Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination by Noelle Gallagher (review)

Noelle Gallagher's Itch, Clap, Pox provides a delightful and important study of the ways in which the eighteenth-century British imagination grappled with venereal disease. Well researched, thoughtfully argued, and nicely illustrated, this book makes a significant contribution to a branch of sexuality studies that has flourished in recent years: the study of venereal disease and its cultural implications. By the eighteenth century, pox, or syphilis ("the French disease"), had long been endemic rather than epidemic, but it remained potentially fatal. Clap, or gonorrhea, was taken more lightly, even though it was believed to be an early stage of pox, while the "itch" lumped together scabies and other genital problems. With deft readings of satiric prints, poems, novels, medical pamphlets, and other visual and literary texts, Gallagher shows how, together, the diseases served as metaphors for deep cultural anxieties. These took as many shapes as the symptoms of venereal disease itself, encompassing practical concerns about government, economics, and immigration and more fraught anxieties about patriarchy, whiteness, religion, national identity, and power.

Gallagher's first two chapters argue that representations of venereal disease vary more than previous scholars have acknowledged. In men, pox and clap might be depicted as either serious or comic, the subject of warnings, jokes, or even admiration. Although pox could maim or kill, it could also carry curiously positive associations: being poxed or clapped suggested sexual daring, virility, and robust manliness. As White Kennett's 1744 mock-epic poem "The Machine, or Love's Preservative" put it:

Happy the Man, in whose close Pocket's found,Whether with Green or Scarlet Ribbon bound, A well made Cundum; he nor dreads the IllsOf Cordees, Shanker, Boluses, or Pills:But arm'd thus boldly wages am'rous FightWith Transport-feigning Whore, in Danger's Spight.

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Pox was frequently associated with soldiers and sailors and with the prostitutes they frequented. For men, it sometimes thus took on connotations of courage and prowess, even as others worried about the potential impact on military and naval preparedness. Pox was also frequently associated with elite libertinism. It therefore sometimes took on connotations of status, fashion, and sexual success, even as commentators fretted about the dangers that hereditary syphilis posed to England's leadership class.

Representations of infected sex workers and the sex trade varied just as widely. Poxed prostitutes could be portrayed as hideously diseased predators, as sentimentalized innocent victims, or even as merry and resilient class warriors. Where other scholars have sketched a progression from earlier comedic and satiric portrayals toward more serious later depictions, Gallagher argues for the persistence of all three representations. Thus varied, the figure of the infected prostitute could be used metaphorically to critique consumer capitalism, skewer political leaders and electoral corruption, attack Catholicism or the French, or call for social change.

Gallagher takes particular interest in how representations of venereal disease serve both to enforce and to call into question cultural boundaries—boundaries between diseased and healthy, male and female, working class and elite, white and black, other and British, human and nonhuman. The second half of the book examines two particular examples of such policing in detail, demonstrating the extent to which prejudice shaped the rhetoric surrounding venereal disease. Chapter 3 looks at the association of disease with the "foreign," particularly as the foreign poses a supposed threat to English identity. Gallagher makes particularly fine use of satiric prints to show how categories as different as French luxury goods and Scottish immigration could be associated with venereal disease. Pox, clap, and itch became figures for infection by foreign fashions, customs, commodities, and ideas; for concerns about British identity; and for fears of French military aggression.

Chapter 4 examines fears of infiltration via one particular trope: the nose corroded away by syphilis. Absent or unusual noses routinely serve as boundary-policing metaphors in both literature and art: via the nose, Africans, Jews, and the poor...