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A
Ugh.
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B
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D
In early modern London, no one wanted to admit to having the pox. With sinful associations and excruciating symptoms. The pox came with shame, pain, and silence. So how do you study a disease that nobody ever admitted to having? Well, Olivia Weiser has done just that. And in this episode of the History Extra podcast, she speaks to Charlotte Vosper about the pox ridden world of early modern London.
- [01:58]
A
So I think we should start by asking, what is the pox? You know, what disease are we talking about here?
- [02:03]
E
I think the easiest answer would be that it's most likely what we call syphilis. The more complicated answer is we don't really know what it is. The pox, or venereal disease was this umbrella term that was used to talk about all sorts of diseases that we now differentiate, such as chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis. We have these modern disease categories. They didn't have those categories at the time, and they obviously didn't have bacteriology or a way of testing. So the ways they defined disease was by symptoms. And they were kind of batched under this pretty expansive umbrella of venereal Disease or the pox. And the symptoms they had in common were generally genital discharges, lesions, sores, ulcers, but it could also be things like headache. So if it's helpful to think of a modern corollary, syphilis is probably the one. But it's likely it was all kinds of STIs that we're talking about.
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A
That's really interesting that actually it wasn't just one disease, it was a variety of them. So how might a person catch this disease, or diseases, I should say, or actually, how did an early modern person think that they would catch this disease?
- [03:14]
E
So there were actually two different forms of venereal disease. There's a milder form which was thought to be transmitted through touch. So the idea was that there was pocky matter is what they called it, that you could transmit through sexual contact, but also through non sexual contact, like sharing a glove, sitting on the same bathroom seat, sleeping in the same bed, and sweating in the sheets. So this was the external exchange of fluids. It wasn't by means of any kind of penetrative sex. And you could also get this milder form of the disease by having some kind of traumatic event trauma to your genitals, basically. So I found one case of a man who talked about falling off his horse and he got this mild form of venereal disease. Another example is someone who got hit in the groin with a rock. So these are really non sexual ways of contracting this kind of mild form of the disease. And then the more severe form of the disease was called a true pox or a confirmed pox. And it was associated with much more severe symptoms. And it was thought to be transmitted by penetrative sex. So, you know, in later stages, rotting, you know, degraded cartilage, your palate of your mouth could kind of break down the cartilage in your nose. It was a pretty debilitating and painful disease. People talk about these really painful sores and ulcers that are, you know, first develop in the genitals, but then can extend all over the body. And also what was debilitating about it were the treatments for it. So the more severe the disease, the more extreme the treatments. So the symptoms were broad and varied, but I would say the common denominator in most of the cases that I've looked at were just really extreme suffering. It was not an easy diagnosis to have to endure.
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A
Absolutely. And so where do those kind of debilitating, painful symptoms sit within how bodies and sickness were understood in the early modern period? How did people understand that so bodies,
- [05:17]
E
or health, I should say, was understood as really being about easy intake and easy outgo. And so by that, I mean, ill health was thought to stem from congested or corrupt or imbalanced internal fluids. So a lot of the treatments for all kinds of ailments in this time period involved inducing some kind of outflow. So whether that's purges or bleedings or spits, salivating. So for venereal disease, and specifically, the kind of general idea was there was some sort of venom or poisonous matter that was in the blood, and the more severe version of this disease meant it was kind of more deeply seated in the blood and you needed to get it out somehow. So really common ingredient in a lot of these antivenurial treatments was mercury. And that's because mercury, if you imbibe it, if you eat it as a pill or put it in some kind of liquid, it makes you salivate, like, a lot. Someone in a case that I found talked about salivating five pints of saliva in a day. And other people would make it into an ointment and rub it on their skin, which would make you sweat. So we have a really different way of explaining what's happening when you do these things. Like, we would say, oh, that's mercury poisoning, and you shouldn't do that. But people in this time period, in the 1600s and 1700s, saw this as a healthful expulsion of corrupt matter, that it was good to get the bad stuff out. And so seeing all this saliva or all this sweat was considered a beneficial thing as opposed to how we would see it, which is toxic.
- [07:02]
A
Yeah, there's a really stark comparison there, isn't there, between how we understand those symptoms and treatments and how an early modern person would have done. A really central part of your book is, is the idea that these symptoms of the confirmed pox came with a real sense of stigma and shame because of the sexual ways in which it could be caught. Do you want to talk a little bit about that shame and stigma element of this disease?
- [07:26]
E
Yes. The most obvious way this disease was stigmatizing is its association with sex and relatedly, debauchery and sinful ways. But as we just talked about, there's lots of ways people believed you could contract the disease that were not sexual at all. And the other really important way this disease was stigmatized was not only its association with sex, but the physical symptoms that resulted when you contracted the disease. So all these symptoms we just talked about ulcers, sores, people would limp because of genital discharges. It was very visual and it was very moralizing because this was a time period in which your external markers on your body indicated that the kind of person you were inside your internal moral state. So if you were covered with ulcers and sores, that kind of indicated to people that you are somehow immoral on the inside. And also likewise, a lot of the treatments we just talked about, mercury for example, were very visible, very visual. If you were salivating five pints a day, people could see that. Or if you were profusely sweating, people would see you walking down the street and say, oh, that person is undergoing a treatment for the pox. So healers would market themselves by saying, okay, you can come live in my house for three weeks and undergo this salivation or this treatment, or I have a sweating house where you can sweat in private. So this was a way that healers kind of marketed themselves because there was a lot of shame, not just around having the disease because of what it looked like and how you contracted it, but also because of how conspicuous the treatment was.
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A
That's really interesting. How then did the notions of shame and stigma play out when you were trying to find treatment or a cure?
- [09:08]
E
I mean, a lot of people did market kind of secretive ways of accessing cures. So I just mentioned healers who were offering kind of customized treatment plans where you would go to their house and pay them a significant amount of money to undergo a multi week kind of treatment plan tailored just to you. This is not something a lot of people could afford and a lot of people didn't have the time either to do this. And so another way, a more common way, I think that people accessed treatments that were very much informed by this stigma that we're talking about, were ready made cures. And by that I mean treatments that were uniformly made and sold throughout the city. So this is something I think we take for granted. If you're, you know, go to your pharmacy and purchase a pill and then I go to a different pharmacy and purchase the same pill, we're going to be ingesting the same thing. This was a new idea in the time period, this idea that you could make kind of an over the counter drug that could then be sold out of multiple places in the city was relatively new at the time and there was an expansive market for these ready made cures. When it came to treating the pox because it was a shame free shopping experience, you didn't have to have that lengthy interaction with the healer, you didn't have to live in their house for three weeks and have these kind of conspicuous treatments where everyone could see what you were enduring. Instead, you could go do your shopping and pick up your pill or your potion, or relatively unseen. I've found really interesting stories of how people did this kind of thing. A lot of these healers would outsource the sale of their treatments to third party retailers. So people who were not involved in the medical trade at all, chocolatiers, bakers, cheesemongers, bookshops, and this essentially removed the healer from the selling of the product. And then the patient could go to the bookshop or the chocolate shop or wherever it was they were shopping that day and pick up a cure for their pox without anyone being the wiser, without anyone knowing. So this was one of the ways that we see stigma really shaping the commercial healthcare scene in London in this time period. And then there are other ways. You know, another really fun example of this is an ale house where a healer was selling a pox cure. And you could go to the ale house and order a very specific kind of drink in this little structure that was built on the outside of the house. I kind of envision it as a bit like a phone booth, like an old fashioned telephone booth where you, you go in and there was a little door that would slide open and you could talk to the proprietor of the ale house and order the drink and they would slip you the venereal cure through the window. So this was literally this kind of secret confessional booth that you would enter to get this medicine. So there are all kinds of ways that we see healers selling these ready made, over the counter cures in ways that were accounting for the deep shame of having to undergo a pox treatment.
- [12:15]
A
Wow. It sounds like there's some really innovative ways to get that anonymity when you're shopping for cures to the extent of going to an outbuilding an ale house. Can you give us some examples of treatments that you might be buying in these kinds of settings? Can you just give us a bit of a flavour of this medical world that we're operating in?
- [12:33]
E
The flavor is pretty horrifying when you look at the ingredients of a lot of these cures, they often included things like turpentine and mercury, ingredients that we would never ever want to ingest. I looked a lot at recipe books to get at how people were treating themselves at home. And an interesting ingredient that comes up in a number of recipes for self treating the pox was fasting spittle, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's the spit of someone who was fasting. And I think this is a great example, because I think it really does give us a little window into the ways people thought about this disease and about healing in the time period, which is that this idea that fasting was this atonement for sin, this kind of way of communing with God, this kind of form of redemptive suffering where you're denying yourself food, and somehow those acts, that kind of behavior infuses your saliva with purifying qualities that were considered to be healing for a disease, like the pox that was born of venery and corruption and sin. And so these recipes, I found one of them is you collect sage leaves and you saturate them in the fasting spittle before you then make them into a drink. And then another example that might stick with you is maybe the most interesting of all. A common treatment for this disease was to drink the urine of a virgin.
- [14:04]
A
Wow.
- [14:05]
E
And it comes from this idea that was called the virgin cure, which was this belief that if you had sex with a virgin, somehow the disease would move from the corrupt body of the infected man. It's usually a man. To the pure, untarnished body of the virgin by undergoing the very act that led to your infection in the first place. And this was a very prevalent belief. I've looked and looked. I don't have any evidence people did it. People actually did this, but they talked about it a lot. It comes up in drinking songs. It's mentioned in recipe books, like, oh, if only I could find a virgin. Ooh, that would be a quick fix. So it comes up a lot. But I haven't found a lot of evidence that people were doing this. But I think this coming back to the urine, I think it's kind of a weird combination of the virgin cure and the fasting spittle, that there is some sort of way that the water, the urine of the virgin, somehow absorbed her purity, her unblemished body. It was somehow infused her urine with healing properties that then regenerated and purified the infected person who drinks it. I found this really interesting exchange between two healers who were arguing about selling this urine to their patients. And one of them was accusing the other one of selling counterfeit urine. He said, this guy is selling the urine of his wife. It's okay because she's an honorable woman, but it's not as good as my urine, which is from a virgin. So these guys were fighting not about whether or not you should drink someone's urine. That was fine. But whether it was counterfeit, whether it
- [15:45]
A
was suitably pure, the idea of drinking a virgin's urine to cure the pox is just incredible, isn't it? And actually to our listeners, if you'd like to find out more about historical treatments and cures, then we've actually got a brilliant article on the History Extra website and app which is about an earlier time period. It's about medieval medicines used during the Black Death. The article is called Beating the Black Death. Did Medieval Medicine Help People Survive? And it's by Dr. Elma Brenner. I'll pop a link to it in the description of this episode. So definitely check that out. If you'd like to know more about historical treatments for disease.
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C
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D
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C
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D
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A
Back to the pox. I think the range of these treatments and as you mentioned, the availability of them, you know, the fact they're sold in an outhouse at an alehouse. This all points to a central argument of your book, that the pox was everywhere in London and yet it was commonly called the secret disease. So there's a bit of a contradiction. There was It a secret disease. And how can a historian study something that's supposedly a secret?
- [18:11]
E
Yeah, I think it was called that in part because secrets was slang for genitals. But it was secretive. People didn't want to talk about having it. And I think that paradox that you're talking about there is really my inspiration for writing this book. This disease was running rampant at the time. Some really wonderful historians have done some research into the prevalence of this disease and they found that if you were a grown up living in London in the 1700s, you would have up to a 20% chance of getting infected with the pox, which that is an astounding number. And whether or not that's true, we do know for certain that this disease was everywhere. And yet we don't know a lot or we haven't been able to recover a lot about what it was like to have it, what it was like day to day because people didn't want to talk about it. So then, as a historian, how do we do this work? How do we write the history of a disease that no one wanted to admit they had? The way I set out to do this, first, I tried to think creatively. I tried to look outside medical spaces. So I looked in courtrooms, in kitchens, in streets, and tried to recover experiences outside kind of typical medical interactions. And second, I tried to look at sources in new ways to try to tease out what it would have been like to be a patient day to day living with this disease in the time. So one example of that are the advertisements for those ready made cures that we were just talking about. These were handbills, those are single pieces of paper that were pinned to coffee shop walls or printed in newspapers. And they were advertising these drugs, all kinds of drugs, not just venereal cures. There's a lot of information we can get from these advertisements about how healers were presenting themselves as authoritative and oh, I've been living in this neighborhood for 25 years and you can go ask so and so about how she was cured from my miraculous cure, because this is before privacy laws. So they would print up the names of all the people who were successfully cured. So what I did was I looked at these ads and I looked at the addresses at the bottom of the ads and I made a map of where you could find these treatments in the city. And what I found is that this was an expansive trade in venereal cures throughout the city. And I tried to kind of imagine what, what it would be like to be a patient navigating the city looking for one of these. So all you have is this hand bill with this address. Okay. There's no street signs. The sign boards over the shops in this time period often had very little relation to what the shop was because it was just leftover. So you might have like a sheath of wheat over an apothecary shop because it used to be a bakery. Often when you get to the address, there's multiple people selling the cure because there are all these imposters who are trying to poach customers. So this is just one example of how I tried to kind of overcome the hurdle of writing a history of a secret disease that no one admitted to having is to kind of think about how to use sources in creative ways to recover those day to day lived experiences.
- [21:18]
A
Talking about then these kind of contradictions that the disease was everywhere. People were searching for cures and treatments actively, but at the same time they didn't want to admit having it. Are there other paradoxes in the early modern people's experiences of having the pox that you noticed when you were doing your research?
- [21:34]
E
There's lots of paradoxes and contradictions with this disease. I think that's partly what made it so fearful and loathsome. It was everywhere, but nowhere. Everyone knew what it looked like, and yet it was often misdiagnosed, it was often misunderstood. This was before there was this idea that diseases were uniform organisms that affect all bodies the same way. So we kind of take that for granted that if you are diagnosed with tuberculosis and I'm diagnosed with tuberculosis, we're both infected with the same germ and the disease is going to manifest more or less the same way in our bodies. This time period, the 1600s, the 1700s, is before that development in thinking about disease. This is a time period where each individual is given this kind of tailored diagnosis. There isn't this idea that everyone who has the same disease is going to look the same. It might look different in different people. So what patients say, their experiences, their health histories, their felt subjective symptoms, is incredibly crucial to the work of clinical practice. But here we have a disease where none of that can be trusted because of its stigma, because it's so shameful to admit, yeah, I was sleeping with a prostitute a month before my wedding. No one wants to say that. So they omit that from their narrative. And then all of a sudden, the healer is faced with, okay, well, how do I make sense of all these ulcers? Maybe it's scurv. Hmm. You know, they're trying to make Sense of what's going on in front of them, given this potentially unreliable narrative. And what happens is healers, they said, you know what? We can't rely on what patients tell us. We have to turn to bodies. And so that means bodies take on a new kind of privileged position in clinical encounters. Healers rely on them much more centrally than we see in other kinds of ailments. They're manipulating them physically with their hands, they're using their senses, they're smelling the effluvia that comes out of bodies. They're listening to the sounds when they press on, let's say a tumor or a bump on the body and listens to the fluid that's moving throughout it. They're trying to find patterns across all their cases. And all these ways of privileging the body, historians of medicine tend to associate with a much later time period. We kind of think about this developing much more centrally in consultations in the 19th century with the venereal disease. We see the body operating in this important way in clinical Encounters Much earlier, 150 years before that time, because patients words couldn't be trusted.
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A
That's such an interesting role that the body has in that kind of medical landscape. Talking of people experiencing the same disease differently, did men and women experience this paradoxical poxed world differently? Was the experience of the pox gendered in any way, do you think?
- [24:32]
E
I think it was absolutely gendered. The pox as a disease was typically blamed or pinned on women. So a very common stereotype was that women, specifically sexually aggressive women, are disease vectors. So prostitutes, often women who are from warm tropical climates, any woman who's acting lustfully was typically blamed for spreading the disease. We know this is not true, but this was the stereotype. So going into the experience of having this disease, is this kind of presumption that women are the primary vectors. And then I think also just coming back to those, you know, clinical interactions we were just talking about, you can imagine negotiating or interacting with a male surgeon or a male clinician would look really different if you're talking about a reproductive or sexual disorder that involves burying your body, taking off your clothes. That interaction is going to be really different if you're a woman or a man. Especially in the 1600s and 1700s when sexual propriety was really central to a woman's reputation. So there's lots of ways presumptions about the cause of the disease, negotiations about how to treat it and diagnose it, and just the kind of concrete reality of shopping for cures would have been very much gendered. And we see, going back to those advertisements, those handbills we were talking about earlier, healers often account for these gendered concerns when they're promoting themselves. So they might say, hey, if you're a woman suffering from the pox, my wife also specializes in treating it, so you can go to her and you can have that intimate conversation with her. So they're very much aware of the gender dynamics of seeking out cures and kind of promote themselves accordingly.
- [26:23]
A
You spoke just there about women's experience of negotiating the landscape of securing a treatment or getting a diagnosis even. I'd like to draw on that a little bit more because something that we've touched on, but not explicitly discussed yet, is that the experiences of the pox seem to have really varied across spaces. Do you think there's a relationship between experiences of the pox and space and what were those spaces?
- [26:49]
E
I do place absolutely matters because it dictates how stigma plays out and the shame of the disease plays out. So meeting a healer in the back of a coffee shop or a tavern, that's going to look really different than if you're meeting a healer inside their house. I thought, okay, I'll look inside people's homes. I'm going to open the doors to kitchens and closets, which is where people would make medicines at home. Don't imagine our own modern closet. It was kind of a word for a little room where you would store your ingredients to make medicines. And I thought, okay, here's a place where stigma probably didn't play a big role, right? That people would choose to make these treatments at home to avoid the shame of meeting a healer in the back of a tavern or having to undergo a three week long salivation. Surely that's what's happening here. But what I actually found is the opposite. I found that stigma was there. These self cures at home involved moral redemption, that a lot of them involved some sort of redemptive suffering, some sort of atonement for sins by undergoing a fast or punishing treatment where you would suffer for basically your sinful ways, since there was this presumption that you contracted this disease through sin. There were also treatments that involved ritual cleansing or ingredients that were thought to work not just because of their material qualities, but because of their immaterial associations with purity. Like breast milk was a common one. Or a lot of recipes talk about using the milk from a cow who had recently given birth or newly laid eggs. So there are these kind of assumptions about morality and the stigma of the disease that you're trying to cure. Kind of baked in to these cures even when you're using them in the semi privacy of your home. And then the final example that's really interesting about how place dictates stigma or how stigma changes based on where we look are courtrooms, which is of course the most public place of all in terms of the places I looked. And here we see stigma kind of turned on its head. This disease would be too shameful to talk about in any other context. But in court it becomes something that prosecutors or people who are bringing their cases to court are highlighting or brandishing, they're putting at the center of their cases. Because in court the disease is used as material proof of unlawful sex. It's the stand in for an unlawful sexual encounter where women didn't have to talk about sex, they were just talking about disease. Sex was taboo. You don't want to talk about sex in public, could be detrimental to your reputation, but you can talk about disease. So here we have these moments where the stigma of the disease is something that works to women's advantage in court because it allows them to prove rape, to prove adultery in ways that they couldn't otherwise.
- [29:41]
A
That's a really interesting idea. Then that actually the pox became a language which women could speak in a legal setting. Are there any particular examples where you saw that happening?
- [29:52]
E
Yeah, I think that you put it really nicely there. It gave women a language for talking about sex without having to talk about sex. A really illustrative example comes from Charles Hanbury Williams, who was pretty sure he had venereal disease, but he claimed it was something else, something innocuous, something that had no stigma. And he said, I have to go off to bath to the and recover by myself. So he left his wife and his children in London and he went off to the bath. And it was very clear that he. Because we have all these correspondence between him and a friend, it was very clear he had the pox. And his wife back in London eventually also has the symptoms of the pox. She's able to figure it out, she sees a healer, she's pretty clear on what's going on, and she sues for a separation. And I found a number of cases of this where women are able to sue for separation, which was hard to do. You couldn't really use adultery as a woman. It was something only really men could get away with, but you could use abuse. And so venereal disease kind of stood in. It was a way of showing that a married woman was being abused because she was physically dealing with this debilitating, horrific disease. It was in legal terms about the abuse, but everyone knew what was going on, that that man had been sleeping with prostitutes. So it was able to make men's unfaithfulness central to these separation cases in ways that it wouldn't be able to be otherwise. And the same goes with rape cases. I've found 60 cases of rape, most of them are from the Old Bailey. And they use venereal disease as kind of like a proto rape kit, is the easiest way to describe it. This kind of early form of medical forensic, this way of showing that there was some sort of sexual interaction. Because if this was a confirmed pox, it had to have been spread through penetrative sex. The women who were bringing these cases to court didn't have to talk about sex. They didn't have to talk about non consent, which they didn't even have a language for talking about, because the disease stood in for all of that. It was long enduring, it was easy to see, and you could bring in male medical experts to prove it. So it became this way of proving sexual encounters that would have otherwise been very hard to talk about and very hard to prove. And it actually did. The conviction rate for rape was pretty abysmal. It was about 11%. But in the 60 cases I found, when you account for the cases that mention venereal disease, it goes up to about 30%. So you were three times more likely to get a conviction if you relied on this strategy.
- [32:37]
A
Wow. It's incredible that shame and stigma and the experience of the disease can vary so much across spaces to the extent that women are using it as a powerful language in a legal setting. I suppose one thing we do have to remember, though, when we're talking about experiences for parks in different spaces, is that in this case, all of these spaces and those covering your book are in early modern London. What were experiences of the disease like beyond London?
- [33:03]
E
That's a very good question. I think in many ways they're probably pretty similar in that people understood bodies and understood diseases in more or less the same ways, but in many other ways. The stories that I've been telling are really London specific. And that's because London at this time was growing exponentially. It had a huge surge in population, it had a huge uptick in commercial activities, and it was the center of an emerging, emerging empire. So what this all means is it's just a densely populated, chaotic place that allowed for this expansive medical marketplace that we talked about and it allowed for patients to shop relatively unseen. It allowed for that phone booth type outhouse where you could purchase your ale. It allowed for prostitutes to purchase a wig and beauty patches to cover up their bald spots and their ulcers from their pox infections. But it just enabled the stories that we're talking about to unfold. And I think in even more concrete ways, there was a real vibrant sex trade, so there was just more disease. I think if you look to other places, especially outside of urban centers, there's just not going to be the same amount of disease and therefore the same amount of kind of medical infrastructure around treating it as you would in London.
- [34:25]
A
I suppose if we zoom out a little bit more though, out from London and actually out from the early modern period, it's itself in your book you draw parallels between the stigma of the 1700s pox and more recent experiences of disease like HIV and aids. Do you think there are any connections or continuities between the early modern pox and modern diseases?
- [34:45]
E
The connections I would draw out between then and now have to do with what it would be like to suffer from these diseases. And HIV was the obvious corollary for me because it's an STI as well. It's stigmatizing, it's silencing. It was at least originally associated with what was considered to be taboo sexual behavior. So I think one continuity is trying to write a history that teaches us to recover those stories, those silent stories, and what it is like to experience these diseases and kind of have it be a part of our day to day life. You don't think about London in the early modern period and think venereal disease, but it was really prevalent and it's been really erased from the historical record that people don't want to talk about it. And then a second, I think, important continuity which comes back to the HIV piece is stigma and the role of stigma not just in how we experience disease, but how we understand disease, how we make sense of it and treat it. A big takeaway from my book, I hope, is that it was stigma, not science, that made this disease look so modern for its moment. It was the ways bodies were being privileged. These over the counter cures were taking off because they were so shame free that made this disease look out of step with time. And it's not because there was some big modern innovation or some breathtaking discovery. It's because of shame. And so that shame isn't only something people infected with the disease have to endure. It actually shapes how diseases are conceived. Clinically and how they're treated. And I think that's a trans historical lesson.
- [36:28]
A
I think it's really interesting that you can pull out this idea of the emotional elements of having a disease and trace those through time, I suppose, feeding on from that, then looking to the future. I know you have touched on this a little bit already. What do you hope will be the impact of the book?
- [36:44]
E
Yeah, I mean, I think my hope for the book is kind of my hope in any endeavor that I have as a historian, which is to use the past, the unfamiliarity of the past, to think critically about the present. There is a value to looking to a past that is unfamiliar, like the 1700s and 1600s, when bodies were thought to be made completely differently, to function differently, when health was understood using a very different framework. That that unfamiliarity allows us to see things that we can't see otherwise. It allows us to see the role of stigma, for instance, in shaping conceptions of disease. And it allows us to see the suffering of patients and how diseases become embedded in day to day life in ways that we then can apply to our present moment that we wouldn't be able to do otherwise. So it kind of gives us the tools to think critically about where we are and how we got here.
- [37:43]
A
Yeah, that's a really interesting vision for the book. Thank you very much for coming onto the podcast today to talk to me about it. It's been gruesome, fantastic and wildly interesting. So it's been brilliant. Thank you.
- [37:55]
E
Thank you for having me.
- [37:58]
D
That was Olivia Weiser speaking to Charlotte Vosper. Olivia is an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, specializing in the history of medicine, gender and sexuality. Her new book, the Dreaded Pox, reveals many more stories of the sickening symptoms of and the torturous treatments of early modern venereal disease. If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-granger. Visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.