Syphilis, #Metoo and Covid19
By: Matt Mccaw
Tags: Syphilis, Covid 19, Metoo, Disease, Sex

If you’re anything like me you’ve had plenty of free time in the past year, and you’ve probably spent some of it binging sitcoms and romcoms of varying vintage and quality. It’s odd to watch these pre-pandemic players crowd into rooms and bars and lean in and out of doors without masks, oblivious to the pathogens their spewing into each other’s improbable homes and apartments. It is equally odd to watch the abandon with which leading men bed disposable female characters and discuss their conquests with a now-shocking degree of biological precision. Watch anything filmed after the #metoo watermark and the libertine playground has suddenly been replaced by a discrete, precious chastity. This is an odd experience since for well over a century Westerners have lived through a steady relaxation of sexual mores. No one alive has ever seen collars inch upward, and this has led Westerners to construct history as a constant, slow advancement of individual freedoms, particularly in the bedroom. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Social regulation of intimate life has ebbed and flowed regularly throughout history, with periods of decadence following upon periods of finger-wagging. We live in the shadow, though, of one of the strictest periods of sexual repression, the Victorian Era, and our view of sexual freedoms is often obscured by this tower of judgment and repression. Few realize, though, that this century of prudery, so unfathomable to the contemporary mind, owed its existence to another pandemic, one that dwarfs our present-day affiction in body count and sheer horror.

Though the origins of syphilis are disputed, the disease was likely present in the New World at the time of European contact and was probably brought back to Europe by Columbus and his crew. It’s likely that the form of the disease that existed in the New World was mild or even asymptomatic, and the deadly, disfiguring infection we know only emerged when the disease combined with other pathogens or simply altered owing to selective pressures. The first known outbreak of the disease took place in 1494 in Naples during an invasion by France. French soldiers brought the disease home, and from there it began its steady, four century march across the globe. Initially, syphilis killed in a matter of months, though its morbidity quickly lessened in a pattern common to pandemics. Within a generation the disease became a chronic, debilitating condition that allowed for the infected to live some type of regular life even as symptoms worsened and death inevitably followed.

The historical record includes so many references to syphilis that its occurrence begins to verge on the mundane, and it’s not hard to find cases in which infected individuals carried on with families, lives and relationships, all the time spreading the disease. While early references focus on the horror and confusion of a new, deadly enemy, in time the disease is discussed with either mundane disinterest or even macabre humor. In The Rake’s Progress, artist William Hogarth’s multi-panel depiction of the moral decline of a petty noble, the disease advances from painting to painting like a humorous nod to the individual’s nocturnal habits. In Bronzino’s An Allegory with Venus and Time a lusty embrace of nude figures hides the tiny image of an infected individual. The disease may look bad, but the skinfest at the center of the canvass seems to be worth the price. Venetian physician Girolamo Fracastoro described the new disease in fanciful, poetic verse:

An ancient king had we, Alcithous,

Who had a shepherd lad called Syphilus.

On our prolific meads, a thousand sheep,

A thousand kine this shepherd had to keep.

Any history text treating the early modern period of the West is dotted with incidences of syphilis. Columbus himself may have had the disease, and it subsequently cut a wide swath amongst European crowns and royals. Charles VIII of France and Ivan the Terrible likely had infections, and by the nineteenth century infection was prevalent among artists and intellectuals; Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gaugin and Oscar Wilde were likely victims. By one estimate, 10% of mortality in nineteenth century Europe was caused by sexually transmitted diseases, with syphilis responsible for the bulk of cases. Another recent study found that by the late Eighteenth century one in five Londoners had contracted the disease. It was here, in hard-struck Britain, that a desperate populace began to retract into a tight-knit moralism. Three centuries of medical science had produced little more than quackery, and any notion of safe sex existed on the other side of the industrial revolution. The only other option was to suppress that most basic of human desires to a degree never seen before.

The excesses of the Victorian era are well-documented. Home libraries often separated books based on the gender of their author, and chair legs were occasionally covered up if their curve was deemed too sensual. The terms ‘white’ and ‘dark’ meat were created at the time so no one would have to say ‘breast’ or ‘leg’ during a meal. Candle snuffers became popular so women wouldn’t have to purse their lips in a suggestive manner. The white wedding dress was introduced at this time, with its accompanying emphasis on women’s chastity, purity and virginity. Men, similarly, were pressed to live a ‘clean’ life, a phrase understood to mean avoidance of sexual relations outside of the confines of marriage. At the heart of these odd behaviors, though, rested a very real fear. The phrase ‘clean life’ and the emphasis on ‘purity’ contain, at their core, a preoccupation with infection and sanitation. Victorians were surrounded by infected individuals. Some harbored unseen and undetected infections, while others bore the visible disfigurations of the disease in its later stages. One contemporary author writes that the infected individual is ‘a constant menace to society’, while another author writes asks ‘Has a man the right to associate others , that is to say , wife and children , in the future dangers of an insufficiently treated syphilis ? Marriage under such conditions is an immoral and culpable action’. Such social pressures may have slowed the pandemic or they may have created an underworld of sexual release where the disease had free rein. We can’t be sure. It was only the discovery of antibiotics in 1928 that turned this debilitating disease into a minor inconvenience and began a slow relaxation of public morality.