Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Syphilis

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

From Acts of Parliament to unethical clinical studies to legendary symphonies (possibly) - syphilis has stained many different areas of history.To find out what this disease is, what it does to the body and how treatments of it and the people who have it have changed, Kate spoke to Cat Irving, Human Remains Conservator for Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh.*WARNING there are adult words and discussions of illness and death in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed Thomas Ntinas.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here with your fair do's warning. I know I normally make silly fair dues warning, but this is actually quite a serious fair do's warning because we are talking about syphilis.

It's fascinating, but it is absolutely hideous. So you just might not want to listen to that, and who can blame you? If that's the case, get out while you still can. At various points in history on the French, the Italians, the Dutch, the Turks, Christians, Columbus and Cupid. But wherever it did come from, syphilis has left a destructive trail through our history. Today betwixt the sheets.

We are wrapping up and we're going to find out some more. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Jerry.

Hello, and welcome back to the Twix the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. By the end of 2021, diagnosis of infectious syphilis had already returned to pre-pandemic levels, with seven and a half thousand people testing positive that year alone.

But the disease is not new. Oh, no, no, no, far from it. It has been estimated that in the 18th century, one in five of the population of London had syphilis. And countless famous people have now been retrospectively and probably quite inaccurately diagnosed with it at various points in history. Henry VIII, Beethoven, Al Capone, although he did actually have syphilis. That is on his medical records. But today I'm speaking to Kat Irving about syphilis, what it does to the body, how it has been treated, and how people with it have been perceived. Today, Betwixt the Sheets, we are going to find out more.

Hello to Kat Irving. Hello, thank you for joining me Betwixt the Sheets today. Hello, it's a pleasure to be here. I am thrilled to be talking to you because you are the Human Remains Conservator for the Surgeons Hall. Yes, I am, which it's a fairly rock and roll job title, I feel. That is epic. Yeah. What exactly is that?

Well, basically, I mean, if you've been to Surgeons Hall, you will see we have a lot. bones, we have things in jars, and the natural thing that the human body wants to do is to decompose, and I'm here to stop at decomposing. That's an amazing answer. Oh, right, okay, but we are talking today about something that did a pretty good hatchet job on making human body parts decompose and rot away syphilis. My interest in syphilis comes from the fact that it has such a devastating effect on the body. You know, I work with these body parts, and you see the ones that have been affected by syphilis. I mean, we have skulls that have holes in them. We have wet preserved human remains, which have like the top of the mouth with just massive gaps in it.

We have these bones with roughen surfaces. And it's, you know, it's terrible. You think about what these poor people must have went through. Then you look into it and it's even worse than you imagine. I don't think we really comprehend how hideous it is today, at least in the general public. It's got this sort of weird air of like, it's a sort of a power. disease or something archaic that belongs to a different era. And of course, syphilis is still around today and we'll get to that. But it should be curable by, you know, a course of antibiotics, touch wood. We just don't see quite the devastation that it can do. So talk me through it. What is syphilis and what can it do to the human body? Well, it's a disease that's a spirochete. It's a little

spiral-shaped bacteria. It looks quite nice when you see sort of electron micro-microids. graphs of it. It's quite pretty. It looks a bit like a corkscrew. But yeah, it gets into your body. It's primarily through sex. The place where it comes into contact with the body, and that will usually be the penis, the cervix is one of the most common places you will find it in women. The vagina, labia, around the anus, the mouth, the hands. Those are the places you tend to get the first contact with this little spirekeet bacteria. And that's the place where primary syphilis will start. And this is a chanker, which is a little kind of ulcer, sort of soft in the middle. And, you know, obviously some of the places we've talked about, you're not actually going to see that at all.

If you want on your cervix, you're not going to notice it. And then that will pass. It'll go away. And then a few weeks after that, you'll get into secondary syphilis. When you start to get things like cold and flu symptoms, you know, just those kind of nasty things. You might get bone pain, joint pain, headaches, a rash. You know, a rash was a very, very common way that it would manifest. And then that again, that would pass. And, you know, some people would think, oh, I've beaten syphilis. In the 19th century, that would be a bit of a sort of, you know, a thing for young men. You know, they'd beaten the pox, they'd gotten through that. And, you know, that was a rite of passage. But at this point, you go into the latent stage where that

spirochete getting deep inside the body you don't have any symptoms you're not particularly contagious at this point but it's getting really deep into the body and it's doing nasty things so then many years later it can be a couple it can be as much as 40 years afterwards 40 years wow you get into tertiary syphilis and you know they think that the reason not everyone gets to tertiary syphilis stage might just be that they're not living long enough oh that's grim you know you die of other things before you get to tertiary stage. And how that manifests can depend on what tissue that wee bacteria has got into. If it gets into nervous system, you get neurosyphilis.

That doesn't sound good. No, no, it's not. And this was one of the main reasons you would find a lot of people in asylums in the 19th century. It would cause problems like if it was in the brain, it would start off. You know, you would get moments of brilliance. Wow. And, you know, sort of creativity, things like that, delusions of grandeur, along with, you know, severe depression, suicidal depression. And as it progressed, that would go into a sort of a lethargy and sometimes symptoms like epilepsy, seizures.

And you would just end up a sort of shadow of who you would be. Okay. Whereas if you got it into the nervous system, that would affect the way that you interacted with the world. Wow. You got this thing, it was called a Tabitic Gait. You would have this funny walk. And that was quite recognisable. And because it was affecting your proper perception,

so the way you experience the world, you might not notice that this funny walk was causing you problems. And so you would get progressive damage of the joints, typically the ankle or the knee joint. And that would just get worse and worse because you weren't doing anything about it because you weren't really noticing it. And that led to a condition that was called

Charcot's joint, where you just got this awful, awful damage to the joint because of, you just not realising that you were walking on it funny. So that's neurosyphilis. Syphilis could also get into connective tissue and cause what were called gummers. And gummers sounds quite nice. I always think it sounds like, you know, it makes me think of gummy bears. Okay, yeah, I see what you're doing there. Okay. But these were actually sort of like kind of soft, like round growth. The word gummer came because of the texture that they had in the middle. Right. And these things, they were usually referred to benign because they weren't cancerous.

They weren't gross that were going to metastasize in the way that a cancer does. But it's not benign in the way that I would think of benign. You know, it's something that does something nice. These could be hella destructive. They would destroy the tissue that was around them. So these would be the things that would cause these ulcerations in the skull, often destroying the nose. you know, this was a... Why does it do that?

Why does it go to the nose? That's really symptomatic of late-stage syphilis. What is it about the nose? I think it is actually other places as well. You certainly, we have a lot of skulls where you can see it in the forehead and the back. But I think that's something about if it is the nose... Jesus.

People really notice it. You know, we're so focused on the nose that we kind of, you go, yeah, that's syphilis. And the Spirekeek does tend to like certain tissues. so I think possibly gravitating to this area as well. So this was another manifestation of tertiary syphilis. The other one was cardiovascular syphilis. That spirited really likes, particularly the aorta,

you know, that big blood vessel that comes out of the heart. And this was the one that you tended not to notice outwardly as much. But probably the most devastating, because often the first symptom you would have is sudden death. Jesus Christ. That's one to watch out for. So that's syphilis. And of course, a mother with syphilis can pass it on to a child.

And if you see this damage that it's doing to a fully grown adult, you can imagine what this can do to a developing child. So congenital syphilis was awful. You know, it calls thinning of the skull. You get symptoms that you dissociate with thinning of the skull, like Hutchinson's teeth, where you get these small notched incisors and what we're called mulberry molars. You know, so the teeth weren't forming problems. saddle nose, again, another symptom to do with a nose just because that skull is so thin, the bridge of the nose isn't forming properly. It can often lead to deafness and blindness. What's called snuffles, you know, I feel very snuffly today, but this would be a child,

and every snuffly bit of mucus could spread syphilis. Jesus Christ. So it's under these gummer things, like these kind of, like almost like blister-welt things, that it can destroy the bone underneath those. Is that what happened? Yeah. Yeah, the bone underneath those, the skin above it. So this is where you would see those really devastating holes in people's faces and their foreheads. Could you be unlucky enough to get all of these expressions of syphilis?

Could you be half mad your heart explodes and your nose disappears? You could, but that would be, you know. Very unlucky. Very unlucky. And it's a killer, isn't it? I mean, it kills people. Yeah. I mean, as I said, that cardiovascular.

Sucalus, that can get you very, very suddenly. This neurosyphilis would lead to a long, long decline. And obviously, the gummers, depending exactly where they're affecting, that can really cause damage to your health. It must have been devastating, mustn't it? I mean, because it's so disfiguring as well. Imagine, like, your nose disappearing or big holes opening up in your skull and your head. And it's no wonder people were so scared of it.

Oh, definitely. Yeah. Do we know where it came from? Oh, that's a very good question. The short answer is no, but there are theories. Okay. All right, hit me with some theories. So the first recorded outbreak of syphilis in the Western world in Europe was in 1494, 1495. So there is a theory.

You know, obviously Christopher Columbus had gone and done his wonderful things in the Americas. Yeah, cheers, Chris. Just before that. Yeah, great man. obviously, and he took terrible diseases over there. Smallpox flu, which caused absolutely devastated the native populations in the Americas. And there is a theory that he brought syphilis back. Right. Okay. So that's the Colombian theory. Of course, some people believe there is actually evidence of syphilis in Europe before that. Right. Thought that maybe there were diseases like

leprosy, because all these things about syphilis, I've just given you a great lot of. list, which isn't even complete of things that you might see in syphilis. It's a great imitator. It could look like a lot of other diseases. Yeah, it would do, wouldn't it? You know, especially those early stages, you know, where you've got a rash and you've got flu-like symptoms. Yeah. People could have thought you had a lot of things. It could get confused with other skin conditions. And so people have thought that maybe things like leprosy were actually being misdiagnosed, that they were actually syphilis. And we just didn't realize until there was this particular outbreak, again, to do with war in 1494, 1495.

And of course, there's an idea that syphilis was a much less devastating disease in the new world. It came back with Columbus and then there were a whole range of new selection pressures on it and then it evolves the syphilis we know and love. So that's another theory. Again, we don't really know. But there's a whole range of genetic testing that's going on at the moment, things that are new techniques that are developing, which maybe will give us a bit more insight into that. And of course, we've got astrological reasons. There's a wonderful, wonderful broadsheet from 1496 by a Nuremberg physician, illustrated by Albrecht Dure. And in it, you can see this little sort of zodiac thing above it with the date 1484.

And it was thought that this was when you had this devastating conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Scorpio. I knew it would be Scorpio. I knew it would be a Scorpio that did this. Yeah, it's all Scorpio's fault. This was the foretelling of this great disease that was to come. God, oh, mighty. And I actually get the same from a mythological reason for the disease. In 1530, there was an Italian poet produced a poem in which he said that a shepherd called syphilis pissed off the god Apollo and that this disease was his punishment.

And so it'd always just be known with the Great Pocs or the French Pocs or the Italian Pox, depending on who you'd fallen out with before that. And then when this poem was written, that's when it starts to be known as Ciphylus. Right. It's all syphilis is for... I mean, you know, if you've got a prime candidate, the guy called Cipolis, it's really going to be him. In the early days of this thing, did they know it was sexually transmitted? Yeah, they realised that quite quickly. And it was actually an alchemist called Paracelsus, who was one of the first people to put this together that sex was in.

evolved. And that was really, really early on. So yeah, and it was one of the reasons for this great outbreak in 494-95 was that there were troops besieging Naples. And, you know, they had all their camp followers coming along with them. And very, very soon after they took the city, they realized something terrible had happened. And it was said that it seemed to have been a lot more severe at that point than it is today. It seemed to progress a lot more quickly. that the screams at night from the joint pain echoed through the city. Jesus. Wow.

I mean, that is brutal, isn't it? Yeah. It's, I mean, it just sounds awful. You can see why at this point they would think, you know, there were whole lots of things about this being punishment from God as well, you know. Yeah. So why this kind of thing would really take whole these kind of ideas. And it must have changed sex history forever.

It must be one of those seismic events in our cultural history, is this thing, I mean, obviously they'd always had sexually transmitted infections with this, that and the other, but this is a really big one, perhaps on par with, you know, the HIV epidemic of how it changed people's attitude to sex. Because when they'd figured that out, and in a culture that views these things as divine punishment, now it looks like sex is being punished. Oh, yeah, yeah. And of course, very, very quickly, they started to blame sex workers. And in the 19th century, the stigma, you know, that you were going to get, you would get this terrible disease from these loose women was huge. And actually ended up being enshrined in law. In the 1860s, you got the Contagious Disease Act, which really, really made this, you know, the fact that this was women's fault into a legal framework.

Before we get there, and we will get there, what were some early treatments? treatments for this? I mean, because the race must have been on of like, well, now this thing is here. What in the hell are we going to do about it? Well, I mean, the treatments were often as bad as the cure, basically. So again, Paracelsus, he had this idea that the dose made the poison, you know, that something that was toxic to the body in small, small doses, you know, might be okay. And so he had this idea of treating it with mercury. There were various treatments that they brought across, from the new world that, you know, various resins and things like that. But he thought, been in mercury, that's what you need. And of course, mercury causes skin rashes. It causes, you know, hair loss, teeth loss. In the long term, it can cause things like dementia and kidney failure.

So mercury itself was fairly devastating. And they would start off by, you know, like motions. You know, they would put mercury motions onto these rashes that were peering. But then you would get into the mercury, things like mercury pills, mercury fumigation, and mercury carried on as a treatment for syphilis right up until the very beginning of the 20th century. Though you had some other things along the way, you had dietary things. There was one poet who was getting treated in France for syphilis in the 1860s, I think, and he had this soup that he was given, and he said that the effects were

so explosive that death would be preferable. Jesus Christ. I've always wanted to ask this question, and I don't know if you will be able to, I hope that maybe you'll give me the answer. Did Mercury do anything to help? Because it was used for hundreds of years. Why? I mean, was it just that this guy said hundreds of years ago? Yeah, I think that works and just nobody dead question it. But did it do something that looked like it was helping? Did it relieve symptoms? Did it do anything at all? Or was it just all ridiculous? It does seem because Mercury has this toxicity that if you got it on that chancor at the right point, very, very early on, that that toxicity might kill the bacteria and stop it spreading. Right. And it's kind of like, almost like the idea of modern chemotherapy, where you're trying to kill the cancer, hopefully before the nasty things kill you.

Right. So there is that very, very small chance that Mercury could have done that at the right stage. But effectively, what you can imagine, as I've said, you know, that chancra passes quickly, then a few weeks later the rash comes, and that passes after, you know, maybe six to eight weeks. So you get the idea that if you do put something on, the chanker goes away. It looks like you've done something. It looks like you've done something.

Yeah. That I've always wondered that, thank you so much, that makes perfect sense. Right. Okay, I'm very glad I know that now. So we've got Mercury, which is ridiculous, and we've got a whole load of other mad treatments. And then of course, blaming people works pretty well. And the most obvious target of all of this is women. That's pretty easy.

And the women selling sex. And that has got a very long history indeed, doesn't it, of blaming sex workers for syphilis. Yeah. And in the 19th century, I mean, in Britain, you know, this was the height of empire building. A lot of the soldiers were having problems because of sexually transmitted diseases.

And so rather than try and stop the soldiers doing their thing, the idea was you restricted the women. And this led to the Contagious Disease Act of the 1860s, which basically were brought in around towns, which were either naval or army bases. It meant that women who were suspicious, and I mean, that could be as simple as a woman who was walking on her own after dark, that they could be brought in. and subjected to a compulsory inspection to see if they had a sexually transmitted disease. Wow. And this was something that a campaigner against these acts called Josephine Butler described as surgical rape. I'll be back with Kat after this short break.

How much of a tyrant really was Julius Caesar? And it's very interesting to think about why it's Caesar in particular when there have been many political assassinations in the past millennia, why Caesars has been the one that is brought up again and again. Would we have ever stood a chance against the first dinosaurs? In the Jurassic, you see dinosaurs get bigger, and you see meat-eating dinosaurs grow into things like the size of buses. And did Helen of Troy really have the power to launch a thousand ships?

She is always derided as this sort of terrible adulterish, but at least as old as Homer, at least the 8th century BC, is a counter tradition, in which Helen doesn't go to Troy. She's never Helen of Troy. She's Helen of Egypt. Well, you can expect all of this and more from The Ancients on History Hit. Join us twice a week, every week,

as we explore some of the greatest moments of our ancient past. Subscribe to the Ancients, wherever you get your podcasts. You can see why, can you? You're going to be dragged off the street by volunteers, I think it was. It wasn't even necessarily medical people doing this.

Yeah. And then I think that they were given a choice, They either submit to this forcibly or we put you in jail. It was exactly that jail with hard labour. And if they saw something that looked like it might be a sexually transmitted disease, and as I've said, the great imitator, it could look like a lot of other things. You know, if you had a skin condition, maybe if you had thrush or something fairly simple, then you would be put into a lock hospital, which you couldn't get out of.

and then, you know, for three months and subjected to treatment, which as we've said, the treatments could be fairly devastating in their own right. My God. Yeah. My God. Through the 1860s, there were amendments to this Act, which increased the number of towns that applied to, which increased the time that you could be in the lock hospital for.

I think it's, and it's not like this was just like a flash in the pan that they tried it for six months and it didn't work. This thing was enforced for years, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah. It was only in the 1880s that it was repealed. And the lock hospitals did not go away at that point. And lock hospitals were hospitals specifically set up to treat venereal disease, weren't they?

Yeah. And in London, as you were leaving, you would get beaten just as extra punishment. Just to make sure you understand that this was your fault and don't do it again. My God. Jesus. And of course, at no point in any of this, are they testing the men for syphilis? No. No.

Not only is it brutal, it's also pointless. Yeah. Honestly. And so this did nothing to spread the stop of syphilis at all, did it? No, no. No. Syphilis was still rampant and it continued, you know, well into the 20th century. Even during the First and Second World Wars,

you would see these awful posters warning you about the terrible, terrible women who were going to give you sexually transmitted diseases. Because there was a serious problem when we, I mean, the Contagious Diseases Act was about soldiers. By the time you get to the First World War, there's a real problem with this, isn't there? Because syphilis, actually any venereal disease, would mean that the soldier was removed from the front line and placed in what was effectively a lock hospital for up to two weeks, because we don't have antibiotics by this point doing the First World War.

No. So he'd be taken away from action. So trying to control, treat syphilis in particular was now a matter of national security. Oh, yeah, yeah. and again the sort of soldier manor was lost because of syphilis, gonorrhea, things like that, was huge. When do we get to antibiotics and when do we get to a treatment that actually works with this? Well, you actually get a fairly early in the 20th century. You get salversan.

What's salvosan? I've not heard of that. Salversan was developed. They tried many, many things. And what they end up using was arsenic. No. Fucking hell. It's okay. And Salvosan did work. Oh, right. Okay. So, but treatment was complicated. You know, you had to have repeated doses of it. It's, you know, specified times. It's arsenic based, so it's not pleasant. You could have very, very nasty side effects, including liver failure and arsenic poisoning. And because it was so specific and you had to have these repeated doses, a lot of people didn't go for the follow up. That would have no effect. You know, you would just have some nasty side effects. You know, you would just have some nasty side of for a while, no long-term cure. But if you did follow it properly, it did work. So that thing was

but very, very early in the 20th century. And then in the 1920s, we get the discovery of penicillin. The magic bullet they called it, didn't they? Yeah. But it actually took them a while to be able to produce penicillin, you know, in sufficient quantities for proper testing. So it's only really by the time we get to the Second World War, where they start to go penicillin. That's the thing for syphilis. So it starts to get mass produced. And the initial people who get it are soldiers. You know, they rush it out. By the beginning of the 1940s, it's being used as frontline treatment for any soldiers that are showing any signs of syphilis. And that's great. It does work. It does the business. And in 1947, it's rolled out to the whole of the US population for this purpose.

I mean, it must have seemed like a miracle, because it was a miracle in a lot of ways. You know, I've been living in the shadow of this horrendous disease for so long and now there's a cure. Yeah, it must have been amazing. I mean, obviously, the thing with that is that, you know, if you've had any long-term damage, you know, if you've had any of these gammers forming, if you've got to the nursery stages, it's not going to undo the damage that's been caused, but it's going to stop it progressing. Okay. That's still better than your heart exploding and your head caving in. If you notice that chancre, if you notice that rash of secondary syphilis, and you get get treated then.

Then and there. Perfect. So we've got to talk about a particularly, I was going to say, a particularly dark point in the history of civilists, but it's all pretty fucking horrible, isn't it? So as you were saying that people didn't quite know what the effects of antibiotics were, how it would work, how civilist progressed, all of those things. And there were experiments being done, weren't there, into the 20th century?

I think you know of the one I'm talking about. I mean, that was one of the things that nobody really knew the long-term progress. the way this disease progressed. And it was actually, I mean, I talked about neurosyphilis. It's only in the 1870s where people make this connection between that chancor and that rash that you had when you were young and, you know, these people end up in mental asylums. So it was very, very late.

So, yeah, they decide that they're going to do experiments to try and figure out the way the disease progresses. Right. And as you say, I mean, the disease is awful, but this is when, for me, this is people being awful. and it seems a hell of what worse, the nasty actions of a wee spirochet. So the way they decide to do this is by examining what happens to a population that's exposed to syphilis from exposure right through until death.

Right. And this is when we get the Tuskegee Siphilis experiment. When was that? It starts in 1932. It's a group of African-American sharecroppers, some of whom have syphilis, some of them have syphilis, some of whom don't, and they follow the progression over a number of years. The plan is for this to be a long-term experiment. And the people who are involved are giving free health care, free death benefits, things like that, in return for their participation. None of them are ever told that what they have is syphilis.

So that means that, you know, they're not having protected sex, they're not telling their families about this. So that seems fairly bad. How did they find them? If they didn't tell them they had syphilis, how did they find it? I mean, this is a very poor, impoverished group of people, isn't it? Yeah, so they're basically taking one group, seeing how many have syphilis, how many don't. Right. And then just kind of following them long term to see what happens.

And what did they tell them they were doing? I'm not entirely sure how they framed it. But I'm sure it was that sort of thing. Oh, look, we're giving you all these things. We're just going to have a look. We're going to be looking after you. Okay. And obviously, penicillin is rolled out to the general population in 1947.

Right. Then they know it is a cure for syphilis that it works. None of these men are ever given it. Oh, my God. None of them are told they have syphilis, and this is an option. And the study carries on until 1972. 28 people die as a direct result of having syphilis during that time. 100 die from complications related to syphilis.

40 of the patient's wives get the disease and 19 children are born with congenital syphilis. And then there is a man who comes along and says, why are we doing this? And he's told that the study has to carry it until all of the men are dead. And at that point, he becomes a whistleblower. And this is the only thing that brings it to an end in 1972. So it would have kept going? Oh, yeah, yeah. So, yeah.

That's just, so they recruit this very, poor group of people by somehow telling them they're involved in some kind of medical study and they get free healthcare, something. They test a bunch of people, find out who's got syphilis who hasn't. And then they deliberately don't tell these people they've got syphilis or offer them any treatment. What if they'd like been to their own doctor or something? I'm guessing that if you're, you know, that strata of society at that point in time, the idea of going to your own doctor would never... Of course, yeah, it's America, isn't it? Yeah, and you'd have to pay for it. And they're offering free

health care. They're offering free health care. So they're basically going over that barrier. Oh my God. So when this all came out in 1972, that's horrendously recent. Like, what was the reaction? I mean, it was a family at the time. It changed laws in the US. There was compensation paid to all the survivors and things like that. But again, if it wasn't for this one man who was a whistleblower, this would never have happened. My God. I mean, that's just absolutely, who did the experiment? Do you know who did the experiment?

So these were being run by the United States Public Health Service. These were government organizations that were actually involved in these experiments. And this wasn't the only experiments that were going at the time. They were doing similar things. US-backed experiments in Guatemala. Right. They deliberately exposed people from certain backgrounds,

always impoverished backgrounds, so sex workers, people in mental asylums and prisons, again, to try and see what was going on long term. And that was deliberate exposure. But you don't do that in the US, of course. You know, you do that somewhere else. I mean, that is, and to think that that went on for 40 years and no one at any point went, this is just absolutely horrendous. Not just like some rogue mad professor who's just, Jesus. Do you know what, it, in my mind, it was, more scary about that is the thought that if that hadn't been blown in 1972, it could still be going on. And it kind of makes you think, are there other experiments that we just don't know about? Yeah. I mean, it just, it just blows your mind, doesn't it? It really does.

People could think that little of human life that they would think that was acceptable. Jesus Christ. There was poor people. Honestly, like just the absolute horrors of that is properly blown my mind. A very trendy thing to do in history at the moment and because there's no one around to go, no, a don't thing to do is diagnose people retrospectively with syphilis. That's like, that's loads of fun. And I can't think of many historical figures who haven't, at someone at some point has gone syphilis. Definitely syphilis. Yeah. It's, I mean, there's always a problem with any kind of historical diagnosis like that, especially, as I said, because syphilis look like so many other things. And yeah, like you say, the amount of people that have been retrospectively diagnosed, it's huge.

And I mean, some of them undoubtedly would have done. I mean, I've read a variety of figures, but I mean, one said that in London, in the 19th century, like one in five people had syphilis. That's a lot, isn't it? It's a lot. The chances are that there's a good proportion of the great and the good were amongst those. Are there some famous cases of like people that, you know, obviously we can't properly diagnose them? But for your money, that was definitely syphilis. that person definitely had it.

I mean, I'm not sure. Certainly there's a poet, the one that I said, had this terrible dietary treatment. He looked very likely to be suffering from neurosyphilis, and it's quite interesting. His name was Alphonse Dode. And he actually writes about the disease. He writes about the description of his symptoms,

and he goes through it. And, you know, again, it's awful. Some of the quotes that you can pull out from this book, it's been translated into English as In the Land of Pain by Julian Barnes. It's, you know, certainly giving you an idea of what he was going through, but he seems fairly likely to have been one of these sufferers. And he was being treated by the neurologist Jean-Mattin Chaco, who gave his name to Chaco's joint, you know, this tertiary syphilis symptom that I was describing before.

Other people, it always becomes much more, you know, a bit, ever. I mean, because it was such a stigma against having syphilis. That certainly nobody is having this. you know, in their biography. But, I mean, people have said like Beethoven, you know, because I said neurosyphilis has these moments of creativity and greatness, that people have said that, you know, his great symphonies were down to these kind of moments in syphilis, and that's what caused his deafness, you know, and he was known to

where he was averse to bright lights. So people have said that this was down to syphilitic damage as well. Again, he had uncharacteristic behaviour, which would, would, go in with neurosophiles. You know, it's a possibility. Oscar Wilde, people said that his handwriting showed things that were typical of neurosyphilis later in life. Right. So, you know, there's a lot of people, I mean, you know, people said Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary, but, you know, that he took it back and gave it to her because that was a thing that happened a lot. You know, husbands would be doing things they shouldn't be doing and their wife at home would end up with these funny symptoms.

A strong case for that is Mrs. Beaton, who wrote Mrs. Beaton's household management. That's one of the more compelling cases that her husband gave her syphilis. Yeah. It's quite interesting because, you know, there's so few cases where they're looking at it at the point of view of the wife being given it because so many women's voices have been erased in history that way. Her husband writes in his diary that he was bitten by a goose, which sounds mad, but like, goose was a term for a sex worker to be bitten by a goose did mean that you'd been given. the clap. And apparently

there's sort of a number of that they couldn't have children and that she had a number of miscarriages and that's kind of been suggested that maybe that's what it was. We'll just never know for sure as I suppose. But one person we do know, in 1906 they develop a test

so you can say whether or that would do it, yes. Whether or not it is syphilis. So Al Capone certainly did have syphilis. Right. So once you get into the 20th century you start to be able to say things a bit more positively. But even then, you start to see with the women, you start to see this difference in attitude. There are some cases that we've got here in the museum. We've got a woman who

twice was given these vasamint tests to see whether or not she had syphilis because she's described as being drunk and disorderly and of a low moral character. She didn't have syphilis, but they felt certain that she must. So they kept giving her these vasmin tests. Whereas we've got a woman who, through her life, they diagnosed her with tuberculosis and it's only post-mortem they go, actually, she was of a much higher standing so you wouldn't have used the worst of difference in relation to her. That's fascinating. So there is a lot of class, but even when they can diagnose the thing. Wow. And where are we up to today with syphilis? Like, it's still out there, isn't it? And like I said at the beginning, it's got this slightly archaic image about it, but it's not archaic. It's still here.

Yeah, I mean, I saw an article at the beginning of the year, which basically said syphilis is on the rise. And I mean, this is partially down to antibiotic resistance, you know, which is going to be a problem long term. But one of the things they were saying, they were saying, but the reasons are good why syphilis is on the rise. Oh, really? Yeah, it was a very bizarre article because it was basically saying because we can treat HIV so much more successfully today, people were being less cautious using condoms and ways of protecting themselves against sexually transmitted diseases, which is making syphilis numbers rise. I don't think that's a good reason to be. No, I'm not buying that.

No, no. But, you know, it's one reason why we're starting to see more syphilis. And I gave a talk in syphilis for Valentine's Day earlier this year. And I had some people from our local sexual health clinic there. And in Edinburgh, the sexual health clinic is right next to the eye pavilion. And they said that because syphilis can cause problems with the eyes, they're actually now getting a lot of referrals from the eye pavilion, which is right next door, because, you know, people don't recognize it. People, you know, the general population don't know about syphilis and what it looks like. And so it will often get a bit further along before it's being diagnosed.

So that's quite interesting thing as well. Wow. And what's the treatment for it? Is it still antibiotics? No antibiotics, yeah. And how serious is the antibiotic resistance thing as being able to treat cephalose? I think we're still getting quite a lot of effective treatment. So I don't think it's at worrying levels yet. I think in the long term, as with many diseases, this might be something we need to be a lot more worried about. And anybody that might be listening to this thinking, this sounds a bit familiar, what should they do?

Go along, see your GP, go to your local sexual health clinic. You can get treated. And again, historically, stigma has stopped a lot of people even talking about the fact they've had these problems. Don't do it. Just get the antibiotics as quickly as you can. And the chances of it doing long-term damage, we can see if we can sort that out. Oh, Kat, you have been amazing to talk to. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? You can find me on Twitter, Instagram as anatomical cat. and I also have a blog called Wandering Bones, which you can find if you Google me. Thank you so much for joining me today to talk about syphilis. You've just been wonderful. Thank you. It's been a delight to be here.

Thank you for listening, and thank you so much to Kat for joining me. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic. sounds.