This Podcast Will Kill You - Special Episode: Dr. Olivia Weisser & The Dreaded Pox

Episode Date: May 12, 2026

In a time when smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and typhus ran rampant through the streets of London, there was another disease that instilled even more fear than these other killers: syphilis. So feared and so stigmatized was syphilis that it was sometimes called “the secret disease.” A diagnosis would not only sentence you to a drawn-out and painful illness possibly resulting in death, it also labeled you as an outcast and not fit for polite company. Skyrocketing infection rates drove a corresponding rise in syphilis “cures” and an increasingly desperate public. In this TPWKY book club episode, Dr. Olivia Weisser, associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Boston joins me to discuss her recent book The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London. She transports readers to the hidden shops and stalls that promised a remedy to this feared disease, to the courthouses where a syphilis infection was an important piece of evidence, and to the country houses that held recipe books for those who could not purchase a cure. Tune in for a fascinating glimpse into a time and place where morality, sex, and disease were so strongly entangled. Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move.

And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to Season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month,

and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks, and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I, like, was just so wanting to, like,

be out of that phase out of my skin. and I just like really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do?

be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yelloo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Moderato from Stranger Things, Tanna Monshu, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Erin Welsh, and this is This Podcast Will You. Welcome to the TPWKY Book Club, a series where I invite authors of popular science and medicine books to the show to chat with me about their latest work. It's been such a fun series to put together, really making my inner bookworm so happy. we've covered some great topics over the years. If you'd like to see what we've featured in the past or get a peek at some of the books that we're planning to feature in the future, head on over to our website. This podcast will kill you.com. There, in addition to finding all sorts of goodies from transcripts to sources, you'll find a link to our bookshop.org affiliate page under the extras tab.

On Bookshop, you'll see a bunch of TPWKY related book lists, including one for this book club, as well as the kids book club, put together by Aaron Updike and posted on our socials. So if you're not following us there already, you should be. As always, we love hearing from you all about these book club episodes and about our other episodes, your thoughts, your suggestions, we love it all. The best way to get in touch is through the contact us form on our website. or through the submit your first-hand account form, which you can also find on our website. Two last things before moving on to the book of the week, and that is to please rate, review, and subscribe. It truly helps us out. And second, you can now find full video versions of most of our regular season episodes on YouTube. Make sure you're subscribed to the Exactly Right

Media YouTube channel so you never miss a new episode drop. Londoners in the 17th and 18th centuries were no strangers to infectious disease. Plague, tuberculosis, typhus, measles, and smallpox all reared their pestilential heads at some point or another. But alongside these well-known and highly broadcast afflictions lurked another disease, so feared and so stigmatized that it was sometimes known as the secret disease. we know it today as syphilis. Siphilis, or the pox, as it was also called, was among the most feared diagnoses in early modern London, not just because there were no effective cures and it could lead to painful sores or even death. If your pox infection became public knowledge,

you would likely face deep stigma and shame. You may even be ostracized from your friends and family. With so much at stake, it's no wonder people went to great lengths to manage or conceal their condition. In the dreaded pox, sex and disease in early modern London, author Dr. Olivia Weiser, Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston, peels back the curtain on the most intimate facets of Londoners' lives centuries ago. Drawing from a wide variety of sources, from court records to recipe books, pox cure advertisements to personal diaries, Dr. Weiser transports readers back in time

to the dirty streets of London. Where might an impoverished maids seek help for her infection? How might a gentleman choose between the many ready-made concoctions in the city's alleys? Who were behind these lauded tinctures and ointments that provided nothing more than hope? The dreaded pox is a fascinating glit. into the daily lives of early modern Londoners as they navigated a world where sex and shame

were so deeply entangled. While today we have more scientific knowledge and the ability to treat and cure many sexually transmitted infections, that world is still familiar to us in many ways, which leads us to ask how far we have actually come and how much further we still need to go. I had such a great time chatting with Dr. Weiser, and I'm so much. excited to share our conversation with you all. So let's just take a quick break and get right into it. Dr. Weiser, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for having me. I cannot wait to dive into the world of venereal disease in the London of past centuries with you. It's going to be a great time. And I'm curious, though, could you tell me what drew you to this area and this era of scholarship?

A lot of people know that there was a ton of venereal disease in this time period. So this was a rampant disease. And we know a lot about the disease because just so many people seem to be affected by it. There are some historians who predict that if you were a grown up living in London in the 1700s, you would have up to a 20% chance of getting infected, which is an astounding number. Yeah. And I don't know whether that's true. I trust them. it's just appalling, like how prevalent this disease was. So we know a lot about the disease. We know a lot less about what it was like to live with it. So that was kind of the historical problem that I faced.

What was it like to endure this disease? What was it like just for a normal person living in the city? And so the answer, to kind of do that work, I tried to look in non-medical places. So I tried to look outside hospitals, outside. I did look in consultation rooms, but I tried to look in everyday sites in the city to try to recover just lived experiences with this disease. And what I ended up writing was a book that's as much about the history of a city as it is about the history of a disease. Which is what I love so much about it. You really transport readers to this era before germ theory where London is growing at such a rapid pace and sex is changing. You know, all of these different components are changing, but also at the same time, we have these sentiments of shame and

secrecy that surround not only sex, but then of course anything that's tied to sex, including this disease. And, you know, we talk about, we've been talking about this disease. What is, what is pox? Like, what could pox be used to describe or label in terms of our modern classifications of disease? It's a great question and one that I get a lot. And my easy answer, if, if it's It's really helpful to have some sort of modern disease equivalent in your head thinking about this topic. My easy answer is syphilis. It's most likely that's the disease we're talking about. The more kind of historically accurate answer is it could be any number of STIs, what we would call STIs.

So, you know, you think chlamydia, gonorrhea, syphilis, it could be any of those. And they used this term venereal disease as this umbrella category that was expansive. So all of these, what we now differentiate as different STIs were kind of all encompassed within that one term. They, in the past, pre-derm theory, like you mentioned, they didn't differentiate these categories the way we do. But it can be helpful to kind of have that in your mind to just think about like what was happening to these people's bodies. You know, like what were their symptoms? What were they enduring? You talked about how pox was or venereal disease was so common in this era.

I mean, like 20% possible lifetime risk, which is mind-blowing again. Why was it so high? Like, how was sex changing in London during the 17th and 18th centuries? A lot of historians of sexuality have argued that sex was changing a lot, that people have used the word revolution, like a sexual revolution in this time period. And there is a lot of evidence that sex was changing, that people were just having more sex outside of marriage. There was many, there's much more evidence of men having sex with other men, the development of what we're called Molly Houses, like kind of like the proto gay club. And so there is evidence that there's

just more sexual activity in this time period. My sense from writing this book is, and a lot of what I see changing is more due to the changes of the city as opposed to changes in sexual behavior. that the city, because it's such a London-specific story, and I think it would be a very different book, if it were a different geographical location. It's a very London story. Because the city was changing demographically, commercially, it was just growing so exponentially in this time period. There's just huge influx of people, this urban, dense mobile population, a huge influx in consumerism. And all of that creates this kind of chaotic environment where on a concrete level there was just a lot of transactional sex happening. And then a lot of disease. And then also a whole market that kind of develops to treat it.

So the kind of short answer is, yes, just more people are having sex. And also I think what's really changing is this urban center that accommodates this kind of hotbed. of sexual activity and disease. As you describe sex was, it was transactional nature, but it was also a private matter. Like it wasn't necessarily something that it was discussed openly. And venereal disease was also called the secret disease, which kind of denotes, again, it's shameful nature. And so given these intense pressures to remain silent about sex or about the pox,

I'm guessing it's not something that was openly written about for many people, whether in diaries or not. And so I'm curious about your sources and what types of sources did you find helpful in researching for this? And how often did you have to read between the lines? A lot. I had to read between a lot of lines. I did.

My initial take was exactly what you mentioned. I'm going to look in private writing. People certainly, if you're dealing with such a stigmatizing, kind of life-altering ailment, surely you wrote about it. And it was really hard to find people. writing about their firsthand experiences in personal writing. So I found lots of examples of people describing other people in letters or diaries much harder to find first person accounts. That makes sense for all the reasons you just said. It's this deeply stigmatizing disease. People didn't

want to admit they had it. They would use euphemisms. So what I did was I tried to think creatively. What are other kinds of sources I can use to get at that experience outside of of personal writing. So I looked to recipe books to try to kind of recover what people were doing at home in these semi-private moments. How were people trying to treat themselves privately? I looked to court records to try to get access to kind of non-elite people giving testimony in court where the disease comes up in court. So I tried to also use sources that we know that historians have used for decades to talk about this disease and study this disease like advertisements for patent drugs, so what we would call over-the-counter cures. But I tried to look at them in a new way. So the kind of typical way

historians use these sources is they look at how healers are promoting themselves, how they're marketing their drugs. I decided to look at the address printed at the bottom of the ad, which is where the healer said, you can come buy my pill or come get my elixir. And it wasn't always at their house. It was sometimes an address to a book stall or a chocolate shop or a bakery. And I decided to make a map of where you can find cures for this disease. So it's just one example of using a historical source we know about that's been used many, many times, but just trying to use it in a new, more creative way to get at a different slice of the story. Let's take a quick break. And when we get back, there's still so much to discuss.

I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of the Wicked Words podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says she's gone. She's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them,

changed forever. Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you'd do. You know, you look back at it and you're like, I can't believe that really happened.

Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the exactly right network. Listen to wicked words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you say. think he is. Your body is not what you saw it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history.

I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets. And just then, we felt the plain turn in the air, so much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle. Each week, we dive head first into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships, and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves. My daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know, but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything

and me pretending like everything was fine. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off, and that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. May is May. Mental Health Awareness Month, and your 20s, they can feel like a lot.

On the psychology of your 20s podcast, we unpack the anxiety, the overthinking, the heartbreak, the identity crisis, all of it that comes with being in your 20s. Because if you've ever thought, is anybody else feeling this way, they definitely are. I feel like my 20s was a process of checking off everything that I was not good at to get to what I was good at. Oftentimes we take everything a little bit too seriously and we get lost in things that we later on decide weren't even important to us to begin when. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so wanting to be out of that phase out of my skin. And I just like really regret not living in the present more. Each week we break down the science behind what you're going through and give you real tools to navigate it.

Your 20s aren't about having it all figured out. They're about understanding yourself just a little. little bit better. Listen to the Psychology for your 20s on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back, everyone. I've been chatting with Dr. Olivia Weiser about her book, The Dreaded Pox, Sex and Disease in Early Modern London. Let's get back into things. Not just what this disease, the effect of this disease on someone's body, but the effect that it had on their social standing, on their relationships, on how they viewed themselves, and There was early on in your book a really fascinating kind of series of diary entries where Samuel Pepys writes about his brother and there's this kind of question of, does he have venereal disease?

Is he dying of venereal disease? Is he getting the all clear? And just these intense emotional perspectives of how someone's relationship is changing based on a diagnosis. And I thought that was just a really fascinating glimpse into the effect that this disease could have on someone's life. Yeah. And it's a great example of how those third party. You know, before I was saying, oh, it's so frustrating. I can't get a first person to count.

Peeps isn't writing about himself. He's writing about his brother, but it still has so much to offer us in terms of kind of insight into just the emotional toil of a diagnosis. Because, of course, Peeps is just worried about himself. He's worried about number one. What is this going to do to my reputation? We have the same last name. What are we going to do?

So, and I just love this diary by Samuel Peeps. It's just really intimate and candid. in a way that we don't often see in diaries. Yeah. Yeah, it's fun. I was like, we need a TV show based on this diary. It sounds like. I support that.

I would watch it. I would love to consult on it, just on the record. Thank you. All right. I think we have an idea in place. Let's go. Yeah. And in addition to these, you know, court records, advertisements, personal diaries,

the Pox also makes an appearance in creative work from this era, whether and it's in a song or a book. or a play or an opera or something like that. When it does make an appearance, what did it signify? It almost always signified debauchery or vice or illicit behavior. And I mean, when you look in court records that have nothing to do with sex, court records for, you know, I looked at a lot for marriage separation or things that aren't sexual necessarily, it comes up as just like a slander for just bad, illicit, negative. it's often used to describe women. So the disease typically, kind of stereotypically, was blamed on women, and there's lots of medical debates about how women,

there's something about women's bodies physiologically that make them prone to not only spreading the disease, but somehow like creating, fomenting it in their hot wombs. And so this phrase, pocky-hor was used all the time as just kind of like a general slander. to just connote bad immoral behavior. You know, there are lots of debates where did it come from. Is it from the New World? Is it from the old world? And there were a lot of assumptions that at first it comes from women.

It must be, you know, women are to blame, obviously, time and again. And then as the, you know, Londoners at least are seeing all these new kinds of people that they had never seen before in diseases and plants come into the metropole from these New World explorations, it kind of shifts a little bit. And there's this layering of, well, it also, this disease, also must originate in women's bodies who are from hot climates. There's something about their hotness, their heat. And then there's all these debates that it must come from the new world. It couldn't possibly come from here. And it's being brought from the new world. And therefore,

we need to ingest the plants from the new world as our treatment because they will be suited best to treat this disease. So there is lots of talk about who to blame. And there's a whole other discourse about like, you know, the English call it the French disease because it comes from France and the French called the Italian disease because, you know, and everyone's passing. Trying to shift to the blame. Yeah. Exactly. Passing the blame around. So there's definitely debates about it and they never settle on one answer. It's always up for debate. Exactly. Of course, of course. And so even when this idea of where it came from shifted, it still was women at the source of it. They're like, were men ever blamed or were,

Has it ever thought, like, this is his fault for, you know, whatever? It's such a good question. And if you look in the obvious places, and by obvious, I mean historical documents that are about the disease, that say venereal disease on the cover or the Great Pox, these are all euphemisms for the same kind of nexus of diseases, it's always women. It's always women. But when you start looking at non-medical sources, at the kinds of sources I've been talking about, so, for example, court records or women,

trying to sue for a separation, like basically a divorce, you see that it's not at all the case, that there's a difference between what I would say is the discourse, like the narrative, the story people tell, and the reality on the ground. And the reality on the ground, when you look at medical cases of who's coming to get treated, and when you look at court records and who's talking, it's so clearly not women who are being blamed. It's time and again, my husband went to the bathhouse, slept with a prostitute, came back, infected me. I mean, it's so different from what the discourse is in these other kinds of texts. We've talked about how this is an era pre-germ theory, but that doesn't mean that contagion was not a concept. And so, you know, just based on what you said,

it was clear that people saw the connection. It was like, okay, well, we know the root of transmission. How much did just the act of sex, was that everything, or was it also a role of constitution, type of sex, you know, what were the set of circumstances that people believed led to somebody else developing or transmitting pox? They absolutely understood the sexual connection. It was a different kind of connection than what we have in our minds. So we have in our minds, you have sex with someone who has a STI and you contract it. They had a much more complex understanding of the role of sex within just daily life. And so it wasn't necessarily just sex with an infected person. It could have been too much sex or the wrong kind of sex or not the kind of activity that is healthy for your

particular constitution. So it was a much more kind of complicated interaction. And then layered on top of that, there was also this belief that you could get this disease from non-sexual interaction. So there were two kind of forms of this disease. And I'm saying disease as if it's this one thing. And it's just this kind of collection of symptoms. One was what we might have in our minds. And this is what they called the great pox. A true pox is what they called it. And this is a more severe form of venereal disease that you would get from penetrative sex. And then there's this milder form. And that's where we see words like clap and gong. honoria, which are not kind of one-to-one. They don't correlate to what we think of when we say those words today. This was considered to be a milder form of the disease, and you could get it from sharing a drink, a glass. You could get it from, there's one example I found where someone shares a glove with somebody, or you can get it from sharing a bed, just like sweating in the sheets. So the idea was that this milder form of the disease you got from spreading pachy matter,

is what they called it. And that could be from sexual activity. but it could also be from these non-sexual activities. And then to make it even more complicated, another way you could get that mild form of the disease is through not the spread of pachy matter, but just from trauma to your genitals. So there's one man who talks about falling off his horse and getting a clap.

And another case I found where someone talks about getting hit in the groin with a stone. And he gets the clap. So I think the modern mind is like, wait, well, what did he really have? because it, and I don't know. I just don't know. Maybe it, who knows? We'll never know. But it gets very complicated when you, especially when I was looking at court records, where all of a sudden, the difference between getting this disease from a stone versus someone sexually assaulting you is

huge, right? That's a felony versus a misdemeanor versus nothing. So it becomes really important in certain contexts to kind of parse these types of diseases. In your book, you describe the pox as seeming modern for its moment, and you call it the first modern disease. Can you tell me more about what you mean by the first modern disease and how this perception is kind of reflected in writings from the time? I use that word to kind of capture the way we think of disease, and I think it's something that we take for granted, that a disease is a biological entity that affects all of us more or less the same way. So if you and I both are given the same diagnosis, we'll probably manifest the same set of symptoms. If you and I have the same set of symptoms, we'll probably be diagnosed with the same disease. That this idea that diseases are fixed, that they are all affecting all bodies more or less similarly,

and that they are treated and progressed more or less similarly. This is a modern concept that's born in the 19th century. So this book that I wrote is before any of that. It's way before germs, the discovery of germs and germ theory, but it's also before this kind of conceptual, what I would call revolution in thinking about diseases as stable uniform entities. So this time period, diseases like we've been talking about, they're fluid, they're a group of symptoms. You and I could have the same symptoms and get completely different diagnoses because you are in Denver and I am in Boston and you live near a swamp and

I don't or whatever. You had oatmeal for breakfast, whatever, right? Like any number of factors. We'll be given completely different diagnoses and we'll have completely different treatments. So this time period, this pre-modern era, diseases are fluid, they're individual, and they just are symptom-based. So they're very subjectively understood. And so when I say this is the first modern disease, what I found in doing this research is that this venereal disease looks more like our modern, that kind of post-19th century way of thinking about disease. And it's not because of some revolutionary idea about disease progression or some discovery of a bacteria or some kind of medical breakthrough. It's just because the disease was so shameful. And that it's the shame of the disease

that leads healers, for example, to look to bodies in ways that look bizarrely modern, looking for patterns across bodies in ways that we don't see until much, much later in the 19th century. Or because of the shame of shopping for a cure, patients look to over-the-counter cures, these kind of one-size-fits-all treatments that, again, are kind of out of step with time. So by looking in these kind of non-medical places, the kind of composite image of the disease that I was able to piece together looks more like a 19th century, kind of like a modern disease than the other diseases of that moment. And that's because of the stigma, not because of the science. I was just thinking about this the other day, how this huge transition into putting diseases

into boxes, standardizing them, everyone, as you said, has the same signs and symptoms, has the same diagnosis, has the same treatment, and is expected to have the same disease progression course. And I feel like now we're finally, like, in modern medicine today or, like, cutting edge is like, it's all about precision medicine. It's all about seeing each individual. And so we've almost, in a way, come full circle. Totally. That's why I love studying this time period. It's so unfamiliar, and yet the parallels are so mind-blowing.

I mean, I think it's absolutely, we have this kind of tailored medicine today that in many ways almost mirrors the kind of clinical encounters that I'm finding. ending in this pre-modern era. And the same with the market, right? I was talking about those advertisements and making that map. What was so interesting making that map, what I found was, oh, these cures were sold everywhere. There was not like a neighborhood where you would go get one of these cures. They were sold everywhere. And they were sold out of these anonymous, non-medical places, bookstores, bakeries, chocolate shops. And to me, coming back to this point about parallels to today, it's almost like the leading edge of what we've achieved. today where you can just be in your pajamas, online, purchase whatever embarrassing thing you want

to purchase, and no one will ever know. And it's like we have achieved the ultimate anonymous shopping experience, but we see this very early history of it in the 1600s. Let's take a quick break here. We'll be back before you know it. I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, host of the Wicked Words podcast. Each week I sit down with the true crime writers behind some of the most compelling true crime stories and discuss their years spent investigating and why it still matters. He sees his father coming out of the woods with his hands over his face, and he knows something happened. His father just grabs him and says, she's gone, she's gone. These are the cases that leave survivors, families, and the journalists who cover them changed forever.

Working in national television, it'll push you to your limits, and you'll end up doing things you never thought you do. You know, you look back at it and you're like, I can't believe that really happened. Join me and step inside the investigation. New episodes drop every Monday on the exactly right network. Listen to wicked words on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you saw it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these, These are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of family secrets. And just then, we felt the plain turn in the air, so much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle.

Each week, we dive headfirst into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships, and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves. My daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know, but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything. And me pretending like everything was fine. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. May is Mental Health Awareness Month.

And your 20s, they can feel like a lot. On the psychology of your 20s podcast, we unpack the anxiety, the overthinking, the heartbreak, the identity crisis, all of it that comes with being in your 20s. Because if you've ever thought, is anybody else feeling this way, they definitely are. I feel like my 20s was a process of checking off everything that I was not good at to get to what I was good at. Oftentimes we take everything a little bit too seriously and we get lost in things that. that we later on decide weren't even important to us to begin when. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so wanting to be out of that phase out of my skin. And I just like really regret not living in the present more.

Each week we break down the science behind what you're going through and give you real tools to navigate it. Your 20s aren't about having it all figured out. They're about understanding yourself just a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome back, everyone. I'm here chatting with the wonderful Dr. Olivia Weiser about her book, The Dreaded Pox. Let's get into some more questions. It was anonymous out of necessity, right? Because of this disease was so shameful. And I just kept thinking about how the doctors that were handing out these diagnoses held this tremendous amount of power in the knowledge that they had. And just to kind of

get a perspective on what that power was or how impactful this diagnosis could be. If someone's diagnosis was made public, what kinds of consequences might they face? And how did that differ based on things like their initial social standing or their gender or their race? Like how did all of these things kind of combine and to be like the consequences are different for each individual person? It mattered more for women than for men, for sure. And it comes back to what we were talking about earlier.

about blame. There was a double standard in this society. It was a deeply patriarchal society, and a woman's reputation was intimately tied up in her sexual reputation. So a diagnosis of this disease, if you're a married woman, there would be suspicions of adultery. If you were a servant, let's say, an unmarried single woman working in someone's home as a servant, you would probably lose your job. And there's a case that I talk about at length in the book. That's exactly what happens, a servant. She's suspected of having this disease. She's a caretaker of small children in the home of a merchant, and the children end up getting this venereal disease. And the doctor who comes decides there's nothing sexual, there's nothing untoward happening here. Just it's one of those

mild forms of the disease that she spreads to the children by sharing a bed with them through Pocky matter. So she's sweating in the bed and somehow they're getting the disease. But the problem is she has. it. She has the pox and she denies it and they finally confront her and they find hidden under her bed a box full of medicines that are just for the pox that are very clearly for the pox. They're made of mercury and ingredients that you obviously use to treat this disorder. And she's basically succumbs to all the pressure and is like, okay, you got me. Yes, I am poxed and she loses her job. So there are absolutely severe repercussions for a diagnosis. And the flip side is if you're a man and you're it's not a big deal. Right. It's like, well, this wasn't your fault. We understand. It happens to

everyone. Boys will be boys. Boys will be boys. Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah. And, you know, speaking of, I think another part of this, you know, boys will be boys, different consequences for different genders. You explore what happens in the short and long term with the diagnosis of Pox, with two individuals, Betty and John, these hypothetical kind of people, who have a brief sexual encounter at Bartholomew Fair and which results in John getting the pox. Can you tell me more about Betty and John and how they might have found themselves at the fair, what would have happened immediately after? I loved this little thought experiment of walking through what happens to these two people after this encounter. I discovered Betty, who is a fictional character from a ballad. So these are

songs that were typically sung in taverns, like drink basically drinking songs. They were pinned up in coffee houses and taverns, and they were set to music. And I searched through the ballads to try to find out, well, how does venereal disease come up in these songs? And I found the story of Betty, who's a prostitute, who's plying her trade at the Bartholomew Fair, which is this annual cloth fair in the north of London every August. So I kind of did something that is a little controversial among historians, which is I took this document and I kind of extrapolated from it and made up a story using actual historical sources. So I used medical cases and account books and letters to kind of piece together.

What would it have been like to be John, this fictional person I made up? Well, I didn't make him up. He was in the ballad who's infected by a prostitute at the fair. So there is a lot of historical kind of evidence undergirding what I'm doing, but it is a fictional story. And I just, you know, John in the ballad is described as this country rub, this guy, this, This young guy who's like in the big city for the fair, trying to, you know, have a couple of fun days where he buys a bunch of trinkets to bring home to his family. And the thought experiment I do is, first of all, I looked at maps and I tried to figure out like, okay, how would he enter the city? What would he have seen and smelled when he came into the city?

What would it have been like for this guy to show up at this fair, which was a pretty chaotic, overwhelming place full of stimuli where he's probably seeing things he's never seen before. Venetian women walking on tightropes or playing pipes or rides and food and smells. So I tried to kind of imagine what it would have been like to be him. And then also the flip side, what it would have been like to be Betty. This woman who was probably living in a precarious situation. She probably lived in a home with other women who were selling their bodies to make ends meet. How she would have approached him. They probably went behind a tent.

So I kind of just tried to imagine what it would be like to do this. And then the, you know, the repercussions of it, like John realizing that he was infected and that he loses all of his money, right? So she picks his pocket as they're doing the deed, which comes up again and again in ballots. So and then I kind of just imagine like, okay, well, what symptom would he have had first? Probably it would have burned when he went to the bathroom. And he probably would have seen something in his underwear and what would it have looked like. So then I turned. tried to kind of look to medical text to piece together what people said it looked like. What did your excretions look like? It gets pretty grisly. I mean, it does. It was also so fascinating to think of like, how much would he have known beforehand about what to look for or the questions to ask or if he would have had to consult like a dear friend to be like, hey, man, have you ever seen anything like this? I've got something going on. Yeah. I mean, it was called the secret disease that you meant you mentioned that name, in part because secrets was slang for genitals. So a woman's genitals were called

her secrets. Like privates, yeah. Exactly. Exactly. But it was also called a secret disease because people didn't want to talk about it. And it was shameful. And it was also secretive. Like it was the great be your symptoms could be chalked up to completely different disorders if that's what you wanted. So a lot of people did consult their friends and kind of ask around and read there are these, all these books that exist at the time that are basically like, this is how you tell whether or not you're clapped or whether or not you might have a more innocuous disease like the whites, which is basically a premodern yeast infection. But it can look like a clap. So there's like medical texts, popular medical books that people would probably not very many people could afford to purchase, but maybe you would borrow or access. or purchase if they could afford it, to try to parse out these symptoms. And there was a whole industry around this question. I mean, absolutely there was. And so let's say that, you know, John self-diagnoses or has a friend to gives him advice and says, you know, I think you, I think this is what you've got. You've got the pox man. Where does he go next? Like, as you said,

you've got these advertisements where you can get a clap cure or a pox treatment all over the city. Like where would he see these advertisements? How would that knowledge get to him? And then how would he find the right one for him? So it really depends on how much money you have. So if you're very poor, you have nothing, you wouldn't be able to buy anything. You wouldn't be able to hire somebody. So you would probably go to what was called a Pox Hospital, a pretty punishing, unpleasant place.

We know a lot about Pox hospitals because hospitals have a lot of records. So we have like pretty amazing histories about these institutions. And then if you're really well off, you would probably hire somebody. You would probably hire a surgeon or a healer or just like someone random without any credentials who claims they can heal this disease. You might move into their house, maybe because you want to undergo a lengthy treatment that causes a lot of conspicuous side effects, sweating, spitting, and you don't want to do that in public. So you might move into their home. Maybe they have a sweat bath, a bathing house you can use, or you can use. And this person would tailor, customize their treatment plan just for you, just for your bodily constitution, your situation, your symptoms. That would be very expensive. So then there's everybody else. And I decided John was in the everybody else category. He's new to the city. He probably doesn't have a lot of money. Well, he has no money because she picked his pockets. So he is kind of lumped in with everyone else, which is the kind of the population I was trying to recover. We know the most about

those two ends, the very poor and they're very well off, because that's where they're the most sources. But everybody else would probably go to the book stall lining the Royal Exchange or the apothecary shop or the chocolate shop or wherever to try to get one of these over-the-counter cures. They're cheaper, they're more accessible, they're quicker, they're not as conspicuous, and they're just more accessible. And the chaos of the city can make the shame of the shopping experience not as big of a problem. So, and then there's people, John wouldn't fit into this category. Then they're the people who would make their own cures at home, who would need to have not just the resources to do that, but the know-how to do that. And it's complicated work.

I want to talk more about these clap cures, these people who found themselves producing and selling these treatments. How did they find themselves designing and selling? And, selling these treatments. Some of them say their secret recipes passed down from my grandfather. You know, they claim to have some sort of lineage. Others who are new to the city, because remember this is the time where there's just this huge influx of immigrants to the city to make money. This is a really growing urban area. It's claim, oh, I learned this on an Italian warship, or I learned this from treating the Turkish emperor's brother. So they kind of claim to have foreign knowledge, exotic foreign knowledge. So they're all.

different ways people claim they get the knowledge to produce these things. At the end of the day, it seems like a lot of people were just making more or less the same stuff. I don't know what was in a lot of them because they don't say. They're secretive. I don't know how different the different pills and tinctures that were being sold really were. But I do know from looking at what's what we do know about how they were made, they were horrifying. A lot of them had turpentine in them. A lot of them had mercury, which would cause that prodigious sweating. It would cause mercury poisoning, right? We know to be mercury poisoning, you would make your teeth fall out. If you ingest it, it, you know, makes you spit a lot. So there's one person who said they spit, they salivated five pints a day.

And then it would also be used as an ointment as a solve and you would rub it on your body and it would make you sweat. And the idea was, this was logical within the day. The idea was, oh, if you have stuff coming out, that's the poison, that's the venom coming out. That's good. That's healthful. This is good. So, you know, we see it and we think that's a terrible idea. Do not eat mercury and turpentine, but they had a really different medical logic. To show that, hey, this is doing something to you, therefore it must be doing the right thing to you. Exactly. Exactly. Thinking about the number of advertisements that you found and this map that, this beautiful map that you made, I just love it so much. much. I think it also just shows that it was a kind of a good business model to go into this at 20% of a lifetime risk of developing venereal disease. That means a lot of cures are going to be sold. Yes. And I think that, you know, we know this to be true. Like a lot of people had this disease and a lot of people got in on the game to treat it because you could make money doing it.

It was, and a lot of the ways these guys who were selling these cures were trying to kind of compete with each other is they would accuse each other of greed, of doing exactly what you're saying. Oh, you're just a cobbler. You don't have a medical background. You don't have a secret tincture that was passed down to you from your grandfather like me. You're just like a tinkerer who's trying to get in on the game. So they knew that and they used that as a way of kind of fighting with each other. I mean, yeah, I mean, competition must have been quite stiff. And with so many different people out there, you had to stand out in some way or another. But then there was also, as you said, this flip side of people who were making home remedies based off of recipes. What do these recipes

look like, not in terms of like what ingredients were there, but where were they found? What types of books or were they just scraps of paper? How would someone come across this knowledge? These were found in what we're called recipe books. And we think of cooking recipes when you use the word recipe, but these recipe books would usually be combinations of cookery, medicine, and cosmetics. Sometimes they would be organized. Sometimes they'd be all one of those three categories. Sometimes they would be a mix. And they were basically a very practical how-to guides. And they'd be organized. Sometimes they'd be indexed. So these were incredibly valuable books. They were collections of domestic knowledge of non-learned everyday household medical knowledge and cookery and cosmetics. And they were passed down.

They were valued possessions. They were often bequeathed to kin. And you can see in the handwriting of them the layers of people who passed down these documents and amended them, right? You can see the handwriting change or people write in the margin, this didn't work, or I tried this, or changing the quantities or the ingredients. So you can kind of see it in the handwriting and the crossing outs over time. Oftentimes we don't know who wrote them or who the original compiler is, so it can be a little confusing. But there are tons of these that exist in archives. And I just started going through them and looking for, okay, were people treating themselves at home for this really stigmatizing disease? Do we see recipes? And we do. There are lots of them. You touched a bit on this in

terms of who would be able to go out and buy a cure versus treat at home, but who did have the resources and the know-how who had these access to these recipe books to make these at-home remedies. What I love about recipe books is it's one of the places. at least in the history of medicine in the pre-modern era, where we see a lot of women writing. So it's harder to find a lot of women practitioners. We know there were a lot of female practitioners, but they didn't keep case books in the great numbers the same way male practitioners did. So it's just harder to find historical evidence of female practitioners writing things down.

Recipe books are one of these places where there's just a lot written by women. There's a lot of recipes by men too. It's not an all-female genre by any means. But we get more women writing about medical practice than we get otherwise. And a lot of these women, A, you need to be literate. So that means it's by default the highest levels of society, right? If you're impoverished, if you're barely making ends meet, if you're betty at the fair selling sex, you're not going to probably have a recipe book or keep a recipe book.

So these are pretty like middling to upper status women who have the time and the literacy skills. and the resources because to make these recipes, they are no joke. They are complicated and very technical and in many ways not that different from what you would buy at the bookshop or what you would get if you hired a healer and lived at his house for three weeks. They require sometimes equipment, glassware, cookware. And this was a time when people didn't have a lot of stuff. So it wasn't nothing. And then you had to source all the ingredients, which could be hard to get. So I think we in our minds think, oh, well, surely you grow them in your garden. And yes, you could grow if you had a garden, right?

We're talking about urban London. But if you did have a garden, you could probably grow a lot of these things that you needed for these recipes. But you also probably had to go out into the city and source some pretty hard to get ingredients. Some of them required amber grease from whales. Some required gold dust. So this was not just something any old person could do. A lot of this diagnosis, it seems to be self-diagnosed. People were recognizing symptoms in themselves and then saying, okay, I think I have this. I'm going to go find treatment myself. But then there were

some people who consulted or who had access or were able to consult a physician. And it was very striking and not surprising necessarily, I think, given the time, but like how physicians almost seem to operate on the basis of assuming that their patient was lying about what was going on. Can you tell me more about what that experience would be like from a patient perspective who goes and consults with a doctor about symptoms of venereal disease that they're not sure what they are. It's hard to say what was going on in patient's minds because, of course, we only have the writing from the other side, right? We only have the practitioner's writing. So it's a fun thought experiment. And my guess is that often they legitimately didn't know what they had. And I think more often

they did know and they were trying to get, and I don't want to say they were lying, but they were trying to get the most out of the situation. And that could be to try to save face or to save their reputation or save their marriage or whatever. That could be just trying to get the treatment they thought they needed without the diagnosis. So you see this time and again of them, of patients trying to kind of get a scurvy. It was usually scurvy because there was something about the symptoms that one could really easily be replaced by the other. Get the diagnosis that's inocuous. That doesn't have the shame, doesn't have the stigma. But that comes with the treatment that does the work of treating this because they're treating symptoms, right?

This is before the treatment of actual disease. So I think there is a little bit of truth to this sense that you get from reading the casebooks by practitioners that there is a little unreliability from the patients. But we can never know because it's all through the eyes of these practitioners who are very keen to make themselves look good. Right, which is then part of that is like, well, I am an excellent doctor because I saw past the patient's lives and their efforts to conceal. Exactly. We've touched on this a little bit throughout, and I want to end just by kind of asking more about these parallels that you have seen throughout researching for this, throughout your experience, you know, in this early modern London,

what parallels you see between veneer disease then and disease now or just medicine then and medicine now? and some of the things that you observed throughout this process. I think we already talked about the market forces, you know, that this kind of early version of the capitalization of medicine, I think the biggest parallel I found, you know, I was writing this during COVID, most of it during the COVID times when it was pretty bleak. And I just kept thinking about stigma and shame. And I know, you know, COVID's not an STI. It's really different.

But there was stigma. There was this kind of like, well, were you wearing a mask? Did you take a PCR? You know, like there were kind of assumptions people had about proper behavior. And so I did spend a lot of time thinking about like, how do we blame people for diagnoses and like what does it mean to have to get that positive test back and think like, oh, man, I should have done this differently. Or it was my fault.

I didn't do the right thing. So I think I make a lot of connections to HIV in the book. I think because it's just the most obvious parallel for me, thinking historical. about STIs and shame and silencing and how shameful diseases silence suffers, you know, the famous activism of the AIDS movement in the 80s was silence equals death. And I don't want to, you know, glibly compare the pox in the 1700s and 1600s to HIV because there's immense differences. But I think that role of shame in silencing us and the work of recovering everyday lives of like how we cope with shameful diseases is.

a trans-historical truth, something that, you know, I'm reading these people's letters suffering from these diagnoses and how am I going to, you know, tell my family and what am I going to do and hiding in the spa town to get treated in secret? And it does feel like there are these kinds of connections to that kind of suffering, that shamefulness and silencing that we see in 1980s, New York or today. There are many parallels that I saw doing this work. But, and I think that's the cool thing about studying this time period is it's so different from ours. It's so unfamiliar. And yet there are these parallels that are that kind of shine through. And it gives us kind of the clarity for thinking about the world we live in. Some things being timeless in some

ways. And the shame of disease, regardless of the type, but you know, I know that some disease carries with it more shame than others. But I just want to thank you so much for such a fascinating book, such a wonderful conversation, it has been so enlightening to chat with you and get more into the nitty-gritty of venereal disease. So thank you. Thank you so much. I appreciated this. It was really fun. A big thank you again to Dr. Olivia Weiser for taking the time to chat with me. If you enjoyed today's episode and would like to learn more, check out our website, this podcast will kill you.com. We'll post a link to where you can find the dreaded pox, sex and disease in early modern London, as well as a link to Dr. Weiser's website where you can find her other incredible work.

And don't forget, you can check out our website for all sorts of other cool things, including but not limited to transcripts, quarantini recipes, show notes and references for all of our episodes, links to merch, our bookshop.org affiliate page, our Goodreads list, a firsthand account form, and music by Bloodmobile. Speaking of which, thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes. Thank you to Leanna Squalachi and Tom Brie Fogle for our excellent audio mixing. And thanks to you, listeners, for listening. I hope you liked this episode and our loving being part of the TPWKY Book Club. A special thank you, as always, to our fantastic patrons. Your support means everything. Until next time, keep washing those hands.

Your husband is not who you use. think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the psychology of your 20s

is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks, and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I like was just so wanting to like be out of that phase out of my skin. And I just like really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark.

When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yelloo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gait and Moderato from Stranger Things. Tana Monsu.

Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.