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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, venereal disease, or the 'pox,' was a dreaded diagnosis throughout Europe. Its ghastly marks, along with their inexorable link to sex, were so stigmatizing that it was commonly called 'the secret disease.' How do we capture everyday experiences of a disease that so few people admitted having? Olivia Weisser's remarkable history invites readers into the teeming, vibrant pox-riddled streets of early modern London. She uncovers the lives of the poxed elite as well as of the maidservants and prostitutes who left few words behind, showing how marks of the disease offered a language for expressing acts that were otherwise unutterable. This new history of sex, stigma, and daily urban life takes readers down alleys where healers peddled their tinctures, enters kitchens and gardens where ordinary sufferers made cures, and listens in on intimate exchanges between patients and healers in homes and in taverns.
List of contents
Note on the text; Introduction. Republic of Venus; 1. Piss prophets and clap curers: London's venereal trade; 2. Streets: shopping for cures; 3. Consultation rooms: encounters with healers; 4. Households: treating the foul disease at home; 5. Courtrooms: the pox on trial; Conclusions.
About the author
Olivia Weisser is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Report
'Olivia Weisser's succinct, brilliant history of the pox centers venereal disease as a key component of life in early modern London and a new pathway through which to understand many aspects of big city life. What often seems secret to us was a mundane reality to Londoners. Weisser provocatively argues that the pox was a leading edge of modern disease patterns. In lively prose, she explores the world of the pox from the perspective of ordinary people managing and shaping the experience of infection and its stigma in ways that were both close to home and embedded in the expanding global imperial marketplace.' Julie Hardwick, author of Sex in an Old Regime City: young workers and intimacy in France, 1660-1789
