In Search of Sexual Health: Diagnosing and Treating Syphilis in Hot Springs, Arkansas

By Elliott Bowen Author Interviews, Medicine and the Body

What did Americans living in the time before antibiotics do when they got syphilis?

Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination

By Noelle Gallagher Author Interviews, Early Modern, Medicine and the Body, United Kingdom

How venereal disease was represented in eighteenth-century British literature and art.

Taking the Venereal Out of Venereal Disease: The 1930s Public Health Campaign against Syphilis and Gonorrhea

By Erin Wuebker Medicine and the Body

VD was often associated with immorality.

Sores, Scorn and Stigma? Suffering Syphilis in Early Modern Germany

By Mona OBrien Early Modern, Medicine and the Body

The ‘French disease’ erupted in Europe in 1495.

Moral Panic and Syphilis in Jamaica

By Jill Briggs Empire and Colonialism, Medicine and the Body

Venereal diseases became a means through which colonial elites and moral reformers condemned, surveilled, and made medical interventions against the Jamaican masses.

Bestiality in a Time of Smallpox

By Rob Boddice Early Modern, Medicine and the Body

At the turn of the 19th century, opponents of Edward Jenner’s method for preventing smallpox likened vaccination to bestiality.