Stories of the Origin of Syphilis in Eighteenth-Century England: Science, Myth, and Prejudice

The stories we tell about the origins of things speak to who we are. Each culture has its own tale of how the universe began; each couple its own tale of when and where their love started. Stories about beginnings make sense of the irrational. They tell us when and where and why. In moments of crisis, as when a dreaded new disease sweeps across the world, origin stories give us something to cling to as we wrestle with the inevitable questions: Where did this sickness come from, why is it here, how can I escape? By 1700, stories about the origins of the pox had been circulating for more than two hundred years. Syphilis was an old and extensively studied disease, yet its metaphoric force had hardly diminished. Although long since endemic, syphilis still possessed the power to shame, debilitate, and sometimes kill. It pervaded public consciousness of health and sexuality. A ubiquitous presence, it nonetheless remained an uncomfortable and sometimes taboo subject of discussion. As such, the question of its origin continued to fascinate: How could this tenacious plague be explained? Medical writers, naturally, knew the standard Renaissance debates about syphilis’s origin. The first concerned the disease’s age: Was syphilis new in the 1490s, or had it or its ancestors existed much earlier? The second, a related debate, concerned its etiology: Who or what first caused the disease? Here the sides were more numerous and the stories more lurid. Some parties argued that the pox had been brought by Columbus’ men from the New World. Some identified it with older diseases like leprosy. Some offered more exotic possibilities: It sprang from the cannibalization of corpses, from a deliberately poisoned well, or from, in the skeptical catalogue of one eighteenth-century author,