Venereal disease and the blame game
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Venereal disease and the blame game Noelle Gallagher: Itch, clap, pox. Venereal disease in the eighteenth-century imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018, 288 pp, $65 HB Jessica Borge1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Despite being widespread, venereal disease (VD) was shrouded in secrecy. Used as a metaphor or otherwise discussed through coded language and symbolism, reference to VD provided a means though which the cultural anxieties of a nation— including race, commerce, immigration and gender—could be analysed using the prisms of the ‘clap’ (gonorrhoea), the ‘pox’ (syphilis) and the ‘itch’ (genital scabies). In this book, literary critic Noelle Gallagher explores the significance of the discussion, traced through imaginative representations of VD in novels, paintings, poetry and prints created between 1660 and 1800. The intention is less to consider how venereal disease was diagnosed, treated or experienced but, rather, how it was depicted and mobilised in culture. Itch, Clap, Pox has utility for historians of medicine and sexuality, but the analysis itself is driven by close textual readings of artistic works as primary sources, and consideration of the contemporary rhetoric that framed them. Far from being completely closeted, the symptoms and social effects of VD were widely recognised. VD was routinely invoked as a punch line or to elicit sentimental or emotional responses, in the knowledge that audiences would understand these implicit (or, indeed, explicit) meanings. Itch, Pox, Clap is divided into four thematic chapters. The first of these, “Officers and Gentlemen”, deals with ‘maleness’ in the context of military, medical and financial spheres and within the patrilineal family. Gallagher introduces the idea that VD was widely felt to be curable or at least treatable, which is unsettling considering that the severely debilitating and deadly effects continued until (and, to a lesser extent, after) the mass manufacture of antibiotics in the 1940s. But during the Restoration and eighteenth century, infected persons learned to live with their illness and symptoms out of necessity. Related topics in the literature and art ranged from the trivial to the great. Who suspected, for example, that VD was once perceived as * Jessica Borge [email protected] 1
Visiting Fellow in Digital Humanities, School of Advanced Study, University of London, London, UK
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French, and was consequently in vogue as a “fashionable distemper” (16) among the modish set? Perversely, considering its effects, Gallagher informs us that the fashion for VD was widely correlated with elevated male status and sexual prowess in Restoration comedy, although this takes on a different tone when the plays of Aphra Behn, John Crowne and William Wycherley are read as political satires. Love and war were commonly conflated, with pock marks presented as ‘war wounds’ in, for example, the poems of John Wilmot. In other contexts, infection is paired with impotence as a challenge to male power, as in Wil
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