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Olivia Weisser, "The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
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Experian hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcast podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Olivia Wiser. About her book titled the Dreaded Pox Sex and Disease in Early Modern London, published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. Now, as anyone who has ever read a novel, historical fiction, anything like that, around the 17th or 18th centur, really, anywhere in Europe, especially in the U.K. in London, things like the pox, which has many names, turns up all over the place, right? Venereal disease, sexually transmitted diseases might be what we call it now, but back then it was massively stigmatized in a way that it was a secret. It had loads of names to kind of hide it from public discussion, which is really odd, Right. It means that we know that this thing was all over the place and impacted people's lives a lot, but also it's kind of hard to get actual information about it because it was so shameful and stigmatized and secret. And it creates this conundrum of kind of, how do we capture the everyday experience of like, what happened? If you had it, was there treatment, how did you get it? Which of course, are really historically interesting and fascinating, especially when we have something that's kind of complex and so socially embedded. This book does that work and figures out all the answers to those kinds of questions through some intriguing kind of methodological things I think we're probably going to talk about to actually excavate what it was like to have this dreaded pox. Beyond kind of what might be gossiped about in a novel that turns out there is some actual history we can figure out. So, Olivia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about it.
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Thank you for having me.
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Could you start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us what you why you decided to write this book, what are the sorts of questions you're investigating in the project, and how did you develop this?
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Sure. I am a history professor at UMass Boston and my expertise is the history of medicine. So I am particularly interested in lived experiences and patient histories. And I work on the early modern period, so the 1600s and 1700s. And you kind of laid it out really well in your introduction. I was interested in this topic because, like you just said, this disease was rampant. Everyone seemed to know about it or had it, or knew someone who had it. There are actually a couple historians who've done some statistical research to try to figure out the infection rates and they predict that if you were a grown up living in London in the 1700s, you had a 20% chance of up to a 20% chance of getting infected with this disease. So this was a disease that was rampant. And yet, like you just said, we don't know a ton about lived experiences because of its stigma. So I was kind of tasked with this challenge. How do you write a history of a disease that no one wanted to admit they had? And my approach was to kind of think about new places where I can look that are new sites in the city, often non medical places. So instead of looking to typical medical sites which are make a lot of sense and have produced beautiful, wonderful scholarship like hospitals, consultation rooms, instead I looked to non medical sites, homes and streets, taverns, coffee shops, to find out what it was like to live with this disease. And what ended up happening is it's almost as much a book about life in London in this time period as it is about this disease.
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B
Well, I mean, that makes sense given, as you said, the risk of getting it was kind of up to 20%. Like that is going to be a big factor of everyday life and how London as a city operates. That's not going to be something that's kind of only hidden off in a corner as much as it sounds like people were trying to do it. But if we're moving away then from these sites of kind of normal medical practice into, as you mentioned, sort of taverns and homes, like, those aren't necessarily the kinds of places that would have like traditional archives that we might be used to using as historians. So what kinds of sources do we have? Do we not have? How do you navigate this methodological challenge?
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Right, so the kind of typical way to recover lived experiences of anything really would be to look at personal writing. And there is a little bit of that. So by personal writing, I mean firsthand accounts like diaries or letters, there's a little bit of that, but a lot of it is thirdhand. Like, a lot of it is people writing about other people, not themselves. And again, it's because of the stigma, not a lot of people would want to write down that they endured this disease. So what I tried to do was try to look for traces of the disease in other kinds of documents and texts and images that kind of get at that first person experience. So I looked at recipe books to see what were people doing in their homes to try to combat this disease. I looked at court records, the depositions, you know, were people talking about this disease in courtrooms. I looked at trade cards of different occupations and how people are kind of promoting their work around the city. And then I also tried to think about how to use existing sources that other historians have used to tell wonderful histories about. Venereal disease in new ways. So one quick example of that are advertisements or handbills. These kind of sheets of paper that were pinned up all over the city. They were pinned to coffee shop walls and they were often advertising cures. They might advertise non venereal cures too, but there were tons of these that were advertising what we would think of as over the counter cures for the pox or venereal disease. And the most obvious way to read these texts is to think about them as promotional documents. They're written by healers who are trying to market a product and sell a product. So a lot of what historians have done with them is look to the promotional strategies of the people who are writing these documents. I tried to do something a little different. I looked at the addresses at the top and I made a map of where you could find a cure in the city. So I'm still using the same historical documents that tons of other esteemed colleagues have used. I'm just using it a little bit differently to map out the kind of geography of cures in the city and then to kind of imagine. To use that map to imagine what would it have been like to navigate the city looking for one of these guys. How do you find John Spinks house in Honeymoon Honey market? How do you find Mr. Fowles in the back of the tavern to get his secret nostrum to cure your disease? So some of the work is just kind of thinking creatively about how to use old sources in new ways.
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That is very helpful to understand the kind of behind the scenes of this sort of work, obviously for this book. But I think definitely listeners on other projects might be able to take some tips from that too. So thank you for telling us about trying to figure out kind of what this world was like. But before we get into the sort of hunting around on streets, I mean, we will get to that because that is definitely an interesting challenge as you've outlined. Before someone decides to kind of go outside and try and find someone. There's like a thinking element of this that we probably need to sort out first. Right. Because you can only go seeking a treatment if you have an idea of what it is you are trying to treat. So how were venereal diseases thought of at the time? Was it just sort of like there's lots of diseases you could get and this is one of them, or was there something sort of different or modern compared to how other diseases were thought about at this point?
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Yeah, that's a good question. And I will try to Contain my answer because I have so much to say about it. Venereal disease specifically isn't kind of. It's hard to kind of equate it with one of our diseases. I think if listeners really needed to have a modern disease category in their heads to wrap their heads around this book, I would say choose syphilis. But the reality is that this was kind of a catch all term. It was a broad umbrella of symptoms, and it could be what we now today think of as a broad array of STIs. So, you know, we call them Chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis. They didn't have these disease categories back in the 1600s and 1700s. They didn't have a ton of disease categories at all. So venereal disease is one of a few disease categories. Um, we obviously there are some other ones that come to mind. Smallpox, scurvy, plague. So there, there are diseases. But for venereal disease, it's kind of this broad umbrella and all these kinds of symptoms kind of fit under this expansive term or category of disease. And, you know, I use the term modern a lot in the book, and when I use that, it's almost like a shorthand for basically thinking of disease the way we think of it, which is a uniform entity or a biological entity rather, that affects people more or less uniformly. So if you and I are both diagnosed with a disease, the same disease, we probably will manifest the same symptoms. We'll probably kind of go through the same treatment protocols. There's this uniformity to how we today, in the modern era, think of disease and disease processes. This is something that did not exist in the time period that I'm writing about. So this idea of thinking of diseases uniformly was kind of born in the 19th century. Often historians kind of equate it with the Paris Clinic. I'm sure listeners who work on medical history would know about this. And, you know, it marks this kind of revolutionary shift in thinking about disease concepts and disease progression and the ability to kind of see it in the body. So in the time period I'm working on, it's before all that. So this is when diseases were relatively individual. You and I are diagnosed with the same disease, we might have totally different symptoms, or if you and I have the same set of symptoms, we might be diagnosed with completely different diseases. So each person was this own individual conundrum that needed to be unpacked by healers and determining what they had and how to treat. It was this very individual customized experience that had a lot to do with their health history, their bodily makeup, their lifestyle choices. So venereal disease, I kind of use the term modern to kind of capture the way we think of disease. It looked kind of like one of our diseases way before that 19th century revolutionary shift. So a lot of what the book, kind of the big umbrella argument of the book is to figure out how this is. So why does this disease look like one of our modern or kind of 19th century post 19th century diseases 100 years earlier? And it really comes down to the stigma that the shame of the disease gives it. This like lends people to think of it in more modern terms. So when words become unreliable body healers privilege bodies, when the shame of walking through the streets to shop for a cure is too much, patients tend toward those over the counter cures that creates this kind of anonymous market that looks bizarrely modern before its time. So it's these non medical spaces in the composite when you kind of piece them together because of the shame of the disease and makes this disease experience and conceptions of it kind of foreshadow later develops in medicine. And it's because of the stigma, not because of the science.
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Okay, that's really helpful to tease out because stigma is a huge part of this and it's the social world really kind of not the scientific world. I think that is worth discussing a bit further because there's kind of the obvious question of like not just why it was stigmatized, but like why this was such a big deal. Like there's always a society always has many stigmas all at once, but some of them are seen as kind of like the big thing we all need to be worried about right now. That's super prevalent right now versus like oh yeah, that's kind of like not great. And probably people should probably be like shamed about it, but it's not top of mind, right? It's not like the biggest problem the society is facing. Why was it then that in 17th and 18th century London it wasn't just that venereal disease was shameful and stigmatized, it was seen as like a hotbed of it, like a top priority problem. Why?
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Yeah, I mean the, the simple, the simplest answer to that, and it's a really great question, is this was a time when what you looked like externally was incredibly important to kind of signal the kind of person you were inside. So exterior markers, how you dress, how you look were indicators of not just who you were in terms of identity, but like your moral worth. So this disease was incredibly visually stigmatizing. It left visual marks, it marred the body, it left ulcers and sores and, you know, weeping. It. I don't want to get too gross here. Weeping ulcers comes up quite a bit in the case books, medical case books. So it's really physically, visually stigmatizing. And in a moment when that really deeply mattered. And then also, this was a time, you know, it. As I said at the beginning of this conversation, the book is almost as much about London life as it is about disease. And London is the key player in this story. So this is a time when London was exploding. It was growing exponentially, demographically, geographically, commercially. And this expansion really perpetuated the disease in really concrete ways. It. There was just a really big transactional sex trade in London, but also in terms of creating a vibrant market for treating it. So there's this dense mobile population, there's trade networks, there are people coming in and out of the city, bringing their handiwork, bringing their crafts. There's an urban mobile population that creates this really vibrant market for treating the disease as well as, you know, creating the spread of disease. And there's an uptick in conspicuous consumption that's really key, too. So this is a time in history. You know, historians refer to this time period as a consumer revolution in England. This is. There's just like more stuff around. There's more stuff you can buy. You can buy clothing at secondhand markets. Prostitutes can buy patches to cover up their ulcers or carry fans or perfume. They can buy wigs to cover up their bald spots. These are all conspicuous markers of being infected with the pox. So there's just more stuff around. And all of this together, I think, creates an environment that both fosters the spread of disease and also creates this vibrant trade in treating it. It creates this kind of moment where having the disease was at the forefront of people's minds because it was everywhere, because so many people had it. You could see people walking down the street limping and think, oh, maybe they're infected. Which is something I discovered writing this book. That a limp. I never knew this. A limp could be an indicator that you were infected because of your genital sores and kind of excretions. So I think there were a lot of visual. Just reminders of the disease. And I think because. Because it's. This book is set in London. It was just more kind of prevalent in the day. In day to day life. I think it would be a really different book if I looked outside of Lond. It's a. I do Think it's a really London specific story.
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Yeah, that's. That's definitely interesting to think about and the kind of visibleness of it, especially when we, you know, remember London had very crowded streets. Like, you're physically very close to lots of people and seeing all these things very clearly. But when we're talking about the many, many things that could be bought, what kinds of treatments were available? Who did you buy them from? What was the sort of range of options available?
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Yeah, I think to really get at that question, I have to step back for just one quick moment and talk about how bodies were kind of purported to work, because that's kind of key to understanding the treatments in a way. So, again, this is like, you know, we're talking about the pre modern era. And so bodies were thought to be dictated by intake and outgo. So a body that has fluids coming in and out easily is a healthy body. And one that doesn't have fluids coming out easily. And in going in and out easily is a sick body. So that means sickness was generally all kinds of sickness, not just this disease was generally chalked up to kind of congested or corrupt or imbalanced internal fluids. So all. Most of the treatments for this disease and others at the time induced outflow. They made you sweat or spit or puke or go to the bathroom. And, and, you know, they. I always tell my students, there were no MRI machines, there were no CT scans, there were no ultrasounds. All people had to look inside the body was what came out of the body. So these treatments were considered to be effective at removing corruptions and removing congestions and rebalancing bodily fluids. And they were also really important diagnostic indicators because you could see the stuff that came out, you could smell it, you. You could look at its color. And that was a really important kind of diagnostic measure. So for venereal disease in particular, there were a bunch of products that became very popular in this moment that did the kind of thing I'm just talking about, right, that induced out, that induced flow. So a lot of these ingredients came from the new World. There was this idea, a very common idea, that the disease kind of originated in the new world in America. And so the plants and products that grew in America would be best suited to treating it. So guaicum wood, which is a kind of bark from a tree, sarsaparilla, these make you go. They induce urine, they make you go to the bathroom. Mercury was a very, very popular ingredient in these venereal cures. And that if you rub it on your Skin, it makes you sweat, and if you eat, makes you spit. So I found one person who claimed that they spit up to five pints of saliva in a single day. So these were kind of ingredients and treatments that made sense within the logic, the medical logic of the moment. Like, yeah, you're sick, you gotta get the bad stuff out somehow. And a lot of these ingredients that grew in the new world were particularly kind of thought to work for this specific disease. And then there were a host of other kinds of diseases, cures rather, that to us might seem completely outlandish. And it's kind of a little harder to make, to kind of fit within the logic of the day. But there is always a logic. There is always an early modern logic, which is why I love studying this time period. So one kind of, I think, memorable example of what I mean is it was thought that if you drink the urine of a virgin, that would cure your disease. And this, I think, is a kind of extension of what was called the virgin cure, which is this idea that if you are a man, it's always a man infected with this disease. If you have sex with a virgin, it will somehow like, shift the disease from your corrupt body onto the pure body of the woman. I don't. I looked and looked and I, I can't find evidence that people are actually doing this. But the idea of it was very prevalent. There are ballads about it, people mention it in court records. It comes up a lot, but I'm not sure people actually did it. But I think this urine thing is some kind of extension of the virgin cure. It's this idea that, like, okay, well, the, the kind of effluvia of this pure virginal body can somehow reverse the venal, the corruption of this disease in the infected body. And again, there is, there is a logic that existed at the time because I know listeners might be hearing this and think that is just bananas. But the logic of the time is there were kind of a category of treatments called sympathetic medicines, where this is this idea that you can kind of transpose diseases onto distant but similar foreign objects. So, you know, your, your hand has a, has a tumor on it. There's one where you dig up the hand of a dead, of a corpse and you pat, you rub it on your, your infected hand and then you bury the hand of the corpse and as it decays underground, the, the tumor on your hand dissolves. So this idea that you can somehow kind of shift diseases onto distant bodies was something that existed in the time. And it's kind of Finding those existing ideas and trying to make sense of them that I find to be really, really fun as a historian working in this time period.
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Yeah, it's really interesting to hear the range, but then kind of the idea of why they thought that would work. Right. Like, that's such a key part of this. And it's clearly things that are being discussed that are kind of. At least some of them sort of in the common knowledge of, like, of course this makes sense. Right. So this goes back to the fun conundrum of, like, this is something that's seen as stigmatized and shameful and secret, but also something that, like, everyone has opinions about and kind of knows about at the same time. So what did everyone just sort of know what options were available and kind of, oh, yeah, if you need a cure, you can go to this guy. Or, like, was there a researching process that had to happen if you wanted to get one of these cures?
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Yeah, you know, my. My students, when I teach this stuff, are always like, but it didn't work. What were they thinking? And my response is always, but they thought it worked. And that's what I'm interested in. It's not whether we think it works.
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It's.
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They thought it worked. So, you know, they. There wasn't. I think there was a research process, for sure. I don't think people just knew exactly what to do. And that's because looking to recipe books, you can see people kind of grappling with different ways of treating different symptoms at home. And then there's, like, little shards of evidence here and there. I mean, my favorite little scrap of evidence is the waterman who you hire to cross the Thames river, gave someone a tip for how to cure their venereal disease, which was to eat eggs for breakfast with the shells still on. It's this, like, throwaway line. But it's so. It's so interesting to me because that means they were talking about it, like, as he was rowing them across the Thames, which doesn't take that long, they had this conversation. So I do think people were sharing tips. And, you know, there's. There's evidence in recipe books, for example, people write down, like, where to get the ingredients. You know, go to Mr. John's Bookshop to get this cure, or go over here. You know, go to this apothecary to get this ingredient. So there's definitely conversations happening in research, and there's not just kind of one option. You know, you get.
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B
You.
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A
You think you have venereal disease or you're diagnosed with it. And you go to the venereal disease shop to get your cure? Absolutely not. There's, there's lots and lots of different options for lots of different income levels. And a lot of what we know about this history tends to be toward the very poor who would go to hospitals because there's a huge, there's just robust hospital records, or the very wealthy who could afford to hire a private healer because they left lots of writing behind too. They have case books. So we know a fair amount about those kind of two polar extremes. We don't know as much about everyone else for the reasons we've already kind of covered. So that's where what I'm trying to kind of flesh out is like, okay, if you're not going to go to a pox hospital, which was pretty stigmatizing, you don't want to go to a pox hospital. This is for the very, very destitute who can't afford anything else. You can't afford to hire your own private healer, which could involve like a three to four week treatment regimen. Sometimes you move into their house to undergo these really exciting, extensive mercury spits and sweats. Some of these healers had sweat houses attached to their houses. And you go live with the healer and sweat out your disease because the treatment was just as conspicuous as the disease. So that's expensive, that is a pricey option. So I thought, okay, well what are other people doing? And that's where kind of we come back to the streets, people buying these kind of over the counter cures, which tended to be a little less expensive and self treating at home. So people who are trying to take treatment into their own hands and do something about it at home. And I did that. And then of course the courts also is a way of kind of getting at the middle groups of people in an indirect way, you know, not the very poor, not the very wealthy talking about this disease. And so there were many, many treatment options. And I think at the end of the day, what people were putting in their bodies and doing wasn't that different. I think, you know, you go to Fleet street and buy an over the counter pill, it could be the same exact pill you get prescribed at the hospital or you pay the fancy doctor to give you. Like, I don't think the treatments really changed, but the experiences of accessing them were very starkly different.
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B
Hmm, okay, that's really interesting to think about because of course the assumption could be that like, oh, you can pay for better cures, right? But it doesn't really sound like that's as much of an option here as we might think. So it's more about kind of having someone tending to you the whole time or sort of what that looks like. But when we're talking about this kind of going out and buying something over the counter, I mean, that sounds more, you know, the modern equivalent would be a drugstore.
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A
Right.
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B
You're not seeing necessarily a doctor, but like a pharmacist who makes up a medicine or something like that. Were there doctors at this point or was that only sort of the really posh people that you mentioned of the kind of four week treatments? Like, did anyone else have doctors? Were doctors on the scene at all?
- [28:07]
A
You mean, were doctors on the scene in the street?
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B
I guess like today you could kind of, if you could be middle class and go and book an appointment with a GP or a doctor, it didn't have to be an intensive, like live in physician or only in a hospital. Is that an option here too? Or is the kind of the over the counter thing only cures from apothecaries rather than like a physician's services?
- [28:29]
A
Right, right, right. Yeah, it's, it's much blurrier. Yeah. So these, these kind of what we would call doctors and that again, I'm, I'm, I'm using that term as kind of a catch all. Like a lot of these guys were not medically trained. They didn't have medical degrees, some of them didn't have licenses. A lot of, some of them were just like, you know, they used to be cobblers and then they were like, oh, I could make more money selling venereal cures. Others were actually medically trained. So it's a huge expansive category when we use the word doctor and they tended to use the word physician or surgeon, but whatever. But these guys were also selling over the counter cures on the street. So it was a very blurry.
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B
Kind.
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A
Of network of cures that existed in this moment. So we've got, you know, you could hire Dr. Spink and go to his house and undergo your four week cure. You could also buy his famous healing pill from his store. Or, you know, Mr. Dr. Spink might outsource his healing pill and sell it out of a bunch of bookshops lining the Royal Exchange and you could go over there and grab it. So some of these, what I'm calling over the counter cures, which is a modern term, they do not use that phrase at all. But that's kind of the phrase I use to convey what I mean, which is uniformly Made you go to that Royal Exchange bookstall, you get the very same pill as if you go to Dr. Spinks house. It's the same thing, just dispersed throughout the city. So those are being sold by physicians with medical degrees. They're being sold by people who say they're physicians, but really are just, you know, smiths or cobblers who have no medical training but are in on the game. They're sold by, they're outsourced to non medical retailers. So Dr. Spink might outsource his healing pillow to a chocolate shop, the bookstall at the Royal Exchange, a toy shop that sells trinkets. So what I ended up finding by doing this mapping is that these cures were for sale all over the place, often at a really far remove from the person who's actually making the cure. And so it wasn't just people who were making up these treatments in their kitchens and trying to, you know, earn a pound and selling them all over the place. It was a combination of those kinds of people and more credentialed people. And so it created, you know, I think the, the historical record left behind that I was able to work with was all the tensions that emerge from that, because you've got these credential guys who are kind of miffed that all these other people are getting in on their game who don't have credentials, like.
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B
What are you doing here?
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A
Trying to sell my, you know, sell cures. You don't even have a medical degree. And then you've got imposters, people who are claiming to be, for example, that Dr. Spink. So you. We've got handbills, these one page advertisements where they're describing how to get to their house and then they include a little line about how there's an imposter who lives across the street. Don't go to his house, you have to come to my house. My house has the yellow pails in front. The other guy's an imposter. He's pretending to be me to poach my customers. So there's so much going on, it's, it's really actually quite chaotic. But the chaos kind of leaves a trail of historical evidence behind that I was able to work with in a way which was helpful.
- [31:45]
B
Yeah, I mean, chaos is definitely useful for historians, but also really gives us a sense of, as you said, like this is a story as well about London. And it sounds like living in this city at this point would have been chaotic. Right. And that's kind of a useful element of like, oh, there's lots of information, and you have to do this parsing of, like, is this person a fraud? How can I trust them? Like, that's a useful sort of weigh into people's everyday experience to kind of be able to make sense of. But it does sound pretty chaotic. Right. And that's not always something that everyone wants to deal with. So if you either didn't want to deal with the chaos of figuring out if Dr. Spinks was legit or not, or you were like, you know what? I don't even care if he is legit. I'm so terrified of anyone knowing that I might have the pox. Was there an option to treat the disease privately in your own house without anyone finding out?
- [32:36]
A
There was, yeah. So, I mean, that was kind of where I. That's kind of why I turned to houses is I. I had that same question, like, okay, if. If walking around the city is chaos and difficult. So part of kind of my reimagining, my imagining using that map and imagining what it would be like to shop, the answer is chaos, stress. It is not easy to navigate this city. So surely people would have wanted to just treat themselves at home, assuming that they also might not want to go live in some healer's house for four weeks and kind of undergo this tailored, lengthy cure that was very expensive. So I thought, yeah, people must be treating this at home. And the answer is they were. They absolutely were. I found about almost 30% of the recipe books I looked at included some kind of cure for venereal disease. So I looked at 166 recipe books, and I found treatments for venereal disease in about almost 50 of them. So, yes, these were absolutely there. But the issue, the problem with recipes is that they don't actually show what people were doing. Right. They're like, I think we all can relate to this idea or this experience, rather, of writing down a recipe because you might want to make it, you know, make the. The. Whatever. The pie or the cake or whatever recipe you're writing down one day and you never. You never do. So the same goes for medicinal recipes. People wrote down all kinds of things. It doesn't mean they actually made them and used them. So recipe. Recipe books are kind of evidence of what people should do in, or wanted to perhaps do or wanted to preserve. But they don't necessarily tell us what people were actually doing. And so I had to kind of look carefully, and I, you know, I turned to a lot of really esteemed colleagues who've done lots of wonderful work with recipe Books. And I learned from them about how you can read them carefully. You can look at the marginalia, you can look at the changes of ink color, you can look at kind of crossing outs and writing in little notes or even just writing in, you know, the amount, you know, the size of a nutmeg or whatever amount you're supposed to use of an ingredient in the margin. These kinds of little tiny indicators that someone was trying this recipe. They might not have been trying it because they had venereal disease and needed to treat themselves. They might have just been trying it to see how to, how to make it. We just don't know. So these are really, they, they're really wonderful historical documents, but they can be really tricky to use. So we have to kind of read them very carefully to get over this hump of like, okay, they preserved it. And that is telling, that is important that they thought to write this down. But how do we know they were actually using these recipes? So at the end of the day, I've kind of did all this sleuth work and I found, yeah, a lot of people were using these recipes, that it absolutely was the case that people did want to treat themselves at home. But what I found is that it wasn't like an easier path toward treatment, that a lot of these recipes were just as complicated. Complicated and required just as many tools and ingredients as going to a healer. I mean, in many ways, going to a healer might be easier if you had the means, right, because you were just paying the healer to do all this stuff for you. Whereas at home you have to have funnels and glassware and, and pots, which we, you know, was not something everyone had at home. You might have to have distilling equipment, you might have to go out and source lots of ingredients that you couldn't grow in your garden. Like some of these recipes call for, like ambergris or gold. One of them called for gold, which obviously is not something people would just have. So making these recipes was very complicated work. It required a lot of technological know how, so it wasn't necessarily an easier option. And then the final piece, you know, I came to this research thinking, well, surely people did this to evade shame. And the most surprising finding of all, doing this kind of domestic medical care work was discovering like, shame was still there.
- [36:40]
B
It was just different.
- [36:42]
A
It was embedded in the, in these recipes. It was embedded in the ways they titled the recipes. Like Burning from a Harlot was the title of one of the recipes. Burning being your stinging sensation in your genitals. And harlot. I think we all know what that means. So like the, the, the moral assumptions about who the kinds of people are who have to treat this disease are just right there in the title of the recipe. And then they're also embedded in how the recipes were purported to work. They're embedded in the logic of the cures. So a lot of these homemade recipes drew on these ideas that are steeped in religion about atonement and kind of suffering for your sins. So a lot of them were deeply punishing. You know, starvation diets, sequestration in your room for days on end. These, these recipes that were punitive really. And I think kind of were based on this idea that you were. That that redemption was a kind of key component of cure and that it was kind of part of the curing process was to suffer for your sinful ways. So all of these presumptions I had coming in to doing this work were kind of overturned. When I, when I looked at, at these actual recipe books, people were using them, but they weren't necessarily easier to, to use and they were not necessarily shame free.
- [38:01]
B
No. This is really interesting to see like the reality of it.
- [38:06]
A
Right.
- [38:07]
B
And all the kind of ideas embedded and especially these concepts of sort of atonement and suffering and like punishment as well. Obviously there's like religious aspects to it. But it does make me curious about what you found when you went looking for the dreaded disease in the courts. How did they show up there? Like, why was that even a relevant thing to bring up in a courtroom?
- [38:28]
A
Yeah, so I was just playing around with the Old Bailey online is how I went. Did this work for anyone interested, interested in how I even came to this? I was just playing around with the database. So it's a wonderful. If listeners don't know about it, it is a beautiful resource. I use it to teach all the time. You can freeword search, you can do just really intricate searches through all of the, I think almost all of the depositions from the Old Bailey, the central Criminal court in London. And I put, just put Venereal into the database and all these hits came up and I just looked at them and saw like, wow, these are almost all for rape or sexual assault, like what's happening here. So that's kind of how I got into this research of looking in the courts. And you know, to answer your question, the ways it came up in court are two ways. So sexual assault or rape. Because this is a criminal court, so these are for rape charges. Sexual assault would have been charged in different courts, in quarter sessions, which I did look there too. And the second way is separation suits, which wouldn't come up in the Old Bailey. So that's also a consistory, court records. And that's because you could get a separation if you could prove either adultery, which women could not really ever prove, or abuse. So venereal disease, being infected with venereal disease was the result of your husband being adulterous. But the way it plays out in court is it was proof you'd use it to prove abuse. So it was kind of this, like, twofer in a way. So. And this is really unusual that I'm using many different court systems together, but I think it is okay, because what I found kind of is consistent across all these court systems in terms of how venereal disease comes up. And it's really interesting that you're asking this question after talking about the shame of treating this disease at home, because in courts, this is the one place I found at least, where the shame is turned on its head. All of a sudden, what would be too shameful to talk about in any other context becomes something that prosecutors are highlighting because the disease is the material proof of unlawful sex. So this shameful, stigmatizing thing that on the streets, at home, with healers, in the tavern, in the coffee houses, you don't want to talk about, you want to high, you want to hide here in court becomes something that you highlight, you talk about explicitly and openly. And that is very unusual. And I think, you know, the kind of uniform the finding I found across all these court systems and all these really different ways the disease is coming up in court. The. The kind of common denominator is that the disease is this early form of medical forensics. So for these rape cases, you would have to prove, to get a conviction, you'd have to prove non consent. If you're under the age of consent, you have to prove penetrative sex. So over the age of consent, you have to also prove penetrative sex and also non consent. Under the age of consent, you just have to prove penetrative sex. But women cannot speak publicly about sex without harming their reputation. They have no language. They literally have no language for talking about consent. So. And then for separation suits trying to use abuse to get a separation, you can't just say, look, I'm covered in bruises. Right? You have to contextualize those bruises. The woman who's bringing the case to court has to explain them. And of course, this is a moment when women's words are undervalued in the court systems. So these are hard cases to win. And in both of them, what happens with this disease is it allows women to speak about unlawful sex in a way they couldn't otherwise. So the disease is long enduring. It lasts a long time on the body. It's visible, which we already talked about, and it speaks for itself. You don't need to contextualize it. You don't need to explain, like, look, I have this disease. We all know how you get this disease. So it allowed women to talk about these events, these unlawful sexual events that they could not talk about otherwise because they weren't. They were talking about disease. And then finally, it also shifted testimony on to the words of men who were purported to have more. You know, their words were purported to be more valued. Right. They were taken more seriously in court because they would bring in male medical experts to determine whether or not the woman had the disease. So then we've got these apothecaries, surgeons, physicians coming to court as medical experts saying, yep, this is disease. This is venereal disease. You can only get this from penetrative sex. So now you've got these cases that are about ostensibly unlawful sex, but they're relying on the words of men instead of the words of women. And so the disease, it's still riddled with problems. I don't want to suggest this is some cheery story where all these women are able to secure rape convictions, but it did. You know, mentioning the disease did raise the conviction rate for rape up 30%. So you had a 30% higher chance of getting a conviction if you purported to have gotten venereal disease from your assaulter. So it wasn't this cheery, rosy story of women overcoming the patriarchy, but it did give them a way to bring these cases to court and sometimes win. So it was kind of an interesting moment where the disease kind of gave women a way to navigate this system that they wouldn't have had otherwise.
- [44:02]
B
Yeah, that's really interesting to see how those things are all coming together and creating a language that's like, you know, having language around consent literally doesn't exist. So it's. It's so shameful. It's in that category, whereas this is really shameful. But, like, at least there's words for it. You know, it kind of gives us this almost relational idea or hierarchical idea of levels of shame in the society and kind of how these different aspects of law and gender are sort of interacting. And, of course, questions around consent and rape are definitely one of the ways in which this world you're taking us into are still relevant today. There's some other aspects we've mentioned of it too, right? Kind of over the counter cures and medical professionals and like, what kinds of qualifications they have and the idea of trying to treat something yourself versus the shame of going out and the chaos of navigating. I mean, those are all elements that might sound familiar too. There's also, of course, things that are really, really different. Right. Like some of the logic behind the medicine you've been describing, like, doesn't make a lot of sense to us now. Or even the way that the diseases are conceptualized and sort of mentally categorized. Are there any other kind of key similarities or differences that you want to highlight between this world then and maybe more where we are now?
- [45:14]
A
I think you touched on a lot of the big ones. I think one more would be stigma. I think throughout the book I bring it back to Covid, and I think I also bring it back to hiv because that's another deeply stigmatizing sexually transmitted disease, although it's very, very different from venereal disease. And a lot of the similarities there that I was able to pull out have to do with more of the early history of HIV, like the 1980s and 90s in America, not the later, more recent histories elsewhere. But I would say the role of stigma. You know, I was thinking about how silencing it can be even just thinking about COVID in the early times of COVID that you don't want to admit you have Covid or you don't. You know, there's still a shame even when you're talking about diseases that have nothing to do with sexual behavior and just kind of the, the work of telling a history of lived experiences of a disease that's kind of erased because now we don't want to talk about. I mean, I know I don't want to talk about COVID anymore. I. You know, when I'm watching television shows and there's a Covid plot, I'm like, no, I don't want to think about it. I'm done. Let's move on. Like, it's a bummer. We don't want to, we don't want to think about it. And so I think what ends up happening is this pandemic experience that we all just lived through is erased. And I think it's a coping mechanism. It's very common. It happens throughout history. It's how we cope and move on. And it's important that we do move on. It's also important that we remember and commemorate. That's also healing and important too. And so part of, I think the work, you know, I wrote this book from start to finish. Well, actually I started it long before COVID but I wrote most of the words during COVID And I think that really informed how I thought about doing this work of recovery of, you know, what, what was it like to be an ordinary person dealing with this disease? How do we give words to who were silenced because they didn't want to talk? And so I think kind of living through that pandemic was part of that. You know, it really informed how I thought about doing this, this work. And I think the takeaway would be, you know, how do we do the work of recovering silence diseases? Like how do we as historians do that work? And then also bringing it back to stigma. And you know, what we were talking about earlier, about how stigma shows up in these different ways when we look in different non medical sites, we see shame, this kind of invisible guest at every single interaction with this disease in London. And I think the kind of takeaway for today is to think about, like, how stigma is shaping the ways not just we experience disease, but how we conceive disease. Because a lot of what I found in doing this research is that, yes, stigma absolutely is affecting experiences. It's causing shoppers to sneak in back doors and to go to bath houses and at night to get their, you know, their steam baths for their venereal infections. It's, it absolutely influences experience, but it also influences conception. It also affects how the people in this story that I'm telling thought about disease. It leads them to think about the disease as a process differently. It leads, it creates different markets for cures, right, economically. So it's kind of got its fingers in its talons in all different dimensions of this disease. And I think that is a trans historical story.
- [48:39]
B
Well, it's certainly a very interesting one with all sorts of relevances to the past, the present and as you've mentioned, right, the future and how we go forward thinking about these things. So on that last theme, what may I ask, are you working on now that the book is done? Any side projects? Any, I don't know, the most epic garden quests. Like, what are you working on at the moment?
- [49:01]
A
Yeah, I have not yet started another book. I have a couple ideas that I'm trying to figure out which direction I want to go in. But in terms of academic work, I'm returning. So my first book was written on. I wrote about the history of the patient. There's a logic to how I got to this book, and I'm kind of returning to that and thinking about the history of the patient and where that history is now, kind of what we can do with the history of the patient now and how we, as historians can do that work in new and interesting ways.
- [49:33]
B
Well, that certainly sounds intriguing. Best of luck exploring various topics. And of course, while you are doing that and deciding what book might come next, listeners can read the book you've already written that is out the newest one, titled the Dreaded Sex and Disease in Early Modern London, published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. Olivia, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [49:55]
A
Thank you so much for having me.