No such thing as
a secret affair in Georgian England … the ‘pox’ will always give you

If you had gone for a stroll in London in the early 1700s it would have been hard not to stare. Everywhere you looked men and women, young and old, rich and poor, limped and lurched with strange lop-sided gaits. Some had oozing sores, while others, even creepier, appeared to have a hole where their nose used to be. These unfortunate souls were all suffering from ‘the pox’, also known as venereal disease.

In this gruesome but endlessly fascinating book, American professor Olivia Weisser explains just how common the pox was 300 years ago. Following the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 there had been a collapse of the old Puritan prohibitions. Sex was now for sale everywhere you looked.

Death Sentence: The pox depicted in Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress, 1732

While today we divide venereal infections into gonorrhoea, syphilis and chlamydia, in Georgian England all were ‘the secret disease’. There was, however, nothing secret about it, since symptoms were embarrassingly easy to spot: open sores, lameness, loose teeth and oozing discharge. To make it worse, there was absolutely no cure.

Of course, that didn’t stop people trying. Venereal disease was a quack’s paradise and the list of patent medicines grew longer by the day. One remedy involved plantain juice, rose water and the ‘milk of a woman’ who had recently given birth to a baby girl.

Other attempted cures were more hardcore. ‘Pocky persons’ were most often given mercury, a poison that caused them to sweat and dribble, in the hope that the infection would somehow work its way out. The fact that the process was so unpleasant was the point: mercury wasn’t intended only as a cure but as a painful punishment.

Punishment was essential because the pox was indelibly associated with unauthorised sex. Showing up at the doctor’s with open sores or terrible pains in your limbs was tantamount to admitting that you had been consorting with someone you really shouldn’t. Cruellest of all cases was when a husband had picked up the disease from a street-walker and so passed on a painful death sentence to his unsuspecting wife.

The Dreaded Pox is available now

Lady Frances Hanbury Williams was one unfortunate victim of just such a pocky husband. After months of languishing with running sores and swellings, Lady Frances finally realised the cause of her ill-health and promptly sued for divorce on the ground of her husband’s ‘infamous Crime’.

This was unheard-of in the 1740s. Most women, with far less money and social status, simply had to put up with wretched health and a husband who continued to play dumb about what he had been doing.

In these miserable circumstances the only thing you could do, really, was buy fashionable facial patches to cover the tell-tale sores and attempt to style it out. By the time death came, as it surely and painfully would, you were honestly past caring.