period and the often comedic treatment of the condition in art and literature. While historians reading diaries, letters, and medical records have tended to conclude that the infection was universally loathed and feared, many prominent literary works from the period dismiss the disease as laughable, and some even celebrate venereal infection as a sign of virility and sexual courage. By focusing on imaginative portrayals of the disease rather than historical records of it, I’ve attempted to demonstrate that the relationship between disease discourse and disease biology is much more complicated than we might otherwise assume.

NOTCHES: Itch, Clap, Pox is a book about sex and sexuality, but it also addresses themes including gender, race and commerce. How do these topics relate to eighteenth-century ideas about VD?

Gallagher: Itch, Clap, Pox argues that venereal disease was not just a disturbing phenomenon in its own right; it also became a powerful metaphor for expressing broader anxieties about social, cultural, and economic change in eighteenth-century Britain.  The four chapters of the book examine the association of venereal disease with elite masculinity, prostitution, foreignness, and physical “deformities” like the flattened nose.  I argue that because venereal disease was itself regarded as ambiguous and changeable—it entered the body covertly, could lie dormant for decades at a time, and seemed capable of mimicking many other medical conditions—it offered a powerful metaphor for examining racial, social, and sexual differences that seemed equally vague and changeable in the eighteenth-century world.   It provided a means by which British writers and artists could reconsider (sometimes to uphold, but at other times to question or undermine) the fundamental institutions on which eighteenth-century British society was based: patriarchy, global consumer capitalism, nationalism, and white supremacy.

NOTCHES: How did you research the book, and what particular challenges did this subject (and/ or this set of sources) pose?

Gallagher: One of the biggest difficulties—and greatest pleasures—of researching this book was in trying to puzzle through the period’s more obscure references to venereal disease.  In part because the condition was poorly understood and believed to be ambiguous in nature—physicians and medical writers from the period often described it as a “shapeshifter” or “mimic”—and in part because venereal disease was still a risqué or taboo subject, many of the references to the condition in eighteenth-century fiction, poetry, and graphic art were conveyed using coded imagery, wordplay, euphemistic language, or puns.  I often found myself reading texts that were clearly intended to be funny, but not understanding why: 6 glorious years of being the hanger-on who can’t get the joke.

NOTCHES: Did you find anything that particularly surprised you? And/or did you come across anything particularly interesting which you had to leave out of the book?

Gallagher: There was originally a section in the book on George Foote’s brilliant 1752 comedy Taste.  Foote’s play follows a con man who tricks socially-aspiring collectors of antiquities into buying worthless pieces of junk, and its account of the sale of a “noseless Venus” picks up on many of the motifs and images that run through eighteenth-century satires about noseless venereal disease sufferers. (One of the rarer symptoms of tertiary syphilis is the collapse of the nasal cartilage, making the sufferer appear flat-faced or “noseless”).  Yet while Taste makes great comic work of the Venus and displays the same social conservatism, anti-semitism, and racism that run through many other “no-nose” jokes from this period, it doesn’t ever explicitly refer to venereal disease—a difficulty pointed out to me by my friend and colleague Hal Gladfelder when he read the text in draft.  Identifying all those coded references to venereal disease was a challenge and a pleasure, but it also meant that I occasionally “followed my own nose” a little too earnestly, and ended up veering too far away from the topic of the book! I was lucky to have readers like Hal to keep me on track.

NOTCHES: How do you see your book being most effectively used in the classroom?

Gallagher: Itch, Clap, Pox brings together medical, historical, literary, and artistic materials—but I wanted it to be accessible to scholars at every level, from first-year undergraduates to established professionals. I know it has been assigned on a couple of postgraduate medical humanities courses, but I also hope it will be of use for students of eighteenth-century literature, art history, the history of medicine, and/or the history of gender and sexuality.  Since each of the book’s four chapters focuses on a different concept, I expect different students will be interested in different chapters: students of gender and sexuality might read the first two chapters (which are about masculinity and prostitution, respectively), whereas students interested in the history of medicine, scientific racism, or the history of eugenics might focus on the final chapter about nasal “deformities.”  There are also prolonged sections on individual works, so art historians might use the material on Hogarth, Gillray, or Cruikshank, while literary critics might use the extended discussions of Rochester’s poetry, or novels by Sterne, Smollett, Fielding, and the like.  In short, I’m hopeful the book will have something for (almost) everyone.

NOTCHES: What are you working on now that this book is published?

Gallagher: I’ve just started working on a project about bodily secretions.  Itch, Clap, Pox may be followed by “snot, sweat, and tears”; we’ll see how it goes!

Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination. By  Noelle Gallagher. Notches,  April 11, 2019.

Yale Books

‘When I came to Louisa’s, I felt myself stout and well, and most courageously did I plunge into the fount of love, and had vast pleasure,’ James Boswell wrote in his diary on a winter’s night in 1763, after an assignation with a beautiful Covent Garden actress. But the next day ‘came sorrow. Too, too plain was Signor Gonorrhoea.’ The arrival of the Signor was heralded by ‘damned twinges’, ‘scalding heat’ and the excrescence of ‘deep-tinged loathsome matter’. ‘I rose very disconsolate, having rested very ill by the poisonous infection raging in my veins and anxiety and vexation boiling in my breast. What! thought I, can this beautiful, this sensible, and this agreeable woman be so sadly defiled?’ Louisa refused to apologise and even hinted that she might not be the guilty party. ‘Thus ended my intrigue with the fair Louisa,’ Boswell wrote, ‘from which I expected at least a winter’s safe copulation. It is indeed very hard.’ Within a few months he had encountered a ‘fresh, agreeable young girl’, again without the protection of his ‘armour’.

Boswell was plagued by venereal disease and thought his bouts were worse because ‘I am of a warm constitution: a complexion, as physicians say, exceedingly amorous, and therefore suck in the poison more deeply.’ Venereal disease was ubiquitous in London during the 18th century and syphilis in particular reached epidemic levels. Contemporary commentators warned that the ‘clap’ (gonorrhoea) and the ‘pox’ (syphilis) were rife; towards the end of the century almost a third of the patients in St Thomas’s were in its ‘foul wards’, for those suffering from pox symptoms. Doctors prescribed mercury pills; home remedies were equally alarming. At least one vigilant madam took to scrubbing out her prostitutes: ‘She us’d often to say of her Girls, These Chitty-Faces make me undergo more Fatigue than a Vintner’s Boy, for I scower their Insides as clean, every Night, as if I made use of Shot and a Bottle-Brush.’

Gonorrhoea and syphilis were believed to be successive stages of the same infection rather than two separate diseases. The clap could be asymptomatic, but more usually involved a feeling of burning on urination or skin contact (leading to jokes about women having to deal with penises as ‘hot’ as ‘curry’d and spiced’ sausages) and painful swelling in the testicles. The appearance of ‘shankers’ (ulcers) on the body meant the pox, which lived up to its name by producing – sometimes after a delay of a few weeks or months – suppurating, vile-smelling pocks; muscle and bone pain; fatigue and a high fever. All these things went away eventually, and it was easy to assume that the disease had been cured; but for the unlucky ones it came back with a vengeance in a final tertiary phase, eating away at bones and muscles, collapsing the bridge of the nose, and leading to blindness, stroke and dementia. It also stayed in the family. Children ‘born of infected parents’ were believed to be prone to all kinds of illness – rickets, scurvy, spinal deformity – and could pass on their symptoms with interest to their own offspring.

None of this prevented the pox from having a certain glamour. During the Restoration and the early 18th century, the fashionableness of (male) sexual promiscuity made bodily evidence of it fashionable too. Bernard Mandeville, who never avoided controversy, argued in his essay ‘A Modest Defence of Publick Stews’ (1724) that ‘Whoring’ was ‘now-a-days mistaken for Gallantry and Politeness’ and any resulting disease considered a badge of honour. ‘A hale, robust Constitution is esteem’d a Mark of Ungentility; and a healthy young Fellow is look’d upon with the same View, as if he had spent his Life in a Cottage.’ Young men on the Grand Tour contracted the pox in brothels in France and Italy and wrote home as if it were all part of the adventure (‘the whole account of their travels is generally no more than a journal of how many bottles they have drunk, and what loose amours they have had,’ a newspaper commented sourly). France was thought to be ‘the Hotbed to our English Youth, where they are immaturely ripened, and therefore soon become rotten and corrupt at home’. ‘The air of the Southern parts of France is warm, and impregnating,’ a gentlemen tourists’ guide of 1766 warned, ‘consequently the women extremely amorous, and the majority of them have it in their power … to confer upon you a certain favour, which if it does not cost you your life, may stick by you all your days.’

The pox was also considered a badge of honour because it was associated with soldiers and sailors (men who were away from their wives for long periods and thought more likely to visit whorehouses and risk the consequences). Symptoms of venereal disease figured as ‘battle scars’ or ‘war wounds’; suffering in war was connected with suffering in love. Even doctors played up the metaphors. The physician John Sintelaer wrote a long treatise on venereal disease called The Scourge of Venus and Mercury (1709), in which he discussed the case of a ‘certain great Officer in the Army’ who ‘had receiv’d a very deep Wound in the Wars of Venus’, and counselled ‘young, raw, unexperienc’d Soldiers’ in those wars not to panic if ‘after an illegal Coition with a suspicious Woman’ they noticed a ‘small Scratch’ or ‘insignificant Pimple’. Condoms – thought of as keeping men safe and ensuring the viability of the prostitution trade – also had military associations because they were said to have been invented by Colonel Condom, doctor to Charles II. Those who wanted to stop the spread of venereal infection used the connection to present protected sex as more heroic than unarmoured. An anonymous mock-epic of 1744, The Machine, or Love’s Preservative (‘In Imitation of Homer and Virgil, and Dryden and Pope’), took the colonel as its hero: ‘In CUNDUM’s Praise/I sing.’ The poem attacks those stupid enough to venture ‘all unarm’d to th’ hostile Field’:

Happy the Man, in whose close Pocket’s found,

Whether with Green or Scarlet Ribbon bound,

A well made CUNDUM; he nor dreads the Ills

Of Cordees, Shanker, Boluses, or Pills;

But arm’d thus boldly wages am’rous Fight

With Transport-feigning Whore, in Danger’s Spight.

Mock-epics aren’t written about real wars, so the treatment here is intended to stick a pin in its subject as it inflates it. Like John Durant Breval’s The Progress of a Rake (1732), another poem in ten cantos which compares the grisly suicide of a young syphilitic to the noble death of Cato, it exposes the absurdity of the comparison and the forms of masculinity it props up.

Women had their own heroic disease narratives. Memoirs of well-known prostitutes and bawds celebrated their protagonists’ survival skills as their feeble clients fell down dead around them. In a Life of the Covent Garden brothel-keeper Jane ‘Mother’ Douglas, Genuine Memoirs of the Late Celebrated Jane D****s (1761), the narrator describes with glee the sufferings of a gentleman foolish enough to pick out ‘one of her French girls’ and trust her with the condom:

He soon afterwards found himself p––––d in the most shocking manner imaginable; and having unfortunately fallen into the hands of an unskilful surgeon, he lost the part which he thought so well secured by the instrument above-mention’d. It was cut off inch by inch, and his groin being covered with buboes, he one day, in the height of misery, took a knife and cut and gash’d himself in a most terrible manner.

In Charles Walker’s Authentick Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues and Adventures of the Celebrated Sally Salisbury (1723), one of Sally’s ‘gallants’ encounters an even worse fate: marriage. A French baron newly arrived in London and eager to ‘Engage in the Field of Love with an English Woman’ has the ‘Damn’d ill Luck to be introduc’d to the Heroine of the History’ and suffers the usual consequences. After he’s cured, he returns to her in a rage, bringing an interpreter to help with the English: ‘You Damn’d Confounded Pocky Whore, I am glad we are met, for now will I give you as many Stripes as I’ve taken Pills, Bolus’s, and other Hellish Slip-slops on your account.’ Sally escapes his uplifted cane by shedding ‘sham Tears’ and claiming she was infected without her knowledge by a previous gentleman who also took her virginity. In an ingeniously stage-managed series of events, the credulous baron is tricked into marrying a local gardener’s daughter in the belief that she is a young lady of quality with jewels and a great fortune; the debts the girl incurs to Sally in getting herself ‘Rigg’d handsomely’ for the role are passed on to her new husband; and he ends up ‘in a Starving Condition’ in the Fleet Prison.

These inversions – high brought low; low elevated (temporarily) high; the triumph of the lesser over the greater – are characteristic of the unsettling social narratives the pox or the clap could be used to tell. As Noelle Gallagher shows in her elegant book, venereal disease was intellectually and imaginatively useful in this period: the obscurity, changeability and shiftiness people saw in its symptoms could be turned outwards. As a metaphor the pox had a rare cultural penetration. Its signs and symbols – the marked cheek; the collapsed nose; the quack doctor with his pills and tonics; the badly patched prostitute – were the lexicon of political cartoons and cheap jestbooks, and could be used to indicate pressure points and signs of weakness in social and economic systems.

Sex could be likened to the economy by way of prostitution, which connoted any undertaking that required dishonouring or corrupting oneself for financial gain. Sex, prostitution and the economy were all connected by venereal disease, which was spread by cash but also spread like cash – circulating, multiplying, creating debtors, being entailed and passed on to heirs. The poet Richard Ames (about whom little is recorded save that ‘wine and women were the great bane of his life and happiness’) put it baldly: ‘For while he nibbles at her Am’rous Trap,/She gets the Mony, but he gets the Clap.’

The structural resemblances between economies and diseases allowed writers to present commercial exchange as rotten and the new monied classes as pox carriers. In ‘The Play-House: A Satyr’ (1689), Robert Gould attacks not only actors and prostitutes but also the surgeons who ‘heap up an Estate by our Debauches’, participating in the pox economy by charging ruinous amounts for ‘cures’: ‘Expensive Malady! where people give/More to be kill’d than many wou’d to live!’ (The bills advertising the wares of venereal disease ‘specialists’ in satirical prints – an advert for Dr Richard Rock’s pills on a billboard in Hogarth’s Four Times of Day: Morning (1736), for instance – suggest a similar view.) In the ‘moral drama’ Bickerstaff’s Unburied Dead (1743), the greed of the undertakers who deal with poxed corpses points to a connection between rotten money and rotten morals. ‘This fashionable Distemper is a great Loss to us,’ Mr Quicandead observes to Mr Seizecorpse. ‘We can seldom get a Body sound enough for the Surgeons; they object, Rotten Bones will never make good Skeletons.’ Undertakers weren’t the only targets. The spendthrift Prince Regent, notorious for his hedonism, was a living incarnation of the intersection of sex, money, prostitution and disease. In Isaac Cruikshank’s cartoon A Meeting of Creditors (1795) he looks bloated and unhappy, hands shielding his crotch, in the middle of an angry crowd of pock-marked madams waving bills.

Power, access and votes could be paid for, and so prostitution and pox became part of political discourse too. The prince’s Catholic mistress Maria Fitzherbert was depicted in several prints connecting royal access with profligacy and infection. In The King’s Evil (1786), she is opening a package of pox medicine while the prince stands sullenly next to her with a long but drooping sword sticking out from beneath his folded arms. Disease had been used to smear those who got close to monarchs or ministers for at least a hundred years. The most brutal late-17th-century attacks were poetic libels, circulated in manuscript to generate gossip and controversy and in some cases printed in the notorious miscellany Poems on Affairs of State. ‘Portsmouth, that pocky bitch,’ began one piece of 1680 on Louise de Kéroualle, the Catholic duchess of Portsmouth and Charles II’s mistress,

   A damn’d Papistical drab,

An ugly deform’d witch,

   Eaten up with mange and scab.

This French hag’s pocky bum

   So powerful is of late,

Although it’s both blind and dumb,

   It rules both Church and State.

You can take a lot from this – that the long 18th century wasn’t always (or even mostly) polite and sentimental; that its poetry certainly wasn’t – but it’s essentially making a simple connection between political influence and disease. Another libel on ‘the damn’d dirty Dutchess’ calls her a ‘Pickled Pocky Whore’, claims that she smells worse than ‘the thing that beshit us having got the wild squirt’ and likens her to Edward IV’s mistress Jane Shore, who according to a 17th-century ballad died naked by the side of a road: ‘Jane Shore was more wholesome when dead in a Ditch.’ Some refinement is attempted in a poem by the Earl of Dorset on the Countess of Dorchester, James II’s mistress, which gives its target a delicate pseudonym, but the emphasis is still on her ‘Pox’ and ravaged looks. ‘Can any Dresses find a way/To stop the Approaches of Decay,/And mend a ruin’d Face?’

*

Male court favourites were attacked too, particularly if they weren’t English. Syphilis was colloquially referred to as the ‘French disease’, which made it available to xenophobic commentary. Genital scabies, a condition often identified as venereal, was the ‘Scotch itch’, on the basis that the supposed poverty and squalor north of the border created the right conditions for its spread. No one was easier to smear with both the French pox and the Scotch itch than the 3rd Earl of Bute, George III’s childhood tutor who became his prime minister, and was popularly supposed to have ruined the Seven Years’ War for Britain by negotiating an overly generous peace settlement with the French. His ‘doctoring’ of government and the peace translated into opposition prints of a tartan-clad quack prescribing bad medicine, as in The Evacuations: or an Emetic for Old Englands Glorys (1762), which has him gleefully forcing Britannia to spew up her territorial gains into a bucket. His quackery is connected with itchiness and the pox in The Mountebank (1762), in which he’s shown addressing a crowd of eager Scotsmen afflicted with the ‘Gowden Itch’ (greed, or a hunger for gold); the remedy, he tells them, lies in England, from where he’s gathered (or stolen) the ‘Gowden Lozenges’ that ‘cured’ his own itching avarice. The pox comes in here through the glimpse we get of George III’s mother, Augusta, Bute’s alleged mistress and the reason for his privileged access, stage-managing the spectacle from behind the curtains of what looks like a four-poster bed.

The lozenges in this caricature are two things – pills and ingots – but given their elongated shape and the proximity of Augusta’s bed they’re also potentially a third thing. Puns, verbal and visual, are everywhere in representations of venereal disease once you start to see them; they are carriers, circulated and recirculated, bits of language or symbols that have become infected, besmirched. Innuendos start life as a way of avoiding saying something (‘muff’, for instance, which emerged in cant dictionaries at the end of the 17th century), but over time became a way of saying it directly: by the end of the 18th century no one could be in doubt what the presence of a fur muff on a lady in a satirical print signified.

To contemporaries, writing about curried sausages or misfiring pistols was funny in two ways: in the ‘straight’ sense in which a decoded innuendo is funny, and in a secondary sense that came with repeated, playful usage (and had an additional importance in the case of words like ‘sausage’, where the suggestion required no decoding). The phrase ‘Pandora’s box’, for example, used popularly to mean infected vagina – as in Ames’s couplet ‘Aches, Buboes, Shankers, Nodes and Poxes,/Are hid in Females Dam’d Pandora’s Boxes’ – had sufficient amusement value and imaginative appeal that it wasn’t merely a placeholder for the thing it suggested. This is Breval’s description of his young protagonist’s diseased testicles in The Progress of a Rake:

            such Bags of Sorrow,

Pandora might a Box full borrow,

They’d overrun Pandora’s Box

With Plagues, and fill her with a Pox.

‘Bags of Sorrow’ as a metaphor is manifestly absurd, but the reason for picking it becomes clear when we get to her. Since her mythical box contained troubles and sorrows, mentioning ‘Sorrow’ allows Breval to mention Pandora, and then to swivel from this ‘straight’ reference to the suggestive one (‘Pandora’s Box’), which in turn sets up a satisfying rhyme with ‘Pox’. Innuendo here is what the verse has been leading up to, not a means of getting at something else.

The ultimate visual pun was the syphilitic collapsed nose, both because it was real evidence of venereal disease – as plain as the nose on your face – and because it signified and hinted at something else (other parts of the body obtruded perpendicularly; other parts of the body could collapse). Since a flattened or ‘saddle’ nose was a deformity exhibited by those born with hereditary venereal infection, ‘adventitious’ syphilitics weren’t the only targets of humour. The irresistibility of the connection entailed what Gallagher describes as an ‘extraordinary proliferation of “no-nose” jokes’, as well as jokes about broken noses, fine noses, warty noses, long noses:

The buxom young widow will make smutty speeches,

About your long nose and point to your breeches,

But mercy defend us how loud she will brawl,

Shou’d you come to attack and have no nose at all.

A comic pamphlet of 1736 tells the story of a syphilitic who ‘discharges his Naseal Member’ – that is, sneezes – while walking beside the Thames, but accidentally drops the diseased remains of his nose into the river as he shakes out his handkerchief: ‘He immediately jumped in and drowned himself, uttering these Words before he took his Leap, I always lov’d to follow my Nose.’ In his Secret History of Clubs (1709), the satirist Ned Ward includes a similarly nasty tale about an imaginary ‘No-Nose Club’, established by a ‘Merry Gentleman’ to wine and dine the various ‘stigmatis’d Strumpets and Fornicators’ (‘maim’d Leachers; snuffling old Stallions; young unfortunate Whoremasters; poor scarify’d Bawds’) wandering the streets of London. This noseless company, fearing they have been brought together for a joke ‘by some whimsical Gentleman, that loves to make a Jest of other Peoples Misfortunes’, accost their benefactor:

We must flatly tell you, That we expect to be Respected … Therefore, if you any way Affront us, we shall toss up our Snouts, and, perhaps, bring yours upon a level with the rest of the Company’s; or if you have any design to draw us into Expence, you will find your self deceiv’d, for we are not Persons to be led by the Nose into such an Inconveniency.

The string of puns here – some helpfully indicated by italics – draws the reader’s attention away from the dignity of the argument. The club’s members are right to be suspicious: like the poxed man brought to the edge of the Thames and then into it for a joke, Ward has assembled them for a punchline – and then made them come up with it themselves.

This is the comic landscape of Tristram Shandy, in which the hero is convinced that the crushing of his nose ‘as flat as a pancake to his face’ by a pair of forceps during his birth has determined the disappointing course of his life (his father, an expert in obscure early modern theories of rhino-physiognomy, agrees), and in which noses call to mind other protruding body parts, despite or more likely because of the number of times Sterne insists that they shouldn’t. (‘Now don’t let Satan, my dear girl, in this chapter, take advantage of any one spot of rising ground to get astride of your imagination,’ Tristram warns us during a discussion of ‘the various uses and seasonable applications of long noses’.) The novel goes one step further than Ward’s Secret History of Clubs because it picks up on the oddness of the social assumptions behind nose jokes at the same time as it tells and enjoys them. Sterne’s obsessive circling back to the possible non-noseness of noses admits to something pathological in the humour culture he participates in, some fear or fascination out of proportion to the facts here, or at least a curious unreadiness to accept what he has been telling us all along, ‘as plain as my nose’: that not everything is poxed, and some noses might just be noses after all.

The great appeal of Gallagher’s approach is that she recognises this weirdness. ‘I am deviating from the current trend of relating the 18th century to the present day by identifying it as the beginning of, or precursor to, “modernity”,’ she writes. ‘Implicit in this book’s analysis is a reminder that there is much about 18th-century culture that still seems idiosyncratic or bizarre to 21st-century eyes.’ Nothing brings out its sheer unrelatability more than representations of the pox or responses to it: a suggestion made in 1780 to bring back biblical polygamous marriage laws (‘every man who has seduced a woman, whether with or without promise of marriage, should be obliged to wed her publicly’); or a less serious suggestion of 1750 that if a royal edict were introduced to ‘forbid all Copulation throughout the Kingdom for the Space of one whole Year’ and thus enable women to ‘breed without the Help of Man’, Britain’s poxed race would die out and be replaced by a healthy one (‘British Valour will then recover its ancient Glory; new Cressys, new Agincourts, new Blenheims succeed to grace our Annals’). The pox and the clap altered bodies but they also altered minds, infiltrating language and image: like conspiracies, they made everything seem connected.

Colonel Cundum’s Domain. By Clare Bucknell.  London Review of Books , July 18, 2019.

Noelle Gallagher writes that fear of venereal infection was “lurking around every corner” in the Britain of the long 18th century (1660-1800). Unspoken anxiety about such diseases permeated society at the time. Playwrights, poets and artists obsessed over venereal disease, she argues.

Through metaphors such as “the itch” (herpes), “clap” (gonorrhea), and “pox” (syphilis), artists explored social phenomena including commercialization, globalization, gender, race, and class. Intentionally eschewing medical sources, which at the time were ambivalent about the nature of these diseases, Gallagher remains steadfastly focused throughout on how cultural anxieties were reflected by artistic production.

Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination is organized into four thematic chapters: “Officers and Gentlemen,” “Pox and Prostitution,” Foreigners,” and “A Chapter of Noses.” Each of these interrogates a different cultural anxiety in a thematic rather than rigidly chronological fashion. In her first two chapters, Gallagher considers how artistic imagination of venereal disease reflected (and challenged) the gender norms of the long 18th century. The second half of the book focuses on how venereal disease was tied to racialized “othering.”

In “Officers and Gentlemen,” Gallagher identifies “positive” representations of venereal disease in art. Beyond validating the “acceptability” of male promiscuity, Gallagher notes how images of venereal infection were often linked with male power. Venereal disease was used to celebrate manliness and conquest.

Gallagher describes how scarring from venereal disease was compared to battlefield wounds as marks of honor. At the same time, protection from venereal infection became a matter of national security. The use of condoms, while not valorous, safeguarded the motherland against venereal disease. Gallagher considers this a sign of failed masculinity in the long 18th century.

In “Pox and Prostitution,” Gallagher turns to the female body and the way it prompted pejorative images of venereal disease in literature. The chapter opens with the image of the grotesque, infected prostitute as an object of ridicule, but Gallagher ultimately complicates a story of blanket misogyny in the 18th century. Some authors like Charles Walker in Authentic Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues and Adventures of the Celebrated Sally Salisbury (1723) “sympathized with [prostitutes] or campaigned for them; some celebrated them as examples of social mobility, sexual vigor, or physical resilience.”

Many writers tried to portray diseased prostitutes as objects of charity rather than reproach. Gallagher makes the even bolder argument that venereal disease and its association with prostitution served as an important metaphor to discuss social corruption more broadly. Literary and artistic commentary on venereal disease was as much a commentary on the corruption of the men who solicited prostitutes as the women themselves.

The second half of Itch, Clap, Pox switches focus from domestic demographic concerns to questions of “Other” bearers of venereal infection. Curiously, Gallagher contends that venereal disease was not associated with enemies, but with allies and rivals who influenced and infiltrated British society with more subtle dangers.

French culture and travelers in particular became associated with disease. French wigs, which became a rage in British fashion, for example, suggested the need to disguise or hide something shameful, like a venereal scar. French servants were often portrayed as disease-carrying foreign agents, attempting to infiltrate the British body politic.

In spite of her argument that venereal disease was not often attributed to enemies, Gallagher finds references to a rise in the “French Pox” during Anglo-French military conflicts. Gallagher also explores how Scottish influence on English culture was compared to a “Scottish Pox” in a similar venereal metaphor.

The final chapter, “A Chapter of Noses,” considers the most insidious imagery of venereal disease in 18th century English culture. The deformation of the nose was a symptom of late stage syphilis and came to be seen as a visible marker of corruption, moral compromise, or vice. Literary metaphors often associated syphilitic noses with “stupidity and moral weakness.”

Deformed noses were also often portrayed as “animalistic” in form and were used to particularly demonize non-white races and form a basis for racial politics, frequently attacking Jews and persons of African descent as bringers of venereal infection.

Itch, Clap, Pox is an unapologetic literary analysis and not a medical history. The four chapters, especially when read as comprising two thematic arguments about the imagination of gender and of race, show the wide range of ways that the “unspoken” threat of venereal disease formed the basis of discourse in 18th-century Britain.

Aside from the literary scholars for whom this book was primarily written, cultural historians of the early modern period would be well served from reading this book for its wide-ranging argument.

Furthermore, the sources on which Gallagher relies are rich and diverse and the book is well-situated in both literary theory and the relevant historiography.

At times, the lack of chronology makes seeing an overall picture difficult. But this shortcoming is more than redeemed by Gallagher’s close, nuanced reading of the texts and images through which artists expressed their anxieties about the itch, the clap, the pox and other social phenomena of the time.

Unspoken Anxiety or Vivid Metaphor? By Jim Harris.   Origins  , May 2019.