Wow, there was lots of VD going around in those days. The spread of VD is hardly a new development.
"Widespread and unchecked until the discovery of penicillin, syphilis was a scourge that accounted for many premature deaths, and several composers are known or strongly believed to have contracted it, including [Robert] Schumann. Other famous [composer] syphilitics were Franz Schubert, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Gaspare Spontini, Gaetano Donizetti, Mikhail Glinka, Bedrich Smetana, Hugo Wolf, Frederick Delius, Edward Macdowell, and Scott Joplin, and their symptoms ranged from lesions and fevers to blindness, deafness, dementia, and death."
http://www.allmusic.com/blog/post/classical-composers-and-their-maladies
No wonder they lost the Revolutionary War!
They had good times for long times.
Well, not so long.
Let’s see.....
Lots of Englishmen going around the world and coming back to London.
Certainly. Add to it that London was the seaport to the world with disease vectors getting on and off each ship.
Two other reasons for wigs were (1) Having an expensive wig displayed conpicious consumption and marked one of status, at the same time forcing the upper classes to spend huge sums for elaborate wigs, siphoned away their money which might otherwise be used for rebellious mischief, like the Fronde in Louie XIV’s time, (2) effective cheap, shampoos were not available until the middle of the 19th Century when German chemists developed them. It was far easier to wear a wig and shave your hair or keep it close cropped to keep your head clean, just as the ancient Egyptians did.
And still, to this day, there has never been a double blind study on the cure of Syphilis. Tell Fauxi to get right on that.
“As many as one in five Londoners had syphilis by their mid-30s”
About the same ratio as women in NYC today...nothing ever changes.
Also putting makeup on to cover the sore outbreaks on the face.
And the British sailors brought that shit to Hawaii and infected the Hawaiians. Hawaiian women were the easiest and friendliest on Earth , they were sitting ducks. Zero knowledge about any such matters. And the men did not give a damn .
Even as early as 1740, the famous fictional villain Robert Lovelace, legendary seducer of women, only went after virgins because he was afraid of getting the pox.
sung to the tune of the Beetles yesterday....
Syphilis- it only started with a simple kiss...
Now it hurts to even take a piss...
Oh how did i get syphilis??
Leprosy- all my skin is falling off of me...
I’m not half the man i used to be...
Oh how did i get leprosy??
Remember the movie Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) and how everyone at the upper class dinner table gasped and went into shock when he said his next target was syphilis?
Didn’t see it? You missed a good one I saw 58 years ago on TV and still remember it.
Syphilis was the AIDS of its day.
Then penicillin came along, and people could sleep around without acquiring a fatal disease.
Naturally, AIDS came along and ended the period of being able to safely be promiscuous.
If we develop a cure for AIDS, something new will come along.
Mercury was used to cure it, hence the quip “A night on Venus, a month on Mercury.”
For later
Where did they wear the mask for that one???
I just finished reading Follet’s new book in the Dark Ages in England. Though the book ended long before the 18th century they book touches on prostitution, sex, slavery and what they then called Whore’s Leprosy.
They used slave girls as young as 11 or 12 for prostitutes, who were housed at most every ale house and it was not just the under class who used them. As a matter of fact the under class didn’t often have money. Even the priests in this book used the slave girl prostitutes. They would raid other groups of people like the British raiding the Welsh and they would carry off the young girls and women for slaves, the younger the better.