syphilis |

Her Grace had never bothered with New Year resolutions. Her father had refused to countenance the practice within his household. Instead, he held to the Christmas Octave, to be commemorated with all due solemnity. Once she married, her husband saw the changing of one year to another as an opportunity for even more excess than usual, and his celebrations had no place for a mere wife. She spent her Christmas and New Year ensconced in whatever of the ducal estates pleased His Grace, her company comprising the servants and whichever of Haverford’s indigent relatives lived there by his miserly favour.

In time, especially after she had given the duke his heir and a second son as a spare, she built her confidence and her own life. Her Christmas parties had become famous, lasting for three weeks from before Christmas until the Feast of the Epiphany, six days after New Year’s Day. She had never seen anything particularly significant about the first of January. It was, after all, just another day.

For some reason, this year felt different. No. What was she if she could not be honest even if only to herself? This year was different because at long last she knew that her cage would soon open, and she thought — or at least she hoped — that old wrongs might at last be righted.

Sitting in her parlour, she sipped tea as she considered the coming year. The long war was over, the Emperor Napoleon confined to St Helena’s. That was cause for hope, surely? The country faced serious problems: poor harvests, unrest among the working poor, a huge population of ex-soldiers and sailors released from the forces and thrown onto the streets to cope with the aftermath of injuries both physical and mental. But the war was over. Her eldest ward had wed during the year, and was expecting a happy event. Eleanor had hopes that Matilda’s younger sister, Jessica, might find a match in the coming season.

And as she thought about all that she was thankful for on the wider stage of Great Britain and the more personal canvas of her family and friends, the duchess conceded that she was still avoiding thoughts about the key change that gave a lift to her heart and a smile to her face.

“I feel guilty,” she acknowledged. “I am rejoicing in another person’s pain, and I should not, even if he well deserves it. And yet…”

And yet it was unavoidable. The Duke of Haverford was dying, rotting from the inside, his manifold sins of lust come back to destroy him. In the past eighteen months, his periods of madness had increased in intensity and duration, until he could no longer be released from the careful stewardship of the custodians her son had appointed. The doctors warned that the next spell, or the one after, or the one after that would carry him off. A vein would burst in one of the lesions in his brain, or his damaged heart would fail, or some other physical manifestation of his moral perfidy would carry him off.

“It will be a release for him,” she assured herself, well aware that it was her own release she yearned for. She had been a faithful wife to a faithless and cruel man. Was it any wonder that his demise was an event awaited with anticipation?

Never mind that James was back in England, that they were friends again, that he looked on her with a warmth in his eyes that set her tingling. He had said nothing. Perhaps there was nothing to say. But deep down, she hoped.

(This is a rerun of a blog post I wrote for Jessica Cale’s Dirty Sexy History.)

In 1494, France was at war with Naples when the French camp was struck by a terrible disease.

It began with genital sores, spread to a general rash, then caused abscesses and scabs all over the body. Boils as big as acorns, they said, that burst leaving rotting flesh and a disgusting odour. Sufferers also had fever, headaches, sore throats, and painful joints and bones. The disease was disabling, ugly, and terrifying. And people noticed almost from the first that it (usually) started on the genitals, and appeared to be spread by sexual congress.

The Italian kingdoms joined forces and threw out the French, who took the disease home with them, and from there it spread to plague the world until this day.

Where did it come from?

Syphilis. The French Disease. The Pox. The Great Imitator (because it looks like many other illnesses and is hard to diagnose). The French call it the Neopolitan Disease. It is caused by a bacterium that is closely related to the tropical diseases yaws and bejel.

Scientist theorise that somewhere in the late 15^th Century, perhaps right there in the French camp outside of Naples, a few slightly daring yaws bacteria found the conditions just right to change their method of transmission. No longer merely skin-to-skin contact, but a very specific type of contact: from sores to mucus membranes in the genitals, anus, or mouth.

They’ve found a couple of possible sources.

One was the pre-Columban New World, where yaws was widespread. Did one of Columbus’s sailors carry it back? It would have had to have been the first or second voyage to be outside of Naples in 1494.

The other is zoonotic. Six out of every ten human infectious diseases started in animals. Was syphilis one of them. Monkeys in Africa suffer from closely related diseases, at least one of which is sexually transmitted.

Mild is a relative term

At first, syphilis killed sufferers within a few months. But killing the host immediately is a bad strategy when you’re a bacterium. Especially when you’re a frail little bacterium that can’t live outside of warm moist mucus membranes.

So syphilis adapted. Soon, few people died immediately. The first sore (or chancre) appeared between 10 days to three months after contact. About ten weeks after it healed, the rash appears, and the other symptoms mentioned above. These symptoms last for several weeks and tend to disappear without treatment, but reoccur several times over the next two years.

For more than half of sufferers, that’s it. The disease has run its course. But it is a sneaky little thing. It is still lurking, and a third or more of those who contract the disease will develop late complications up to 30 years after the original chancre. These are the ones to fear. During the latent phase, the disease is cheerfully eating away at the heart, eyes, brain, nervous system, bones, joints, or almost any other part of the body.

And the sufferer can look forward years, even decades, of mental illness, blindness, other neurological problems, or heart disease. And eventually the blessed relief of death.

How was it treated?

Until the invention of antibiotics, the treatment was as bad the cure. Physicians and apothecaries prescribed mercury in ointments, steam baths, pills, and other forms. Mercury is a poison, and can cause hair loss, ulcers, nerve damage, madness, and death.

Syphilis was the impetus for the adoption of condoms, their birth control effect noticed later and little regarded (since conception was a woman’s problem). The first clear description is of linen sheaths soaked in a chemical solution and allowed to dry before use. Animal intestines and bladder, and fine leather condoms also appear in the literature.

They were sold in pubs, apothecaries, open-air markets, and at the theatre, and undoubtedly every wise prostitute kept a stock.

Not having sex—or at least not having sex with multiple partners—would have been a more effective solution, but it appears few of society’s finest took notice of that!

Syphilis in romantic fiction

Those of us who write rakes would do well to remember how easy it was to catch the pox. Indeed, in some circles it was a rite of passage!

“I’ve got the pox!” crowed the novelist de Maupassant in his 20s. “At last! The real thing!” He did his part as a carrier by having sex with six prostitutes in quick succession while friends watched on.

The mind boggles.

We can, I am sure, have fun with the symptoms and the treatment, though we’d do well to remember that it was not an immediate death sentence, and suicide might be considered an overreaction to the first active stage, when most people got better and were never troubled again.

Scattered across a few of the books I’m writing, I have my own syphilitic character in the final stage, suffering from slow deterioration of his mental facilities and occasional bouts of madness, though his condition is a secret from all but his wife, his doctor, and his heir.

Watch this space!