August 28, 2014 • 45 mins
It's difficult to overstate the impact of syphilis on the Western world, and it remains a threat to this day despite effective antibiotic treatments. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Julie explore the history of the illness and its cultural effects, from powdered wigs and false noses to surgical advances and vampire myths.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and on Jergie bas This
is part two of our little series here on syphilis.
The first episode, Syphilis the Great Imitator, dealt with the
(00:24):
the organism that causes syphilista, which is known as Trepanema palladum,
actually the subspecies of Trepema palladum, and this is all
caused by this tiny, tightly coiled spiral key, this little
bacterium that ends up causing all of this trouble for
those that infected. So if you have not listened to
that first episode, go back, have a listen. We will
(00:45):
walk you through all the stages of a syphilis infection
from that from the tiny annoyances of the primary infection
on up to the disastrously deforming and ultimately lethal stages
of tertiary syphilis, as well as the treatment of it. Finally, um,
all right, this has been mentioned in the other episode,
(01:06):
but at bears mentioning again. The first recorded epidemic of
narial syphilis occurred in Europe in by the close of
the fifteenth century. It was pretty rampant. In fact, in Naples, Italy,
there was such a huge outbreak that the pope that said, hey,
we need some help here. Soldiers were brought in, five
(01:28):
thousand of them. And what do you think happened, Well,
they got to the prostitutes and they got more syphilis,
and then of course they just got worse and worse.
So what we're talking about is is a disease that
ravished for centuries throughout Europe, and today we're going to
try to get at the origins of it, and they
(01:50):
we're gonna try to tease out some of the morality
that has been paired with it, as well as the
sort of xenophobia that surrounds it as well. Yeahs, as
I mentioned before, it's it's it's kind of difficult to
overstate the importance of syphilis in Western culture for those
four and a half plus centuries. Um that it that
(02:11):
that it was a problem. Um And And as we
discussed in the last episode, syphilis is not eradicated. It
is still around the day. It's still something to be
concerned about, and it's still something we have to to
treat both wet with with penicillin and with education. But
during the fourteenth century to the early twentieth century, it
was really permeating the fabric of culture. It was rampant. Yes,
(02:37):
when we break down the percentages of it, it's going
to vary depending on where in Europe you're looking, but
you're generally looking at a ten to fifteen percent of
the population has syphilis. Uh, you know, with some degree
uh you know, margin for error there, and then uh
upwards of in military because then you have younger men
(02:57):
who are initially traveling around and they are the ones
that are spreading it from place to place, visiting prostitutes,
et cetera. Yeah, and because of its association with Columbus,
who sailed under the Spanish flag, it was called the
Spanish disease for a while, and then the French called
it the Neopolitan or Italian disease because they caught it
(03:19):
from residents of Naples, or should they say when Naples,
of course, was one of the major outbreak areas. The
Russians called it a Polish disease, the Polish called it
a Russian disease, and the Turks called it a Christian disease,
while the English called it the French park. So what
do you see here, a lot of finger pointing. Yes,
it's always the other that you blame the disease, and
(03:42):
you have to draw that firm line in your worldview
between we the clean and they the disease, and hope
that that line doesn't come to envelope you as well. Um,
the the Columbus thing is so fascinating and it's and
it's a it's a point that is continually studied and
argued about. But again we see that first big outbreak
(04:03):
in and as we all know in four nine two
Columbus sailed the ocean. So it sounds it sounds almost
too good to be true, slash too horrible to be
treat It almost sounds too easy, but but we keep
coming back to it time and time again. Here we
have Columbus sailing to this drastically new land and their contact,
(04:28):
be it sexual or merely skin on skin, is occurring
between members of his his crew and the native population.
And then they return to Europe, and then in their
wake we see the emergence of this, this this powerful illness. Yeah,
and you see a lot of wrongheaded ideas about this,
this idea of xenophobia, right, this fear of strangers, this
(04:51):
idea that there are savages that have uh spread this
disease to Europeans via Columbus. Yeah, you laid with a
member of another nation, you late with a member of
another another race. All these these weird taboos spring up,
uh and seemingly in concert with the parameters of the illness.
As we mentioned before, one of the reasons that syphilis
(05:13):
is such a captivating topic is because it's so rife
for metaphor, you know, be it a metaphor of morality,
of a metaphor of racism, nationalism, sexism, whatever you want
to throw at it. It seems to conform to that
that form rather nicely. Yeah. Now we will get back
to Columbus and we're going to try to get to
(05:34):
the origins of of syphilis. But before we do, it's
just worth it to say that this is syphilis, and
trying to get to the origins of it is really difficult. Um,
it's very hard to study. There are many strains, some
of which don't exist anymore, and then you have anecdotal
claims throughout the centuries, so you can't really pair that with,
(05:55):
you know, a systematic approach to say, yes, indeed, this
was a case of syphilis, because again, as we have
mentioned before, syphilis is the great imitator. So it's very
possible that someone had leprosy and not syphilis exactly. And
and again on that difficult to study. Note, you you
can't grow syphilis in a culture. You can't have a
little petrie dish of syphilis. Even today, we have to
(06:17):
study it in rabbits, so right, you have to have
it in an actual organism to really get a good
idea about it. That being said, there have been these
pre Columbian theories kicked around. In other words, this idea
of hey, could syphilis have existed before the New World,
previous to the late fourteen hundreds in the old world.
(06:41):
That's again called the pre Columbian theory. Yeah, and this
is this theory is basically that to say that, well,
when we have other illnesses, and if you look back
at some accounts of leprosy, you might say, well that
that kind of leprosy doesn't match up as well with
our modern understanding of leprosy. Perhaps that was a different ailment,
Perhaps that was in fact syphilis. And instead we're just
kind of latching on to this easy explanation of Columbus.
(07:05):
Since this groundbreaking um expedition takes place just a few
years before this major outbreak. But of course, the world
because I mean it makes sense, right, I mean, the
world is more complicated than one ship sailing off and
coming back. There are other movements going on in the world.
It's a time of great change. People are moving around,
(07:25):
not only throughout Europe, but you have movements going into
into into Asia and Africa. So what so why not?
Why why could there not be another route for this
illness to take? And we'll discuss that, we'll really try
to get to the bottom of this. But so when
we call when we say pre Columbian, we're talking about
Old World. When we talk about Columbia and we're talking
about New World generally here old world is Europe, Old
(07:48):
world is is Western civilization. New World the America's Columbia, etcetera. Right,
And if you're going to talk about New World, you
have to talk about something called yaws and facial Now,
these are tropical diseases that are closely related to tromponema palladum,
which is of course syphilis, although they are different. Bagel
(08:10):
causes mouth stores and lumps in the bone, and yaws
caused skin stores and disfiguring growths on the legs. So
of course they're they're related to syphilis, but they are
non venereal, right, they're spread through skin to skin contact,
They're not They're they're not straight up venereal diseases. Um.
You know, granted you could catch them in skin to
(08:31):
skin contact during sexual intercourse, but they're not depending on
that as their mode of transmission. Yeah, but these are
all trimp and emial diseases that are These are all
close relatives of the subspecies of Trimpandema palladum that causes syphilis.
And we bring them up because they're important to study.
If you're if you're trying to look at where syphilis,
syphilis originated from, then you're gonna want to look at
(08:54):
yaws and basil because paleo pathologists Bruce and Christine Rothschild
used that information to point toward a new World origin
of syphilis. They examined six hundred and eighty seven skeletons
from archaeological sites in the US. We're talking about arranging
(09:14):
an age from four hundred to six thousand years and
what they found is that populations to the south look
to have syphilis, while those to the north had yaws.
And then by contrast, they examined one thousand Old World
skeletons dating to before contact with the New World and
they found zero cases of syphilis. So this kind of
(09:38):
gets you onto the route of well, maybe the New
World did have the case of syphilis, although it's not
that clear cut, as well discussed, and this leads us
to what is called the Unitarian hypothesis, which has nothing
to do with Unitarians in the religious sense of the world,
where don't worry, Unitarians, We're not We're not nailing this
one on you. Unitarian in this sense that that it
(10:01):
unites the Old World and New World hypotheses regarding the
emergence of syphilis in Europe. The basic idea here is
that you do have Columbus and New sailors setting sail
from Europe to the New World to the Americans, and
when they're there, they do come into skin to skin
contact sexual and non sexual with natives there, and then
(10:22):
they end up acquiring trimpanemal diseases. Now, you know, again,
think to the Jewel, think to to tent, to, think
to yads, but not necessarily syphilis proper but they bring
back a relative of syphilis, and they bring it back
to a drastically new incubation world. We're talking about a
different environment because in the in the America's uh, you know,
(10:44):
individuals with syphilis they're gonna largely be in you know,
smaller communities. But then you bring them to a European
port town. You bring it to a world where individuals
are wearing more clothes, thus allowing for less skin on
skin contact. You're bringing it to a world where you
have brothels, a world where you have tiny ships tightly
packed with men sailing from one port to the next
(11:05):
port throughout Europe. And what happens, according to this hypothesis
is that the the treponemal disease changes and and we
get this subspecies of Trumpanema palladum that causes syphilis as
we know it. So it is a story of mutation
under new environmental circumstances. Yeah, if anyone is interested in
(11:27):
taking a deeper dive into this and and some of
the skeletal evidence behind this, there is a paper two
thousand and twelve paper called the Science behind pre Columbian
evidence of Syphilis and Europe research by documentary and that
goes into this, uh much more. And I wanted to
quote Molly Zuckerman. She's one of the authors of paper.
(11:47):
She says, in reality, it appears that venereal syphilis was
the byproduct of two different populations meeting and exchanging a pathogen.
It was an adaptive event, the natural selection of a disease,
independent of morality or blame. Yeah, it's not as situation
of ah, the sinful sailors are all those diseased natives
(12:09):
in this new world. It's it's something more complicated than that. Yeah.
And you know, at the outset of this, the researchers
for this paper, they really wanted to sort of disprove
this idea that Columbus and his crew were vectors for
syphilis because I thought, it can't be that just you know,
Columbus and his his guys hung out in America and
(12:32):
then brought it back to Europe and spread syphilis all
over the place. Can't be that simple. And it's not
that simple, um, you know, because the trick here is
that it mutated, it adapted rather um. But they really
they went into it with the intent of saying, no,
it can't be yeah, because it does sound like something
you would read and sort of conspiracy theory kind of
(12:55):
message board, right, like, well, these two dates line up,
we can correlate this little little bit. Therefore, that must
be what happened. Um Now, Now, we do want to
drive home that these are all hypotheses and that this
is still an area that everyone that there are a
lot of papers that come out about this, there's a
lot of discussion, a lot of argument, lots did a
lot of disagreement. So there's no definitive answer here, and
(13:16):
it may indeed be one of those areas where we
never have a definitive answer. It's true. And uh, you
know that the researchers who worked on that paper also
worked on some of them worked on a different paper
looking at fifty four published reports of pre Columbian evidence
and skeletal remains of syphilis, and they found there that
again there wasn't enough supporting information and real evidence to
(13:42):
say that it existed in its form of syphilis as
we know and talk about it now in the old world.
So again, there seems to be some sort of direction
here in terms of the way that the river is
streaming with information, But it doesn't mean that this is
the endpoint of the origins of syphilis. And we're gonna
(14:02):
talk about more of the sort of sights and sounds
and smells of what it might be like in a
syphilitic era in Europe. And I wanted to just read this.
This is from the BBC, A Cultural History of Syphilis.
It says in the fourteen nineties and apparently new and
terrifying disease struck naples in southern Italy and swept fire
(14:25):
like across Europe, reaping a dreadful human cost. It must
have been as though Hell had come to earth. Pustules
spread across the gentitals and the face of its many sufferers.
Unbearable gastro intestinal pain followed upon fevers, screamingly severe headaches
and other symptoms. Finally, flush fell from bones. Syphilis had
(14:49):
arrived in Europe, where it would stay misunderstood, lacking any
form of cure, for nearly five years. Yeah, that's that's
pretty rough sounding. Um. And again, remember that this was
not a disease that affected just the poor. This was
a disease that affected rich and poor alike, that affected
royalty and peasant, that affected clergy members, anyone that was
(15:10):
engaging in sexual contact, uh, random risk, a high risk
of acquiring uh this this illness. And yeah, this was
not a quiet sort of illness. I mean people could
smell you before you even came around. And we're talking
about rotting flesh. We are talking about your face bearing
the marks of syphilis, your body bearing the marks of it.
(15:30):
In fact, you could even kind of see it as
the sort of scarlet letter A brought into your flesh. Yeah. Again,
the metaphorical power of syphilis is unavoidable here because you
already have the idea, uh in Western culture, that that
physical deformities may signal inner deformities, that that that that
(15:53):
an inner sin can have a fleshly manifestation. And it's
super easy to apply that line of thinking to syphilis,
because here's something that's spread through sex. Here is something
that's spread through uh through sin, if you will, and
and then has these these terrifying physical um manifestations, certainly
in its later stages. So it's it's easy then for
(16:16):
someone to point the figure and say this, this is
the way. These are the wages of sin right here.
All you have to do is look at this individual,
Look at the look at the sores on their body.
Look at the deformities of their facial feature. Look what
has happened to them? Uh, And and so you see
this just throughout its stuff, throughout its four and a
half centuries of unchecked rampaging, and even beyond into the
(16:39):
twentieth century and even into the twenty one. There's there's
a moral aspect to syphilis and to other venereal diseases.
This is something you caught because you were doing something
that was wrong. Like that's the script that is often
applied to the scenario. Yeah, and now people have the
sort of calling card hallmarks of that disease. Right. They
(17:01):
look at you and they say, oh, let me see
you've you've got a nasty rash there, you've lost your hair, um,
perhaps your nose is even caving in into what's called
saddle nose. And so what do people do, Well, they
try to find anything and everything that might cover up
their transgressions or what would be perceived as transgression. Right.
(17:25):
And bear in mind again through all of this, that
there are no set of standard symptoms for syphilis, and
there are stages where it's undetectable. So so every everyone's
going crazy with ways to detect and treat it, while
the illness itself is is so difficult to get your
hands on. It's the great imitator, it's the it's the
great hider um. So yeah, bad stuff is happening to
(17:48):
your body in the varying stages of syphilis. So one
thing you might do is to, of course, you may
cover things up. Since we were wearing clothes, we're wearing makeup.
You can apply clothing and makeup to cover up your source. Yeah.
In fact, syphilis just creates this whole cottage industry of
different things you can buy and do to either feel
better or look better. So there might be some sort
(18:11):
of snake oil that you can buy right that has
absolutely no medical marriage. Or you might visit your local
wig maker quite a bit, because again, you want to
cover up the bald patch on your head or the
baldness so that people don't suspect that you have syphilis.
And if you are a prostitute, American is a must
(18:32):
because yeah, you might be saving your pupd care any
way to cut down on lights, but then you also
might have an outbreak of syphilis down there. You want
to disguise the signs, so you get a wig for
your genitals also called a mercan, which is not a
Muppet character. Yeah. They apparently used a lot now in
for films, especially historical films. Yeah, but historically it was
(18:55):
more a matter of venereal diseases for the men. Generally,
wasn't really an option because the well there's just more
to cover up down there, and uh, just do a
Google im his search, he'll see what I'm talking about.
All right, Yeah, there are some rely just sticks there
that you can't quite uh cover with American. But what
happens when your nose caves in and your flesh begins
(19:18):
to rot away, Well, this creates a problem, and in
general it was kind of a rough time for noses anyway.
If you remember the story of Tico Briy, the the astronomer,
I think we did an episode on him, or at
least he's come he comes up a time we did. Yeah, Yeah,
fascinating individual. Um. There may be some biographers that that
(19:39):
creep syphilis in there, but but I think it's pretty
established that that he lost the nose in a duel.
So on on one level, you can lose that nose
in a duel. Living an adventurous lifestyle, getting yourselves into
arguments with other armed gentleman. But you can also acquire
sephilis through your adventurous lifestyle. And then you see the
saddle nose, the eventual rotting away of the nose. So
(19:59):
one thing you can do is you can buy a
fake nose to where over your destroyed nose. And this
is this is as simple as it sounds. If you've
ever seen a digital underground video and you've seen Humpty
Hump with the big fake nose on his the on
a face who incidentally, according to the backstory, lost it
in a frying accident, I believe so, So no dueling
(20:20):
or syphilis involved with Humpty. But but it's basically the
same scenario, a fake nose that is strapped onto the
body or held with wires over the over the the
the vacant area. Yeah, in fact, and this is according
to Lindsay fitz Harris, who is in medical historian and
writes on the Kirojian Apprentice, which is a great website
(20:44):
documenting medical surgeries. She writes that this deformity was so
common amongst these suffering from the pots, as it was
sometimes called, that no nose clubs sprung up in London
on February eighteen seventy for The Star reported Miss Sanborn
tells us and an eccentric gentleman, having taken taken a
(21:05):
fancy to see a large party of noseless persons, invited
everyone thus afflicted whom he met in the street to
dine on a certain day at a tavern where he
formed them into a brotherhood. And on this site again
that Lindsay fitz Harris is put together, there is a
great example of one of these sort of noses that's
(21:29):
attached to a pair of glasses, that's attached to a
sort of almost looks like a headgear, like early headgear braces,
and it's one that that a female patient war Yeah,
and you can imagine that warn with a wig, and
it makes it makes perfect sense. And you know, the
no Nose Club also makes a lot of sense because
(21:49):
if you're you're dealing with this illness, you're having to
cover yourself up and where this this this fake nose
over your your your face. I mean, there's gonna come
a time when you want to be able to just
take that off and be yourself, no matter what has
happened to yourself in this illness. You want to be
able to just say, hey, here we are. We may
not have noses anymore because of this illness, but hey,
(22:12):
we're people, and we want to look at each other
like we're people and not worry about oh whatsever and
all these other people that don't have syphilis, or don't
realize they have syphilis, or in other stages of the
illness are looking at me and judging me for for
what I am and making judgments about my moral character
based on what has happened. Well, and fitz Harris has
that blog post Still Syphilis a Love Story which essentially
(22:33):
talks about this, and I believe it is miss Sanborn
who eventually takes the fake nose off at her husband's
request because he accepts her as she is. You know,
it's interest. I was listening to that to BBC program,
The Cultural History of Syphilis, which I'll link to on
the landing page for this podcast episode. But they go
(22:53):
into some of the cases of individuals, particularly in the
seventeenth century, who end up, if not finding pride in
their syphilitic appearance, they at least, you know, come to
own it. Uh. You see individuals like Sir William Davenant
uh sixteen of six through sixteen sixty eight as a poet, playwright,
(23:15):
and he was famously not shy about being painted or
depicted in artwork without a false nose. So you see
a very sunken saddle nose, you know, almost a vacant
um you know, part of his facial features. And he was,
you know, pretty upfront about it. Um. Another instance, you
have artist Gerard Delorice one through seventeen eleven, who is
(23:36):
actually a prominent painter uh and uh and he was
born with congenital syphilis. Um. And he he was. There's
actually a painting of him by Rembrandt, which I'll put
on the blog for everyone to see because it's it's
a it's a Rembrandt piece, so it's it's splendid to behold.
But here's an individual who you know, he's setting for
a portrait. He's he's he's open and uh and free
(23:58):
about who he you know, he's not trying to hide
it at this point. And you see a number of individuals,
say John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, who was
portrayed by Johnny Depp in the movie Libertine. Um. You
see individuals like this who basically say, yeah, I have syphilis.
I have had a wildlife, and the wages of having
(24:20):
that wildlife are syphilis. So it's it's almost like a
badge of honor. Yeah, It's like when you hear I've
heard people say point at rock stars aging rock stars,
and you know, say, oh, they look rough, but they
partied hard to get there, you know, to say that,
you know, what has happened to them is like a
badge of honor because it says they have enjoyed their
younger life and that is why, uh, their their older
(24:44):
form is so decrepit. And think that's what you're seeing
in some of these individuals. Now, granted, these are individuals
that we're living at the in the upper echelon of society,
so they had a little more room too, you know,
to grab onto that pride. They weren't dying of syphilis, uh,
you know in the slum. Uh. And likewise, some of
these individuals too also had taken to various um ideas
(25:06):
about how syphilis could be treated. So they thought that
perhaps their their syphilis was being treated and managed by
regular mercury treatments in one of those mercury steam baths, which,
as we mentioned in the previous episode, may uh, you know,
was was likely making their symptoms worse in some cases.
So they thought that they were above sort of some
(25:26):
of the social rules in place because of their position
and society and be that they might have been vanquishing it.
So they were uh, not quite as concerned about how
they looked. Perhaps, Yeah, and if you're taking if you're
looking at the body from a less religious standpoint, you're
looking at more from a hedonistic or even mechanical standpoint,
(25:48):
then you're saying, hey, I live in a world in
which syphilis exists, and if I behave a certain way,
syphilis is what happens to my body. You know. Um,
some of these cases too, you see individuals where they
they're they're almost happy when they finally catch syphilis because
it means, if nothing else, it means they don't have
to worry about catching syphilis anymore. You know, they're they're
(26:09):
they're no longer living in the shadow of syphilis, but
within the dark of syphilis. And you can see where
there might be a certain amount of empowerment there. Certainly,
if you have to latch onto something, you might as
well latch onto that, although again you'd have to be
in a really specific social position to do that, and
you'd have to be a male for certain. No. Yes, indeed, now,
(26:30):
if you had the money, the wherewithal, and you did
not want to wear a fake nose, or you weren't
ready to come out to the world that you had syphilis,
then you would try a kind of nasal reconstruction, which
in the sixteenth century was called the Indian method, and
this involved cutting a nose sized section of skin from
(26:51):
the forehead. So there's again another calling card or hallmark
that you have the disease, because your nose looks great,
but you've got a big patch of skin, but you
have a really big wig. That's true, that's true, you
have a nice wig. But they take that skin from
the forehead and they would attach it to the bridge
of the nose to maintain a steady blood supply. And
(27:12):
then that flap was twisted into place and sewn over
the damaged area, which kind of created a replacement nose.
But again it wasn't perfect and you know, really cold weather,
it would not turn the same color as the rest
of your nose. So there were certain telltale signs that
it may look like an intech nose, but it is
(27:33):
not your perhaps knows that you were born with. But
it turns out that there's a better and perhaps more
horrific way to take a stab at plastic surgery or
early plastic surgery. You know what it is tempting to
say it's horrific, but it but in you know, another way,
it's kind of beautiful and it gets it how malleable
our flesh really is. Because again modern plastic surgery, the
(27:57):
plastic is referring to the plasticity of the flesh, that
you can craft flesh into a form. Yeah. And actually
this method did and does inform plastic surgeons about how
skin grows and how you can mold it and and
sculpt it. So yeah, in this we see the sixteenth
century advent of the Italian method. Now to to picture this, um,
(28:19):
if you don't have an image of it in front
of you, um, And and if you're not driving a
car doing anything where you need your hands place, place
your your palm of your hand, uh, kind of on
your forehead, okay, and then allow your nose to to
touch your arm. That is basically the position where the
surgeon would would lock your arm into place. There would
be like a head vice type of scenario going on,
(28:41):
so that you could not move your arm away. You
cannot move your the flesh of your arm away from
the flesh of your face. And then that's where you
perform the the the skin graft. You walk a pedicle
of flesh, you sort of cut it away from the forearm,
and you stitch it into place where the nose should
be in play of the nose that you've lost two
syphilis or duels or what have you, and then that's
(29:04):
held in place while the the grafted skin grows onto
the face. So for a brief period of time, you
have effectively sown your arm, or a surgeon has effectively
sown your arm to your face. And then once the
graft is taken, then you cut the arm away from
it and you've you've essentially walked as a piece of
(29:24):
flesh off of your arm onto your face and then
use that to form a new nose, which is kind
of brilliant, and honestly, you ask a plastic surgeon about
this and they'll be like, this is a great way
to try to get the skin to graft onto other
skin and then be able to shape it um. The
only problem here is that for about two weeks, you're
(29:46):
walking around with your your hand stuff in your head
and you can't really move your nose right because that's
now stuck to you your arm. Yeah, I'm guessing you're
probably not doing a whole lot of walk around town
like that. But but yeah, there's going to be a
weird period there. But you know, the Italian method, it's
a remarkable what it can do. Like it may be
(30:06):
summoning images of like a really bad plastic surgery job
or something. But I've I've seen some images, particularly like
particularly late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, in which you
see multiple pedicles of flesh that are essentially walked up
the body to the face to repair individuals who say
lost their lower jaw uh to to gunshot wound. Uh.
(30:29):
And then you're able to walk all these pedicles up
to the face and it looks kind of ghastly at first,
but then you start putting them in their place, and
at the end of the of this series of procedures,
you have a much more uh normal looking visage uh
there in place of the damaged tissue. So in in
in this scenario, we see the impact of syphilis on
(30:52):
early rhino pass plastic in Europe. But we also see
other ways in which syphilis ends up change in the
way that that that medicine is practiced, uh through throughout
the the old world. For instance, immediately it challenged humorism
and the doctrine of contagion that was probablement the other day. Um.
(31:12):
We also see syphilis as a catalyst for modern doctor
patient confidentiality, because suddenly it becomes a kind of a
calling card for some doctors. Hey, let me treat you
for your syphilist because I'll keep it on the download. Now,
we just kind of take that for granted that we
go into a doctor, they're not going to laugh about
syphilis to everyone in the neighborhood. And then this is
another key fact that was brought up in the book
(31:34):
Cleaned by Virginia Smith that I've referenced before in podcasts,
and that is that previously you had you'd go into
your your local barber shop and you'd have the barber
tonsors in the front, barber surgeons in the back. You
can have your haircut, your face shaved, all of that
that take place in the front of the building and
go into the back, into the yard or what have you.
(31:54):
That's where you would receive minor surgeries. That's where you
would uh take a bath and saying later as the
as syphilis begins to spread, that's where you start getting
treated for civilis that's where you might take your mercury bath.
And so the prevalence of the disease and fear regarding
the disease, this really leads to regulation. This really this
leads to of course, you know, paranoia. And so you
(32:16):
see the two separates. So you see the separation of
the barber tonsor and the barber surgeon. That's right, because
that red and white striped barber pole used to indicate
that there are surgeries down there. Right in case anybody's
ever wondered why, Um, that poll is outside of a
hair cuttery, all right. So that's this impact on on
(32:39):
on medicine and medical surgeries um, as well as cottage
industries like wig makers, right, and people who are are
selling you know, snake oils. But there are certain things
that you cannot cover up here when it comes to syphilis.
And one of the things would be your teeth. Now
you can pull all your teeth, you could put dentures in,
but if you didn't want to do that you're kind
(32:59):
of saddled with the ravages of your teeth bicyphilis. Yeah,
And one of the more one of the more particular
things we see here with the teeth is something that
pops up in cases of congenital syphilis, and that's something
known as Hutchinson teeth. These are, you know, as with
all things syphilis, the exact symptoms vary, but this is
(33:21):
often typified by sharpened looking teeth or peg shaped teeth
that kind of have sharpened points on the edges. Um.
You can look for for images this online, I think,
and actually I did a blog post um that I'll
link to on the landing page for this podcast episode
that includes, uh, the image that Julian and I are
both looking at now. But they do have a kind
(33:42):
of monstrous appearance either like sharpened teeth inside of a
human mouth, particularly canine teeth. Yes, And so we start
to look at this for a little bit, and uh,
naturally your mind would turn to vampire teeth, because that's
kind of what this looks like. It looks like a
sort of non speraw version of vampire teeth. Yeah, And
(34:03):
it's led us some commentators to argue that the the
evolution of the vampire myth in in Western civilization may
have connections to cases of congenital or hereditary syphilis. The
children are born like this, they have this kind they
could have in addition to these teeth, they may also
have elongated fingers, They may have elongated skull. There various
(34:25):
other deformities that might be interpreted as monstrous by by
somebody taking in the scenario UM and another connection between
vampires and syphilis arguably takes us to bron Stoker himself,
the author of the book Dracula. And another area where
(34:45):
vampires and syphilis seem to converge UH is in the
case of the eighteen novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. Now
bron Stoker's exact cause of death and he died in
nineteen twelve A means you know somewhat something of the mystery,
but some biographers attribute his death to tertiary syphilis and
(35:07):
make the further argument that Dracula itself, as a literary
work is is kind of reflecting not only the paranoia
regarding syphilis that's present in the culture, but also Stoker's
own uh experience with the illness itself. Because you look
at vampires. You look attractively and you see uh, something
(35:29):
that is at once sexual and monstrous. You see this
this uh, this outsider that has come to in this
case to England and is spreading this uh, this illness
of vamporism. This uh, this this alien pathogen to to
to to two women in the in the in the area. Yes,
(35:50):
they are puncturing the women. Right, So again you have
to use that metaphor which always comes up sex and vampires, right. Um.
The in fact, there is you something this link uh
to a class that's offered, the classes the vampire in
Literature and Cinema, taught by Tomaslavljovich, who is a professor
of Slavic and comparative literature, and he uses that vampire
(36:14):
lore to explore folklore explanations of disease epidemics, which makes sense, right,
especially if you're you're caught up in this. You'll say,
it's the sixteenth century, is the seventeenth century, and this
is this you know, pervasive disease, and you have all
of these sort of myths surrounding it. It's possible that
(36:34):
that people could sort of extrapolate like maybe there are vampires.
Maybe this is how it's being spread. Yeah, because again
four and a half centuries in which we could not
cure it. So you're throwing what you can at. You're
throwing you're throwing actual research, You're throwing snake oil, you're
throwing mercury, steam baths, you're throwing religion. And again, you know,
because again it just can't be It can't be overstated.
(36:55):
The the connection between between morality and and stuff lists
here and at least in the way that people try
to understand it, or at least ended up viewing it
in society. And so yeah, you're throw in a little
myth in there, you throw a little magical thinking and
and and there you go. You can easily see the
vampire emerge. Nothing concrete there, but some food for thought. Yeah,
(37:15):
which maybe why a vampire in the form of Count
spiro Keet shows up in a Navy video in the
seventies talking about STDs. Right, Yes, and you can watch this.
I link to the video on a blood post I
did for stuff to blow your mind. It's actually a
fabulous documentary. It's kind of the style of of Schoolhouse
(37:37):
Rocks and uh, and it has a Scooby Doo element
to it as well, yeah, it's it's very silly. Look,
even when they get into some of the rougher stuff,
such as congenital syphilis or or actually showing illustrations of genitals,
it's like the setup is very cartoon. It's Death him
self is having an award ceremony handing out the coveted
(37:58):
fourth Horseman Award for a disease that's that's done the
best work in causing misery and death around the world,
and who should win it but count sparrow Keet who
represents syphilis. Uh, the the embodiment of ganahea takes some
issue with it. Some of the other illnesses are like,
what's so great about sparrow keyt what's he doing? There's
a cure for it, blah blah blah, and so Death
(38:19):
and spirow Key, mainly Death goes on to explain to
us why how selphilis works and why it is a problem,
and why enlisted navy men, why why sailors should be
on guard and should go seek treatment for any time
they have any kind of a flare out, which kind
of gets into this whole rich tradition of the military
trying to bring a level of awareness of STDs to
(38:44):
UH to everyone. In fact, if you go back to
War one in wor World two, UH, you will see
all sorts of pamphlets and posters warning military members to
be very careful to watch out for siff, watch out
for gnahea. And it even reminded me of our Quarantine
(39:05):
episode in which we talked about the U. S. Military
quarantining prostitutes in an attempt to try to separate what
they thought is disease carrying prostitutes with STDs from military members. Yeah,
so you have you have these campaigns that are basically
in essence saying, hey, sailors, when you go into the
next port town, please stay away from the prostitutes because
(39:28):
you could catch syphilis and it's bad news. And you
have to bear in mind too that even after the
advent of penicillin, you'll have situations, particularly in wartime, where
there's there's not an unlimited amount of penicillan to throw
at at your your navy men's venereal diseases. You have,
you have that a lot of that penicillan is earmarked
for the battlefield for for use in helping with soldiers
(39:51):
who have been injured in combat. You don't want to
spend it all just on a bunch of horny sailors
who can't control themselves when they go into a farm
port of call. So they're throwing education at the problem
as well. But they're speaking to a male audience, and
and so the messaging tends to take on a very
sexist feel. Yeah. In fact, one of the posters which
(40:14):
I'm looking at right now is a really good example.
It's this, Um it's a photograph of a girl that looks,
you know, kind of innocent and pure and you know,
very Norman Rockwell, Like this is the Norman Rockwell gal.
I'm looking at very Norman Rockwell. In fact, she has
this sort of beatific smile on as if you know,
she's doing godly work. And then there are you know,
(40:37):
some servicemen who are looking at her at a distance.
And across this poster it says she may look clean,
but and the butt isn't all red in all caps,
and it says pick ups good time girls. Prostitutes spread
syphilis and gonorrhea. You can't beat the axis if you
get v D. And what I think is so interesting
(41:01):
about this is that there are many other posters that
have more I don't know, what are you say, tawdry
looking women that there are basically saying they're prostitutes. But
then you have this other sort of like I said,
be to fix smiled, innocent looking girl. And the point is,
(41:21):
as you say, is that they're speaking to men, and um,
they're really underscoring this idea that STDs venarrow diseases all
begin with women and that they are the font of evil. Yeah.
I mean there's this darkness in the woman. It's almost
like the like the feminine form as monster is the
(41:41):
message here? And and you see again you do see
some more fantastic, horrific visions of this. There's one where
the woman is like moving a handheld mask away from
her face and behind it there's a death skull. Um.
I Salvador Dolly's illustration that he did for an anti
sephilis poster in which you see the two buxom women. Yeah,
(42:03):
I guess it kind of melting kind of, but they
look like a death skull. You know. It's one of
those one of his classic stout images where you see
the death's head uh in the form of the women.
I'll be sure to throw that un stuff to your
mind dot com as well. So everyone can see it.
And yeah, weren't you telling me about the sixteenth century
hypothesis of the woman as really the germanator of syphilis. Yeah, yeah,
(42:25):
there was this notion that the syphilis emerged because you
had you had women, you had prostitutes who were having
sex with multiple men. Uh, and then those semens with
those different seeds would be inside her and they would
mingle together and corrupt into the form of syphilis. So
with and you know, they had no one there was
no proof to back up this ridiculous theory, but it
(42:48):
did place the blame firmly on on women and very
moralistically as well. These women are are sinning, and therefore
you have sickness arising from them. They are the sore
of of the ailment itself. Yeah, and uh, not not
to get too crazy here, but it just kind of
brings me back this idea of witches. And we talked
(43:09):
about which is and we talked about, you know, the
power of women and sexuality. And again here we are
subscribing the sort of power this death to women in
the form of syphilis. And uh, you know, I don't
know that that's what all the poster artists intended, but
it certainly captured the spirit of the times. Yeah, and
(43:30):
then again they were talking to a predominantly male audience.
As we mentioned before, even in UH, you know, over
the centuries that syphilis was really ravaging Europe, you saw
the highest percentages of infection uh in the in the
in the soldiers are certainly a higher percentage than in
the rest of the population. So soldiers and prostitutes were
a key area of transference. Indeed. All right, so there
(43:53):
you have it again. There's just there's not enough time
and even in a series of podcasts to really get
into all the way it's syphilis informed UH Western culture
during its UH four and a half centuries of unchecked life.
But but hopefully we hit some of the high points.
We hit some of the ideas who were play here
about about us versus the other, about men and women,
(44:17):
about the morality, about the cosmetics of dealing with syphilis,
and if nothing else, that you serve as an interesting
starting point for your own exploration of the topic. And
also touching um the origin of it as well, and
knowing that we don't have the end all be all
theory in place yet, but we do have an idea
of where it came from all right, Um, you guys
(44:40):
can find us at a multitude of places. Yeah, that's right.
Go to step to Blow your Mind dot com. That
is the mothership. You will find all the blog posts,
the podcast, the videos, et cetera, including a number of
different items related to this syphilis series that we've put out.
And you can also find us at Mind Stuff Show
on YouTube. And if you've got some ideas percolating there
about the top think we covered today or any sort
(45:01):
of stories you want to share with us, you can
do so below the mind at Discovery dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
How staff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and on Jergie bas This
is part two of our little series here on syphilis.
The first episode, Syphilis the Great Imitator, dealt with the
(00:24):
the organism that causes syphilista, which is known as Trepanema palladum,
actually the subspecies of Trepema palladum, and this is all
caused by this tiny, tightly coiled spiral key, this little
bacterium that ends up causing all of this trouble for
those that infected. So if you have not listened to
that first episode, go back, have a listen. We will
(00:45):
walk you through all the stages of a syphilis infection
from that from the tiny annoyances of the primary infection
on up to the disastrously deforming and ultimately lethal stages
of tertiary syphilis, as well as the treatment of it. Finally, um,
all right, this has been mentioned in the other episode,
(01:06):
but at bears mentioning again. The first recorded epidemic of
narial syphilis occurred in Europe in by the close of
the fifteenth century. It was pretty rampant. In fact, in Naples, Italy,
there was such a huge outbreak that the pope that said, hey,
we need some help here. Soldiers were brought in, five
(01:28):
thousand of them. And what do you think happened, Well,
they got to the prostitutes and they got more syphilis,
and then of course they just got worse and worse.
So what we're talking about is is a disease that
ravished for centuries throughout Europe, and today we're going to
try to get at the origins of it, and they
(01:50):
we're gonna try to tease out some of the morality
that has been paired with it, as well as the
sort of xenophobia that surrounds it as well. Yeahs, as
I mentioned before, it's it's it's kind of difficult to
overstate the importance of syphilis in Western culture for those
four and a half plus centuries. Um that it that
(02:11):
that it was a problem. Um And And as we
discussed in the last episode, syphilis is not eradicated. It
is still around the day. It's still something to be
concerned about, and it's still something we have to to
treat both wet with with penicillin and with education. But
during the fourteenth century to the early twentieth century, it
was really permeating the fabric of culture. It was rampant. Yes,
(02:37):
when we break down the percentages of it, it's going
to vary depending on where in Europe you're looking, but
you're generally looking at a ten to fifteen percent of
the population has syphilis. Uh, you know, with some degree
uh you know, margin for error there, and then uh
upwards of in military because then you have younger men
(02:57):
who are initially traveling around and they are the ones
that are spreading it from place to place, visiting prostitutes,
et cetera. Yeah, and because of its association with Columbus,
who sailed under the Spanish flag, it was called the
Spanish disease for a while, and then the French called
it the Neopolitan or Italian disease because they caught it
(03:19):
from residents of Naples, or should they say when Naples,
of course, was one of the major outbreak areas. The
Russians called it a Polish disease, the Polish called it
a Russian disease, and the Turks called it a Christian disease,
while the English called it the French park. So what
do you see here, a lot of finger pointing. Yes,
it's always the other that you blame the disease, and
(03:42):
you have to draw that firm line in your worldview
between we the clean and they the disease, and hope
that that line doesn't come to envelope you as well. Um,
the the Columbus thing is so fascinating and it's and
it's a it's a point that is continually studied and
argued about. But again we see that first big outbreak
(04:03):
in and as we all know in four nine two
Columbus sailed the ocean. So it sounds it sounds almost
too good to be true, slash too horrible to be
treat It almost sounds too easy, but but we keep
coming back to it time and time again. Here we
have Columbus sailing to this drastically new land and their contact,
(04:28):
be it sexual or merely skin on skin, is occurring
between members of his his crew and the native population.
And then they return to Europe, and then in their
wake we see the emergence of this, this this powerful illness. Yeah,
and you see a lot of wrongheaded ideas about this,
this idea of xenophobia, right, this fear of strangers, this
(04:51):
idea that there are savages that have uh spread this
disease to Europeans via Columbus. Yeah, you laid with a
member of another nation, you late with a member of
another another race. All these these weird taboos spring up,
uh and seemingly in concert with the parameters of the illness.
As we mentioned before, one of the reasons that syphilis
(05:13):
is such a captivating topic is because it's so rife
for metaphor, you know, be it a metaphor of morality,
of a metaphor of racism, nationalism, sexism, whatever you want
to throw at it. It seems to conform to that
that form rather nicely. Yeah. Now we will get back
to Columbus and we're going to try to get to
(05:34):
the origins of of syphilis. But before we do, it's
just worth it to say that this is syphilis, and
trying to get to the origins of it is really difficult. Um,
it's very hard to study. There are many strains, some
of which don't exist anymore, and then you have anecdotal
claims throughout the centuries, so you can't really pair that with,
(05:55):
you know, a systematic approach to say, yes, indeed, this
was a case of syphilis, because again, as we have
mentioned before, syphilis is the great imitator. So it's very
possible that someone had leprosy and not syphilis exactly. And
and again on that difficult to study. Note, you you
can't grow syphilis in a culture. You can't have a
little petrie dish of syphilis. Even today, we have to
(06:17):
study it in rabbits, so right, you have to have
it in an actual organism to really get a good
idea about it. That being said, there have been these
pre Columbian theories kicked around. In other words, this idea
of hey, could syphilis have existed before the New World,
previous to the late fourteen hundreds in the old world.
(06:41):
That's again called the pre Columbian theory. Yeah, and this
is this theory is basically that to say that, well,
when we have other illnesses, and if you look back
at some accounts of leprosy, you might say, well that
that kind of leprosy doesn't match up as well with
our modern understanding of leprosy. Perhaps that was a different ailment,
Perhaps that was in fact syphilis. And instead we're just
kind of latching on to this easy explanation of Columbus.
(07:05):
Since this groundbreaking um expedition takes place just a few
years before this major outbreak. But of course, the world
because I mean it makes sense, right, I mean, the
world is more complicated than one ship sailing off and
coming back. There are other movements going on in the world.
It's a time of great change. People are moving around,
(07:25):
not only throughout Europe, but you have movements going into
into into Asia and Africa. So what so why not?
Why why could there not be another route for this
illness to take? And we'll discuss that, we'll really try
to get to the bottom of this. But so when
we call when we say pre Columbian, we're talking about
Old World. When we talk about Columbia and we're talking
about New World generally here old world is Europe, Old
(07:48):
world is is Western civilization. New World the America's Columbia, etcetera. Right,
And if you're going to talk about New World, you
have to talk about something called yaws and facial Now,
these are tropical diseases that are closely related to tromponema palladum,
which is of course syphilis, although they are different. Bagel
(08:10):
causes mouth stores and lumps in the bone, and yaws
caused skin stores and disfiguring growths on the legs. So
of course they're they're related to syphilis, but they are
non venereal, right, they're spread through skin to skin contact,
They're not They're they're not straight up venereal diseases. Um.
You know, granted you could catch them in skin to
(08:31):
skin contact during sexual intercourse, but they're not depending on
that as their mode of transmission. Yeah, but these are
all trimp and emial diseases that are These are all
close relatives of the subspecies of Trimpandema palladum that causes syphilis.
And we bring them up because they're important to study.
If you're if you're trying to look at where syphilis,
syphilis originated from, then you're gonna want to look at
(08:54):
yaws and basil because paleo pathologists Bruce and Christine Rothschild
used that information to point toward a new World origin
of syphilis. They examined six hundred and eighty seven skeletons
from archaeological sites in the US. We're talking about arranging
(09:14):
an age from four hundred to six thousand years and
what they found is that populations to the south look
to have syphilis, while those to the north had yaws.
And then by contrast, they examined one thousand Old World
skeletons dating to before contact with the New World and
they found zero cases of syphilis. So this kind of
(09:38):
gets you onto the route of well, maybe the New
World did have the case of syphilis, although it's not
that clear cut, as well discussed, and this leads us
to what is called the Unitarian hypothesis, which has nothing
to do with Unitarians in the religious sense of the world,
where don't worry, Unitarians, We're not We're not nailing this
one on you. Unitarian in this sense that that it
(10:01):
unites the Old World and New World hypotheses regarding the
emergence of syphilis in Europe. The basic idea here is
that you do have Columbus and New sailors setting sail
from Europe to the New World to the Americans, and
when they're there, they do come into skin to skin
contact sexual and non sexual with natives there, and then
(10:22):
they end up acquiring trimpanemal diseases. Now, you know, again,
think to the Jewel, think to to tent, to, think
to yads, but not necessarily syphilis proper but they bring
back a relative of syphilis, and they bring it back
to a drastically new incubation world. We're talking about a
different environment because in the in the America's uh, you know,
(10:44):
individuals with syphilis they're gonna largely be in you know,
smaller communities. But then you bring them to a European
port town. You bring it to a world where individuals
are wearing more clothes, thus allowing for less skin on
skin contact. You're bringing it to a world where you
have brothels, a world where you have tiny ships tightly
packed with men sailing from one port to the next
(11:05):
port throughout Europe. And what happens, according to this hypothesis
is that the the treponemal disease changes and and we
get this subspecies of Trumpanema palladum that causes syphilis as
we know it. So it is a story of mutation
under new environmental circumstances. Yeah, if anyone is interested in
(11:27):
taking a deeper dive into this and and some of
the skeletal evidence behind this, there is a paper two
thousand and twelve paper called the Science behind pre Columbian
evidence of Syphilis and Europe research by documentary and that
goes into this, uh much more. And I wanted to
quote Molly Zuckerman. She's one of the authors of paper.
(11:47):
She says, in reality, it appears that venereal syphilis was
the byproduct of two different populations meeting and exchanging a pathogen.
It was an adaptive event, the natural selection of a disease,
independent of morality or blame. Yeah, it's not as situation
of ah, the sinful sailors are all those diseased natives
(12:09):
in this new world. It's it's something more complicated than that. Yeah.
And you know, at the outset of this, the researchers
for this paper, they really wanted to sort of disprove
this idea that Columbus and his crew were vectors for
syphilis because I thought, it can't be that just you know,
Columbus and his his guys hung out in America and
(12:32):
then brought it back to Europe and spread syphilis all
over the place. Can't be that simple. And it's not
that simple, um, you know, because the trick here is
that it mutated, it adapted rather um. But they really
they went into it with the intent of saying, no,
it can't be yeah, because it does sound like something
you would read and sort of conspiracy theory kind of
(12:55):
message board, right, like, well, these two dates line up,
we can correlate this little little bit. Therefore, that must
be what happened. Um Now, Now, we do want to
drive home that these are all hypotheses and that this
is still an area that everyone that there are a
lot of papers that come out about this, there's a
lot of discussion, a lot of argument, lots did a
lot of disagreement. So there's no definitive answer here, and
(13:16):
it may indeed be one of those areas where we
never have a definitive answer. It's true. And uh, you
know that the researchers who worked on that paper also
worked on some of them worked on a different paper
looking at fifty four published reports of pre Columbian evidence
and skeletal remains of syphilis, and they found there that
again there wasn't enough supporting information and real evidence to
(13:42):
say that it existed in its form of syphilis as
we know and talk about it now in the old world.
So again, there seems to be some sort of direction
here in terms of the way that the river is
streaming with information, But it doesn't mean that this is
the endpoint of the origins of syphilis. And we're gonna
(14:02):
talk about more of the sort of sights and sounds
and smells of what it might be like in a
syphilitic era in Europe. And I wanted to just read this.
This is from the BBC, A Cultural History of Syphilis.
It says in the fourteen nineties and apparently new and
terrifying disease struck naples in southern Italy and swept fire
(14:25):
like across Europe, reaping a dreadful human cost. It must
have been as though Hell had come to earth. Pustules
spread across the gentitals and the face of its many sufferers.
Unbearable gastro intestinal pain followed upon fevers, screamingly severe headaches
and other symptoms. Finally, flush fell from bones. Syphilis had
(14:49):
arrived in Europe, where it would stay misunderstood, lacking any
form of cure, for nearly five years. Yeah, that's that's
pretty rough sounding. Um. And again, remember that this was
not a disease that affected just the poor. This was
a disease that affected rich and poor alike, that affected
royalty and peasant, that affected clergy members, anyone that was
(15:10):
engaging in sexual contact, uh, random risk, a high risk
of acquiring uh this this illness. And yeah, this was
not a quiet sort of illness. I mean people could
smell you before you even came around. And we're talking
about rotting flesh. We are talking about your face bearing
the marks of syphilis, your body bearing the marks of it.
(15:30):
In fact, you could even kind of see it as
the sort of scarlet letter A brought into your flesh. Yeah. Again,
the metaphorical power of syphilis is unavoidable here because you
already have the idea, uh in Western culture, that that
physical deformities may signal inner deformities, that that that that
(15:53):
an inner sin can have a fleshly manifestation. And it's
super easy to apply that line of thinking to syphilis,
because here's something that's spread through sex. Here is something
that's spread through uh through sin, if you will, and
and then has these these terrifying physical um manifestations, certainly
in its later stages. So it's it's easy then for
(16:16):
someone to point the figure and say this, this is
the way. These are the wages of sin right here.
All you have to do is look at this individual,
Look at the look at the sores on their body.
Look at the deformities of their facial feature. Look what
has happened to them? Uh, And and so you see
this just throughout its stuff, throughout its four and a
half centuries of unchecked rampaging, and even beyond into the
(16:39):
twentieth century and even into the twenty one. There's there's
a moral aspect to syphilis and to other venereal diseases.
This is something you caught because you were doing something
that was wrong. Like that's the script that is often
applied to the scenario. Yeah, and now people have the
sort of calling card hallmarks of that disease. Right. They
(17:01):
look at you and they say, oh, let me see
you've you've got a nasty rash there, you've lost your hair, um,
perhaps your nose is even caving in into what's called
saddle nose. And so what do people do, Well, they
try to find anything and everything that might cover up
their transgressions or what would be perceived as transgression. Right.
(17:25):
And bear in mind again through all of this, that
there are no set of standard symptoms for syphilis, and
there are stages where it's undetectable. So so every everyone's
going crazy with ways to detect and treat it, while
the illness itself is is so difficult to get your
hands on. It's the great imitator, it's the it's the
great hider um. So yeah, bad stuff is happening to
(17:48):
your body in the varying stages of syphilis. So one
thing you might do is to, of course, you may
cover things up. Since we were wearing clothes, we're wearing makeup.
You can apply clothing and makeup to cover up your source. Yeah.
In fact, syphilis just creates this whole cottage industry of
different things you can buy and do to either feel
better or look better. So there might be some sort
(18:11):
of snake oil that you can buy right that has
absolutely no medical marriage. Or you might visit your local
wig maker quite a bit, because again, you want to
cover up the bald patch on your head or the
baldness so that people don't suspect that you have syphilis.
And if you are a prostitute, American is a must
(18:32):
because yeah, you might be saving your pupd care any
way to cut down on lights, but then you also
might have an outbreak of syphilis down there. You want
to disguise the signs, so you get a wig for
your genitals also called a mercan, which is not a
Muppet character. Yeah. They apparently used a lot now in
for films, especially historical films. Yeah, but historically it was
(18:55):
more a matter of venereal diseases for the men. Generally,
wasn't really an option because the well there's just more
to cover up down there, and uh, just do a
Google im his search, he'll see what I'm talking about.
All right, Yeah, there are some rely just sticks there
that you can't quite uh cover with American. But what
happens when your nose caves in and your flesh begins
(19:18):
to rot away, Well, this creates a problem, and in
general it was kind of a rough time for noses anyway.
If you remember the story of Tico Briy, the the astronomer,
I think we did an episode on him, or at
least he's come he comes up a time we did. Yeah, Yeah,
fascinating individual. Um. There may be some biographers that that
(19:39):
creep syphilis in there, but but I think it's pretty
established that that he lost the nose in a duel.
So on on one level, you can lose that nose
in a duel. Living an adventurous lifestyle, getting yourselves into
arguments with other armed gentleman. But you can also acquire
sephilis through your adventurous lifestyle. And then you see the
saddle nose, the eventual rotting away of the nose. So
(19:59):
one thing you can do is you can buy a
fake nose to where over your destroyed nose. And this
is this is as simple as it sounds. If you've
ever seen a digital underground video and you've seen Humpty
Hump with the big fake nose on his the on
a face who incidentally, according to the backstory, lost it
in a frying accident, I believe so, So no dueling
(20:20):
or syphilis involved with Humpty. But but it's basically the
same scenario, a fake nose that is strapped onto the
body or held with wires over the over the the
the vacant area. Yeah, in fact, and this is according
to Lindsay fitz Harris, who is in medical historian and
writes on the Kirojian Apprentice, which is a great website
(20:44):
documenting medical surgeries. She writes that this deformity was so
common amongst these suffering from the pots, as it was
sometimes called, that no nose clubs sprung up in London
on February eighteen seventy for The Star reported Miss Sanborn
tells us and an eccentric gentleman, having taken taken a
(21:05):
fancy to see a large party of noseless persons, invited
everyone thus afflicted whom he met in the street to
dine on a certain day at a tavern where he
formed them into a brotherhood. And on this site again
that Lindsay fitz Harris is put together, there is a
great example of one of these sort of noses that's
(21:29):
attached to a pair of glasses, that's attached to a
sort of almost looks like a headgear, like early headgear braces,
and it's one that that a female patient war Yeah,
and you can imagine that warn with a wig, and
it makes it makes perfect sense. And you know, the
no Nose Club also makes a lot of sense because
(21:49):
if you're you're dealing with this illness, you're having to
cover yourself up and where this this this fake nose
over your your your face. I mean, there's gonna come
a time when you want to be able to just
take that off and be yourself, no matter what has
happened to yourself in this illness. You want to be
able to just say, hey, here we are. We may
not have noses anymore because of this illness, but hey,
(22:12):
we're people, and we want to look at each other
like we're people and not worry about oh whatsever and
all these other people that don't have syphilis, or don't
realize they have syphilis, or in other stages of the
illness are looking at me and judging me for for
what I am and making judgments about my moral character
based on what has happened. Well, and fitz Harris has
that blog post Still Syphilis a Love Story which essentially
(22:33):
talks about this, and I believe it is miss Sanborn
who eventually takes the fake nose off at her husband's
request because he accepts her as she is. You know,
it's interest. I was listening to that to BBC program,
The Cultural History of Syphilis, which I'll link to on
the landing page for this podcast episode. But they go
(22:53):
into some of the cases of individuals, particularly in the
seventeenth century, who end up, if not finding pride in
their syphilitic appearance, they at least, you know, come to
own it. Uh. You see individuals like Sir William Davenant
uh sixteen of six through sixteen sixty eight as a poet, playwright,
(23:15):
and he was famously not shy about being painted or
depicted in artwork without a false nose. So you see
a very sunken saddle nose, you know, almost a vacant
um you know, part of his facial features. And he was,
you know, pretty upfront about it. Um. Another instance, you
have artist Gerard Delorice one through seventeen eleven, who is
(23:36):
actually a prominent painter uh and uh and he was
born with congenital syphilis. Um. And he he was. There's
actually a painting of him by Rembrandt, which I'll put
on the blog for everyone to see because it's it's
a it's a Rembrandt piece, so it's it's splendid to behold.
But here's an individual who you know, he's setting for
a portrait. He's he's he's open and uh and free
(23:58):
about who he you know, he's not trying to hide
it at this point. And you see a number of individuals,
say John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, who was
portrayed by Johnny Depp in the movie Libertine. Um. You
see individuals like this who basically say, yeah, I have syphilis.
I have had a wildlife, and the wages of having
(24:20):
that wildlife are syphilis. So it's it's almost like a
badge of honor. Yeah, It's like when you hear I've
heard people say point at rock stars aging rock stars,
and you know, say, oh, they look rough, but they
partied hard to get there, you know, to say that,
you know, what has happened to them is like a
badge of honor because it says they have enjoyed their
younger life and that is why, uh, their their older
(24:44):
form is so decrepit. And think that's what you're seeing
in some of these individuals. Now, granted, these are individuals
that we're living at the in the upper echelon of society,
so they had a little more room too, you know,
to grab onto that pride. They weren't dying of syphilis, uh,
you know in the slum. Uh. And likewise, some of
these individuals too also had taken to various um ideas
(25:06):
about how syphilis could be treated. So they thought that
perhaps their their syphilis was being treated and managed by
regular mercury treatments in one of those mercury steam baths, which,
as we mentioned in the previous episode, may uh, you know,
was was likely making their symptoms worse in some cases.
So they thought that they were above sort of some
(25:26):
of the social rules in place because of their position
and society and be that they might have been vanquishing it.
So they were uh, not quite as concerned about how
they looked. Perhaps, Yeah, and if you're taking if you're
looking at the body from a less religious standpoint, you're
looking at more from a hedonistic or even mechanical standpoint,
(25:48):
then you're saying, hey, I live in a world in
which syphilis exists, and if I behave a certain way,
syphilis is what happens to my body. You know. Um,
some of these cases too, you see individuals where they
they're they're almost happy when they finally catch syphilis because
it means, if nothing else, it means they don't have
to worry about catching syphilis anymore. You know, they're they're
(26:09):
they're no longer living in the shadow of syphilis, but
within the dark of syphilis. And you can see where
there might be a certain amount of empowerment there. Certainly,
if you have to latch onto something, you might as
well latch onto that, although again you'd have to be
in a really specific social position to do that, and
you'd have to be a male for certain. No. Yes, indeed, now,
(26:30):
if you had the money, the wherewithal, and you did
not want to wear a fake nose, or you weren't
ready to come out to the world that you had syphilis,
then you would try a kind of nasal reconstruction, which
in the sixteenth century was called the Indian method, and
this involved cutting a nose sized section of skin from
(26:51):
the forehead. So there's again another calling card or hallmark
that you have the disease, because your nose looks great,
but you've got a big patch of skin, but you
have a really big wig. That's true, that's true, you
have a nice wig. But they take that skin from
the forehead and they would attach it to the bridge
of the nose to maintain a steady blood supply. And
(27:12):
then that flap was twisted into place and sewn over
the damaged area, which kind of created a replacement nose.
But again it wasn't perfect and you know, really cold weather,
it would not turn the same color as the rest
of your nose. So there were certain telltale signs that
it may look like an intech nose, but it is
(27:33):
not your perhaps knows that you were born with. But
it turns out that there's a better and perhaps more
horrific way to take a stab at plastic surgery or
early plastic surgery. You know what it is tempting to
say it's horrific, but it but in you know, another way,
it's kind of beautiful and it gets it how malleable
our flesh really is. Because again modern plastic surgery, the
(27:57):
plastic is referring to the plasticity of the flesh, that
you can craft flesh into a form. Yeah. And actually
this method did and does inform plastic surgeons about how
skin grows and how you can mold it and and
sculpt it. So yeah, in this we see the sixteenth
century advent of the Italian method. Now to to picture this, um,
(28:19):
if you don't have an image of it in front
of you, um, And and if you're not driving a
car doing anything where you need your hands place, place
your your palm of your hand, uh, kind of on
your forehead, okay, and then allow your nose to to
touch your arm. That is basically the position where the
surgeon would would lock your arm into place. There would
be like a head vice type of scenario going on,
(28:41):
so that you could not move your arm away. You
cannot move your the flesh of your arm away from
the flesh of your face. And then that's where you
perform the the the skin graft. You walk a pedicle
of flesh, you sort of cut it away from the forearm,
and you stitch it into place where the nose should
be in play of the nose that you've lost two
syphilis or duels or what have you, and then that's
(29:04):
held in place while the the grafted skin grows onto
the face. So for a brief period of time, you
have effectively sown your arm, or a surgeon has effectively
sown your arm to your face. And then once the
graft is taken, then you cut the arm away from
it and you've you've essentially walked as a piece of
(29:24):
flesh off of your arm onto your face and then
use that to form a new nose, which is kind
of brilliant, and honestly, you ask a plastic surgeon about
this and they'll be like, this is a great way
to try to get the skin to graft onto other
skin and then be able to shape it um. The
only problem here is that for about two weeks, you're
(29:46):
walking around with your your hand stuff in your head
and you can't really move your nose right because that's
now stuck to you your arm. Yeah, I'm guessing you're
probably not doing a whole lot of walk around town
like that. But but yeah, there's going to be a
weird period there. But you know, the Italian method, it's
a remarkable what it can do. Like it may be
(30:06):
summoning images of like a really bad plastic surgery job
or something. But I've I've seen some images, particularly like
particularly late eighteen hundreds early nineteen hundreds, in which you
see multiple pedicles of flesh that are essentially walked up
the body to the face to repair individuals who say
lost their lower jaw uh to to gunshot wound. Uh.
(30:29):
And then you're able to walk all these pedicles up
to the face and it looks kind of ghastly at first,
but then you start putting them in their place, and
at the end of the of this series of procedures,
you have a much more uh normal looking visage uh
there in place of the damaged tissue. So in in
in this scenario, we see the impact of syphilis on
(30:52):
early rhino pass plastic in Europe. But we also see
other ways in which syphilis ends up change in the
way that that that medicine is practiced, uh through throughout
the the old world. For instance, immediately it challenged humorism
and the doctrine of contagion that was probablement the other day. Um.
(31:12):
We also see syphilis as a catalyst for modern doctor
patient confidentiality, because suddenly it becomes a kind of a
calling card for some doctors. Hey, let me treat you
for your syphilist because I'll keep it on the download. Now,
we just kind of take that for granted that we
go into a doctor, they're not going to laugh about
syphilis to everyone in the neighborhood. And then this is
another key fact that was brought up in the book
(31:34):
Cleaned by Virginia Smith that I've referenced before in podcasts,
and that is that previously you had you'd go into
your your local barber shop and you'd have the barber
tonsors in the front, barber surgeons in the back. You
can have your haircut, your face shaved, all of that
that take place in the front of the building and
go into the back, into the yard or what have you.
(31:54):
That's where you would receive minor surgeries. That's where you
would uh take a bath and saying later as the
as syphilis begins to spread, that's where you start getting
treated for civilis that's where you might take your mercury bath.
And so the prevalence of the disease and fear regarding
the disease, this really leads to regulation. This really this
leads to of course, you know, paranoia. And so you
(32:16):
see the two separates. So you see the separation of
the barber tonsor and the barber surgeon. That's right, because
that red and white striped barber pole used to indicate
that there are surgeries down there. Right in case anybody's
ever wondered why, Um, that poll is outside of a
hair cuttery, all right. So that's this impact on on
(32:39):
on medicine and medical surgeries um, as well as cottage
industries like wig makers, right, and people who are are
selling you know, snake oils. But there are certain things
that you cannot cover up here when it comes to syphilis.
And one of the things would be your teeth. Now
you can pull all your teeth, you could put dentures in,
but if you didn't want to do that you're kind
(32:59):
of saddled with the ravages of your teeth bicyphilis. Yeah,
And one of the more one of the more particular
things we see here with the teeth is something that
pops up in cases of congenital syphilis, and that's something
known as Hutchinson teeth. These are, you know, as with
all things syphilis, the exact symptoms vary, but this is
(33:21):
often typified by sharpened looking teeth or peg shaped teeth
that kind of have sharpened points on the edges. Um.
You can look for for images this online, I think,
and actually I did a blog post um that I'll
link to on the landing page for this podcast episode
that includes, uh, the image that Julian and I are
both looking at now. But they do have a kind
(33:42):
of monstrous appearance either like sharpened teeth inside of a
human mouth, particularly canine teeth. Yes, And so we start
to look at this for a little bit, and uh,
naturally your mind would turn to vampire teeth, because that's
kind of what this looks like. It looks like a
sort of non speraw version of vampire teeth. Yeah, And
(34:03):
it's led us some commentators to argue that the the
evolution of the vampire myth in in Western civilization may
have connections to cases of congenital or hereditary syphilis. The
children are born like this, they have this kind they
could have in addition to these teeth, they may also
have elongated fingers, They may have elongated skull. There various
(34:25):
other deformities that might be interpreted as monstrous by by
somebody taking in the scenario UM and another connection between
vampires and syphilis arguably takes us to bron Stoker himself,
the author of the book Dracula. And another area where
(34:45):
vampires and syphilis seem to converge UH is in the
case of the eighteen novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. Now
bron Stoker's exact cause of death and he died in
nineteen twelve A means you know somewhat something of the mystery,
but some biographers attribute his death to tertiary syphilis and
(35:07):
make the further argument that Dracula itself, as a literary
work is is kind of reflecting not only the paranoia
regarding syphilis that's present in the culture, but also Stoker's
own uh experience with the illness itself. Because you look
at vampires. You look attractively and you see uh, something
(35:29):
that is at once sexual and monstrous. You see this
this uh, this outsider that has come to in this
case to England and is spreading this uh, this illness
of vamporism. This uh, this this alien pathogen to to
to to two women in the in the in the area. Yes,
(35:50):
they are puncturing the women. Right, So again you have
to use that metaphor which always comes up sex and vampires, right. Um.
The in fact, there is you something this link uh
to a class that's offered, the classes the vampire in
Literature and Cinema, taught by Tomaslavljovich, who is a professor
of Slavic and comparative literature, and he uses that vampire
(36:14):
lore to explore folklore explanations of disease epidemics, which makes sense, right,
especially if you're you're caught up in this. You'll say,
it's the sixteenth century, is the seventeenth century, and this
is this you know, pervasive disease, and you have all
of these sort of myths surrounding it. It's possible that
(36:34):
that people could sort of extrapolate like maybe there are vampires.
Maybe this is how it's being spread. Yeah, because again
four and a half centuries in which we could not
cure it. So you're throwing what you can at. You're
throwing you're throwing actual research, You're throwing snake oil, you're
throwing mercury, steam baths, you're throwing religion. And again, you know,
because again it just can't be It can't be overstated.
(36:55):
The the connection between between morality and and stuff lists
here and at least in the way that people try
to understand it, or at least ended up viewing it
in society. And so yeah, you're throw in a little
myth in there, you throw a little magical thinking and
and and there you go. You can easily see the
vampire emerge. Nothing concrete there, but some food for thought. Yeah,
(37:15):
which maybe why a vampire in the form of Count
spiro Keet shows up in a Navy video in the
seventies talking about STDs. Right, Yes, and you can watch this.
I link to the video on a blood post I
did for stuff to blow your mind. It's actually a
fabulous documentary. It's kind of the style of of Schoolhouse
(37:37):
Rocks and uh, and it has a Scooby Doo element
to it as well, yeah, it's it's very silly. Look,
even when they get into some of the rougher stuff,
such as congenital syphilis or or actually showing illustrations of genitals,
it's like the setup is very cartoon. It's Death him
self is having an award ceremony handing out the coveted
(37:58):
fourth Horseman Award for a disease that's that's done the
best work in causing misery and death around the world,
and who should win it but count sparrow Keet who
represents syphilis. Uh, the the embodiment of ganahea takes some
issue with it. Some of the other illnesses are like,
what's so great about sparrow keyt what's he doing? There's
a cure for it, blah blah blah, and so Death
(38:19):
and spirow Key, mainly Death goes on to explain to
us why how selphilis works and why it is a problem,
and why enlisted navy men, why why sailors should be
on guard and should go seek treatment for any time
they have any kind of a flare out, which kind
of gets into this whole rich tradition of the military
trying to bring a level of awareness of STDs to
(38:44):
UH to everyone. In fact, if you go back to
War one in wor World two, UH, you will see
all sorts of pamphlets and posters warning military members to
be very careful to watch out for siff, watch out
for gnahea. And it even reminded me of our Quarantine
(39:05):
episode in which we talked about the U. S. Military
quarantining prostitutes in an attempt to try to separate what
they thought is disease carrying prostitutes with STDs from military members. Yeah,
so you have you have these campaigns that are basically
in essence saying, hey, sailors, when you go into the
next port town, please stay away from the prostitutes because
(39:28):
you could catch syphilis and it's bad news. And you
have to bear in mind too that even after the
advent of penicillin, you'll have situations, particularly in wartime, where
there's there's not an unlimited amount of penicillan to throw
at at your your navy men's venereal diseases. You have,
you have that a lot of that penicillan is earmarked
for the battlefield for for use in helping with soldiers
(39:51):
who have been injured in combat. You don't want to
spend it all just on a bunch of horny sailors
who can't control themselves when they go into a farm
port of call. So they're throwing education at the problem
as well. But they're speaking to a male audience, and
and so the messaging tends to take on a very
sexist feel. Yeah. In fact, one of the posters which
(40:14):
I'm looking at right now is a really good example.
It's this, Um it's a photograph of a girl that looks,
you know, kind of innocent and pure and you know,
very Norman Rockwell, Like this is the Norman Rockwell gal.
I'm looking at very Norman Rockwell. In fact, she has
this sort of beatific smile on as if you know,
she's doing godly work. And then there are you know,
(40:37):
some servicemen who are looking at her at a distance.
And across this poster it says she may look clean,
but and the butt isn't all red in all caps,
and it says pick ups good time girls. Prostitutes spread
syphilis and gonorrhea. You can't beat the axis if you
get v D. And what I think is so interesting
(41:01):
about this is that there are many other posters that
have more I don't know, what are you say, tawdry
looking women that there are basically saying they're prostitutes. But
then you have this other sort of like I said,
be to fix smiled, innocent looking girl. And the point is,
(41:21):
as you say, is that they're speaking to men, and um,
they're really underscoring this idea that STDs venarrow diseases all
begin with women and that they are the font of evil. Yeah.
I mean there's this darkness in the woman. It's almost
like the like the feminine form as monster is the
(41:41):
message here? And and you see again you do see
some more fantastic, horrific visions of this. There's one where
the woman is like moving a handheld mask away from
her face and behind it there's a death skull. Um.
I Salvador Dolly's illustration that he did for an anti
sephilis poster in which you see the two buxom women. Yeah,
(42:03):
I guess it kind of melting kind of, but they
look like a death skull. You know. It's one of
those one of his classic stout images where you see
the death's head uh in the form of the women.
I'll be sure to throw that un stuff to your
mind dot com as well. So everyone can see it.
And yeah, weren't you telling me about the sixteenth century
hypothesis of the woman as really the germanator of syphilis. Yeah, yeah,
(42:25):
there was this notion that the syphilis emerged because you
had you had women, you had prostitutes who were having
sex with multiple men. Uh, and then those semens with
those different seeds would be inside her and they would
mingle together and corrupt into the form of syphilis. So
with and you know, they had no one there was
no proof to back up this ridiculous theory, but it
(42:48):
did place the blame firmly on on women and very
moralistically as well. These women are are sinning, and therefore
you have sickness arising from them. They are the sore
of of the ailment itself. Yeah, and uh, not not
to get too crazy here, but it just kind of
brings me back this idea of witches. And we talked
(43:09):
about which is and we talked about, you know, the
power of women and sexuality. And again here we are
subscribing the sort of power this death to women in
the form of syphilis. And uh, you know, I don't
know that that's what all the poster artists intended, but
it certainly captured the spirit of the times. Yeah, and
(43:30):
then again they were talking to a predominantly male audience.
As we mentioned before, even in UH, you know, over
the centuries that syphilis was really ravaging Europe, you saw
the highest percentages of infection uh in the in the
in the soldiers are certainly a higher percentage than in
the rest of the population. So soldiers and prostitutes were
a key area of transference. Indeed. All right, so there
(43:53):
you have it again. There's just there's not enough time
and even in a series of podcasts to really get
into all the way it's syphilis informed UH Western culture
during its UH four and a half centuries of unchecked life.
But but hopefully we hit some of the high points.
We hit some of the ideas who were play here
about about us versus the other, about men and women,
(44:17):
about the morality, about the cosmetics of dealing with syphilis,
and if nothing else, that you serve as an interesting
starting point for your own exploration of the topic. And
also touching um the origin of it as well, and
knowing that we don't have the end all be all
theory in place yet, but we do have an idea
of where it came from all right, Um, you guys
(44:40):
can find us at a multitude of places. Yeah, that's right.
Go to step to Blow your Mind dot com. That
is the mothership. You will find all the blog posts,
the podcast, the videos, et cetera, including a number of
different items related to this syphilis series that we've put out.
And you can also find us at Mind Stuff Show
on YouTube. And if you've got some ideas percolating there
about the top think we covered today or any sort
(45:01):
of stories you want to share with us, you can
do so below the mind at Discovery dot com for
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
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