Contagion and blame in early modern England: The case of the French pox

Literature and Medicine

Volumn 22, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 1-24

  Qualtiere, Louis F ^a   Slights, William W E ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; EPIDEMIC; HISTORY; HUMAN; LITERATURE; SYPHILIS; UNITED KINGDOM;

DISEASE OUTBREAKS; DRAMA; ENGLAND; HISTORY, 16TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 17TH CENTURY; HUMANS; LITERATURE, MODERN; MEDICINE IN LITERATURE; SYPHILIS;

EID: 0038209499     PISSN: 02789671     EISSN: 10806571     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/lm.2003.0009     Document Type: Review

References (45)

1. Girolamo Fracastoro's De contagione et contagiosis morbis et eorum curatione libri tres (Venice: Giunta, 1546) has been improperly credited as the source of the notion of seeds (seminaria) of contagion, a conception alluded to in several classical and medieval works and one that relies on very different assumptions from modern germ theory. See N. Vivian Nutton, "The Seeds of Disease: An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance," Medical History 27 (1983): 1-34, esp. 21-33
2. Fracastoro composed his long, philosophical and mythic poem in Latin verse in 1525 and published it in Verona in 1530. It is the source of the name "syphilis," later attached to the pox. The quotation is from Geoffrey Eastough's prose translation. Fracastoro's Syphilis, trans. Geoffrey Eatough (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1984), 55-57
3. For an account of such hospitals in Rome during the period 1530 to 1600, see Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French's magisterial study, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 171-233
4. Two recent studies of hospitals sponsored by the Catholic Church and the City of Florence emphasize the charitable and religious motives that supported such medical facilities: Katharine Park, "Healing the Poor: Hospitals and Medical Assistance in Renaissance Florence," Medicine and Charity Before the Welfare State, Studies in the Social History of Medicine, ed. Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones (London: Routledge, 1991), 26-45, esp. 35-38
5. and John Henderson, "Healing the Body and Saving the Soul: Hospitals in Renaissance Florence," Renaissance Studies 15, no. 2 (2001): 188-228
6. The situation in England during the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance is well documented in Nicholas Orme and Margaret Webster, The English Hospital 1070-1570 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
7. William Clowes, A Short and Profitable Treatise Touching the Cure of the Disease Called (Morbus Gallicus) by Vnctions (London: John Daye, 1579), sig. B1v. Clowes was one of the foremost physicians practicing in London at this time
8. John Marten, A Treatise of All the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, 6th ed. (London: S. Crouch, 1708), 433
9. Roger French and Jon Arrizabalaga have studied the arguments employed by this group of learned doctors to ensure that their mode of analysis was the dominant one in treating the pox. See their essay, "Coping with the French Disease: University Practitioners' Strategies and Tactics in the Transition from the Fifteenth to the Sixteenth Century," Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, History of Medicine in Context, ed. Roger French et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 248-87
10. Every Man in His Humour (2.3.57-74)
11. The Complete Plays of Ben Jonson, vol. 3, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927)
12. Among others, Claude Quétel reviews these events in his History of Syphilis (1986), trans. Judith Braddock and Brian Pike (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 9-11
13. Mary Lindemann argues persuasively that neither of the most prominent theories of the origin of venereal syphilis is entirely convincing - the Columbian (which postulates transmission from New World contact) or the unitarian (which imagines a sudden worsening of a milder, Old World form of the disease, accelerated by the enormous numbers of military camp followers in sixteenth-century Europe). See Lindemann, Medicine and Society in Early Modern Europe, New Approaches to European History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 56-57
14. In her essay, "The New and the Old: The Spread of Syphilis (1494-1530)" (in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggerio, trans. Margaret A. Gallucci, et al. [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990], 26-45)
15. See French and Arrizabalaga ("Coping with the French Disease"), 253-54
16. Jean Astruc, De Morbis Veneris (Paris, 1737)
17. We quote from the English translation by William Barrowby, A Treatise of the Venereal Disease (London: W. Innys and R. Manby, 1737), 1:106-110
18. See the anonymous tract, A New Method of Curing the French Pox (London: J. Taylor and T. Newborough, 1690), 8
19. Sennert, a devout man and a highly principled physician, takes this position in the volume entitled Two Treatises, the First of the French Pox, trans. N. Culpepper and A. Cole (London: Peter Cole, 1660), 27
20. Les oeuvres d'Ambroise Paré (1579), trans. Thomas Johnson as The Workes of ... Ambrose Parrey (London: T. Cotes and R. Young, 1634), 736
21. See Greg W. Bentley, Shakespeare and the New Disease: The Dramatic Function of Syphilis in Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Timon of Athens, American University Studies, Series IV, English Language and Literature, v. 85 (New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 1989), 16
22. Arrizabalaga et al. (The Great Pox, 35) cite several Italian sources for these observations. See also Clowes, sig. B5v
23. See the discussion of early Continental works on the pox and sexuality in Paul A. Russell, "Syphilis, God's Scourge or Nature's Vengeance?: The German Printed Response to a Public Problem in the Early Sixteenth Century," Archive for Reformation History / Archiv für Reformationgeschichte 80 (1989): 286-306. See also Bentley, 25
24. Daniel Turner, Syphilis: A Practical Dissertation on the Venereal Disease (London: J. Walthoe, 1732), 23-24
25. A New Method of Curing the French Pox, 8
26. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Castell of Helth (London: T. Marshe, 1572), fol. 95v. Elyot's work was one of the most frequently reissued medical texts in sixteenth-century England. Its attitudes and advice were highly influential in the period
27. Les oeuvres d'Ambroise Paré, 725
28. Kevin Siena quotes part of the passage in his essay "Pollution, Promiscuity, and the Pox: English Venereology and the Early Modern Medical Discourse on Social and Sexual Danger" (Journal of the History of Sexuality 8, no. 4 [1998]: 553-74), linking this tale of sinister home invasion to the theme of misogyny in the early history of syphilis. A similar tale of tracking syphilitic infection to a wet nurse is recounted in Peter Lowe's 1596 tract on "the Spanish sicknes" (sig. B2r)
29. Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 40, Colloquies, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 845. Subsequent references to this volume will be cited by page number in the text
30. François Rabelais, The Complete Works of François Rabelais, trans. Donald M. Frame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 134
31. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, "The Deceitful Marriage," Exemplary Stories (Novelas ejemplares), trans. C. A. Jones (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 190
32. The Tudor Interludes: "Nice Wanton" and "Impatient Poverty," Renaissance Imagination, v. 10, ed. Leonard Tennenhouse (New York: Garland, 1984). The quotations are from "Nice Wanton": the first is line 264; the second, lines 265-74
33. Marston's The Fawn (1604)
34. Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl (1611)
35. and Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613) all contain trenchant reflections on the social impact of the pox
36. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd edition, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), act 1, scene 2, line 193. All Shakespeare quotations are from this edition and will be cited in the text by act, scene, and line numbers
37. See René Girard, "The Plague in Literature and Myth" in "To double business bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 136-54
38. For a discussion of Timon and genre, see William W. E. Slights, "Genera Mixta and Timon of Athens," Studies in Philology 74 (1977): 39-62, especially pp. 40-41 and 61-62
39. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1949), 220
40. See Oscar James Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), esp. 168-97
41. and Robert C. Elliott, The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), esp. 141-67
42. Allen's analysis of early modern responses to the pox stresses the initial reluctance to regard the disease as medically remediable. In this regard he finds strong parallels with our own society's slowness in reacting helpfully to the AIDS epidemic. See Peter Lewis Allen, The Wages of Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000)
43. Rolf Soellner argues in his book Timon of Athens: Shakespeare's Pessimistic Tragedy (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979) that consumptive syphilis, frequently mistaken for leprosy in the period, is a form of cannibalism in which one person's sins infect and devour others (p. 75). Greg Bentley's chapter on the play demonstrates that "Shakespeare establishes an unmistakable connection between usury and prostitution, employing images of syphilis to suggest the contagious and corrupting nature of both" (p. 160)
44. In his article, "Infection and Cure Through Women: Renaissance Constructions of Syphilis" (Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24, no. 3 [Fall 1994]: 499-517), Winfried Schleiner presents persuasive evidence that the social construction of syphilis arose on a foundation of misogyny. Once the origins of the disease had been imputed to women, the homeopathic cure became self-evident: just have intercourse with a virgin! The Danish scholar Johannes Fabricius argues less successfully in Syphilis in Shakespeare's England (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994) that the divine scourge of syphilis became the cornerstone of the Puritan hegemony in England. Each of these critical perceptions contributes an important piece to a composite picture of how Shakespeare's audiences might have received his representations of the pox
45. John Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, ed. M. L. Wine, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1965), 2.2.44-45