Syphilis

For the purposes of this entry, syphilis is taken to include gonorrhea, since they are related in the public mind and share a common vocabulary, even though they are technically different diseases, syphilis being caused by Treponema pallidum and gonorrhea by Neisseria gonorrhea . Both are sexually transmitted diseases with highly visible symptoms such as facial deformities, especially erosion of the nose, and dementia at the latter stages, the principal early cure, mercury, leading to loss of hair. They are thus subject to the stigmas and taboos associated with such afflictions, showing themselves principally in black humor, euphemisms, and xenophobia. The previous high incidence declined with the introduction of penicillin in the 1930s. Comparisons with AIDS are illuminating, as are the differences.

Although syphilis is not generally fatal, it affected many high-profile figures, such as Queen Elizabeth’s favorite, the Earl of Essex, King James I (1603–1625) and his favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Rochester (1647–1680), and Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–1895), of whom Lord Rosebery wrote: “There was no curtain. He died by inches in public, sole mourner at his own protracted funeral” (1906, 72). According to D.H. Lawrence in an essay written in 1929, syphilis caused a fundamental rupture, generating “a terror, almost a horror of sexual life” in late-sixteenth-century England (1950, 308). Lawrence’s view, although largely intuitive, has been endorsed by a number of studies, as Johannes Fabricius shows in his major work, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England (1994). The disease be-
came a significant theme in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, being referred to via underground slang often laced with savage humor. An earlier school of criticism regarded Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens (ca. 1608) as a depiction of syphilitic disintegration.

One basic ambiguity in naming arose out of using the general established term pox to refer to the plague, to syphilis, and even to smallpox. Pox and pocky were in use from the mid-fourteenth century, and continued to be current both referentially and as terms of abuse up to the recent past. Thus when Mary Queen of Scots refused to allow “a pokie priest,” as she referred to Archbishop Hamilton, to use his spittle in the baptism of James I, which disease would she have had in mind? Clap , dating from about 1587, is related to Middle French clapoir , “a bubo or swelling,” and clapier , “a brothel,” and technically refers to gonorrhea, but the two terms were often used indiscriminately, as in Alexander Pope’s knowing observation on “Time, that at last matures a clap to pox” ( Second Satire of Dr John Donne Versified , l. 47). Both terms were widely current in major authors through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before being driven underground in the Victorian era.

Although there is debate about the demographic origins of syphilis, complicated by references to “venereal leprosy” in Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the first unambiguous evidence of the disease dates from about 1500. Apparently brought back from the New World by Christopher Columbus’s crew, the disease spread rapidly through the length and breadth of Europe. One of the standard histories, N.T. Parran’s Shadow on the Land—Syphilis , traces both the attributions and the origin of the name:

In the beginning there was no name for the disease. Each suffering nation blamed it on the outlander. To the French it was the Neapolitan disease because they met it in Naples. [Even John Florio called it mal di Napoli , probably because he was brought up in England.] The Italians called it the French or Spanish disease. The English, who caught it from the French called it the “French pox.”… The specific name was acquired in 1530 when an Italian physician, Girolamo Fracastoro, wrote a long poem in Latin hexameters in which the leading character, a shepherd named Syphilus, was stricken with the disease because of an insult to Apollo. The poem was enormously successful and made the word familiar. (1937, 36)

The chain of infection described here makes the nationalist naming of the disease entirely plausible, combined with the desire to project blame elsewhere. At the time France and Italy were already stereotyped in England as hotbeds of vice and promiscuity, as the entries for French and Italians show. By giving the disease the name morbus gallicus (“the French disease”), Fracastoro ensured that this national association remained dominant. Among the English names, French pox is found as far back as 1503, followed by French gout, goods, crown, pig , and crust , culminating in the grisly dysphemism “to suffer a blow over the snout with a French faggot-stick”—that is, to lose one’s nose, one of the extreme consequences. All of these are recorded in the seventeenth century and appear in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), which includes many other slang terms, such as the Frenchman and Frenchified (“the mort is Frenchified ” = “the wench is infected”).

Apart from French pox , which emerges in a timely manner in 1503, the other syphilitic specialities, Great pox and Spanish pox , are recorded well after the outbreaks of the sixteenth century. This may be because they are “underground terms” and thus take longer to emerge in written records. In time, pox became widely used as an expletive, like plague and plaguey . Shakespeare seems to have initiated the use of the term as an imprecation in Love’s Labour’s Lost (1588): “A pox of that jest” (V ii 46). Thereafter it had a long vulgar history such as “pox on it!” or—be poxed!," found in Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, and even Virginia Woolf. There is a more literal royal usage in a letter by William IV in 1784: “Oh, for the pretty girls of Westminster … such as would not clap or pox me every time I fucked” (Ziegler 1971, iii, 51).

One early term for a whore with venereal disease are Winchester goose , recorded from 1585 and found twice in Shakespeare: Henry VI, Part I I iii 53 and Troilus and Cressida V x 54-56). The reference is explicated in the entry for Shakespeare and by Fabricius (1994, 213-19). Another is fireship , alluding to the burning pain of the disease, recorded from 1670 in the Restoration dramatist William Wycherley, followed by brim from ca. 1730, brimstone from ca. 1751, and burner from ca. 1785. Another rarity, chancre , from the French term for a venereal ulcer, became a term of insult, first found ca. 1605 in Montgomerie’s Flyting with Polwart (l. 312).

A note in American Speech (1930) observed that pox is used of “any kind of venereal disease.” Whereas the term has become too generalized and dated, thus petering out, clap has had a vigorous history from 1587, remaining current in both British and American English, where it is recorded in the works of such major writers as John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry Miller. Although syphilis and gonorrhea have shown signs of a recent resurgence, they are now usually categorized under the opaque general style of S.T.D.—that is, “sexually transmitted diseases.”