Stories of the Origin of Syphilis in Eighteenth-Century England: Science, Myth, and Prejudice

The stories we tell about the origins of things speak to who we are. Each culture has its own tale of how the universe began; each couple its own tale of when and where their love started. Stories about beginnings make sense of the irrational. They tell us when and where and why. In moments of crisis, as when a dreaded new disease sweeps across the world, origin stories give us something to cling to as we wrestle with the inevitable questions: Where did this sickness come from, why is it here, how can I escape? By 1700, stories about the origins of the pox had been circulating for more than two hundred years. Syphilis was an old and extensively studied disease, yet its metaphoric force had hardly diminished. Although long since endemic, syphilis still possessed the power to shame, debilitate, and sometimes kill. It pervaded public consciousness of health and sexuality. A ubiquitous presence, it nonetheless remained an uncomfortable and sometimes taboo subject of discussion. As such, the question of its origin continued to fascinate: How could this tenacious plague be explained?

Medical writers, naturally, knew the standard Renaissance debates about syphilis's origin. The first concerned the disease's age: Was syphilis new in the 1490s, or had it or its ancestors existed much earlier? The second, a related debate, concerned its etiology: Who or what first caused the disease? Here the sides were more numerous and the stories more lurid. Some parties argued that the pox had been brought by Columbus' men from the New World. Some identified it with older diseases like leprosy. Some offered more exotic possibilities: It sprang from the cannibalization of corpses, from a deliberately poisoned well, or from, in the skeptical catalogue of one eighteenth-century author,

the natural Conjunction of a leprous Man with a menstruous Woman; or from the unnatural or Sodomitical, of another with a diseased Beast; from poisoned Wine; the influence of some malevolent Star; the venomous Bite of a Serpent. Which were the opinions of Paracelcus, Van Helmont, Cœsalpinus, Fracastorius, and our Lister. ¹

For the eighteenth century, as for previous ages, the common elements in these debates were credit and blame: enhancing the prestige of Enlightenment medicine on the one hand and, on the other, deciding which individuals or groups could be held responsible for causing and propagating the pox.

This essay looks at eighteenth-century syphilis origin stories and their cultural implications. Such stories appear in both popular and specialized medical texts about venereal disease, and include everything from serious science to the wildest mythmaking. Some, I will argue, strengthened the medical profession by offering theoretical grounds for changing treatment practices and by presenting readers with a vision of medical progress. At the same time, these stories strengthened the commercial market for both mainstream and alternative venereal remedies--a dubious accomplishment, since no remedy from the eighteenth century actually cured the pox. Other tales were more pernicious. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, origin stories already laid blame, dividing the world into a pure "us" and an impure "them" and bearing witness to contemporary national, religious, racial, and gender prejudices. Several eighteenth-century developments helped reduce the role some of these prejudices played in supposedly scientific texts. Yet I will argue that although eighteenth-century writers on V.D. see themselves as participating in a scientific revolution, their attempts at analysis are only partially successful in reducing the tendency of origin stories to value myth more than science. Only a little more successful are the commercial realities of the age, which shape the discourse from the outside even as writers seek to shape it from within. Ultimately, myths about the origins of venereal disease evade all eighteenth-century attempts to contain them--something that may not surprise anyone who reflects on the AIDS origin stories of our own era...