Itch, Clap, Pox Venereal Disease in The Eighteenth-Century Imagination PDF

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Itch, Clap, Pox
venereal disease in
the eighteenth-century
i m ag i n at i o n
Noelle Gallagher
New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund, and from the
Annie Burr Lewis Fund.
Copyright © 2018 by Yale University.

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For mark
Contents
Acknowledgments, ix
Introduction, 1
1 Officers and Gentlemen, 14
2 The Pox and Prostitution, 62
3 Foreigners, 114
4 A Chapter of Noses, 159
Conclusion, 213
Notes, 217
Index, 259
Acknowledgments
This book could not have been written without the support and guidance
of many colleagues and friends. Hal Gladfelder and Jeff Geiger read puni-
tively large sections of the manuscript and offered generous and insightful
advice; I am especially grateful for Hal’s superior knowledge of the eighteenth
century and careful scholarly eye. Many others also offered commentary, sug-
gestions, or guidance: in particular, I would like to thank Samuel Cohn,
Celina Fox, Sasha Handley, Allan Ingram, Jonathan Lamb, Susan Lanser,
Clark Lawlor, Ursula Mulcahy, Tim Parkin, Jackie Pearson, Steven Pincus,
David E. Shuttleton, Robin Simon, Daniel Szechi, Siobhan Talbott, Valerie
Traub, Leigh Wetherall-Dickson, and Michael Worboys.
I am grateful to the Wellcome Trust, Yale University, and the University of
Manchester for providing funding to complete the research for this mono-
graph. I would also like to thank the staff at the John Rylands Library
Deansgate, the Glasgow University Library Syphilis Collection, the Wellcome
Library, the British Museum, and the Lewis Walpole Library. Of the many
knowledgeable archivists, librarians, and curators who assisted me, Cindy
Roman, Susan Walker, Kristen McDonald, and Sonny Maley deserve particu-
lar thanks for their generosity and expertise. I am also grateful to the readers
for Yale University Press and to the editorial staff there, especially Laura
Davulis, Jaya Chatterjee, Phillip King, and Kip Keller.
ix
x acknowledgments
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the kindness of those friends who

cheered me on my way as I pursued my Shandyean hobbyhorse: Anke Bernau,
Adrienne Boire, Peter Buse, Daniela Caselli, Rob Duggan, David Matthews,
Mark Salber Phillips, Núria Triana Toribio, Anastasia Valassopoulos, Evan
Willner, Janet Wolff, and Tracy Wyman. Last but not least, I thank my par-
ents and my ever-patient partner in crime, Nick.
tch, lap, ox
Introduction
Pain or stiffness in your joints? It might be venereal disease. Sore, swollen

foot? Upset stomach? Skin rash? Any or all of these might be “the Real
Offspring of some Former Venereal Taint.”1 No symptoms at all? Your good
health might be a fantasy: the same “pernicious venereal leven, which lies
disguised under a great variety of forms, may lie quiet, and be worn out in all
appearance, but that some particles of its coagulative and infecting substance
still runs in the blood.”2 Even without any sexual contact at all, you might
have inherited the disease from your parents or grandparents, since “a Venereal
Infection once Received, may very often descend a great Length to Posterity.
Which makes it difficult to meet with a Family, which has not derived from
their Ancestors, Some of this Evil.”3
While the account of venereal disease presented in the pamphlet Monsieur
Belloste’s Hospital Surgeon from 1737 might sound extreme—even paranoid—
in its assessment of the infection’s prevalence and severity, its rhetoric is
broadly indicative of the real fear and anxiety that surrounded the condition
in Restoration and eighteenth-century British culture. Infection seemed to be
lurking around every corner, with “even your Apparent, Starch’d, Demure,
Canting, Censuring Saints” perhaps carrying the “taint”; yet it was also poten-
tially invisible, cropping up in obscure symptoms, or persisting in the body
for decades undetected.4 It was everywhere at once, and nowhere at all—an
object of tremendous anxiety, but also of tremendous confusion.
1
2 introduction
That degree of anxiety and confusion made venereal disease a very hot
topic in eighteenth-century culture, and it held a particular fascination not
just for the period’s medical writers, but also for its novelists, poets, play-
wrights, and graphic artists. In this book, I examine the imaginative represen-
tation of venereal disease in British literature and art produced between 1660
and 1800. In other words, I consider not how venereal disease was diagnosed,
treated, or experienced in the eighteenth century, but rather how it was
depicted by some of the many poets, novelists, dramatists, and artists who
sought to exploit its flexibility as a metaphor. In the chapters that follow, I
track the representation of venereal disease in a wide range of eighteenth-
century images and texts. In the process, I suggest that this “loathsome dis-
ease” became an important vehicle for considering—or reconsidering—some
of the most important social and economic phenomena of the age: commer-
cialization, globalization, changing gender norms, shifting class boundaries.
However embarrassing, punitive, or painful, this ambiguous yet ubiquitous
condition became the focal point for an extraordinary wealth of imaginative
material, providing the punch line for raucous comedies and bawdy satires as
well as the final, fatal stroke in sentimental tales of victimized womanhood.
M I M I C , S H A P E - S H I F T E R , S P Y: T H E N AT U R E O F
V E N E R E A L D I S E A S E I N E I G H T E E N T H - C E N T U RY B R I TA I N
The confusion around venereal disease in eighteenth-century Britain

sprang from a number of sources. For one thing, the two infections known
today as gonorrhea and syphilis—often colloquially distinguished as the
“clap” and the “pox”—were believed to be different phases of the same infec-
tion, with the less serious clap developing into a “confirmed pox” only if it
was not swiftly or properly treated.5 Complicating matters further, both the
clap and the pox seemed to have varied and changing symptom profiles. From
what we can gather, early modern gonorrheal infection could cause, among
other things, an abnormal discharge from the penis, rectum, or vagina; a
burning sensation on urination; pain or swelling in the testicles; anal itching,
soreness, or bleeding—but it could also be asymptomatic, or have symptoms
that disappeared and later recurred.6
Syphilis was more complicated still, since it moved through three distinct
phases, each with its own set of symptoms, and each separated by a period of
seeming good health. In the first stage, a chancre (or “shanker”) would appear
where the infection first entered the body—but it caused no discomfort and
introduction 3
would soon disappear of its own accord. In the second phase—which might
begin immediately after the first or might appear some weeks or months
later—there could be foul-smelling ulcers or “pocks” on the body, a fever, a
sore throat, patchy hair loss, headaches, muscle or bone pain, fatigue—but
these symptoms, too, were variable; and they too would go away with or
without treatment. The infection then went dormant, entering a latency
phase that might last weeks, months, years, even a lifetime—but, as works
like Monsieur Belloste’s Hospital Surgeon took care to emphasize, it remained in
the body and could still be passed on to unsuspecting sexual partners or
unborn children.7 Only in some people would the disease manifest in its
final, severest form. In the tertiary phase, syphilis could cause large tumors
that ate away at the bones and mucous membranes, destroying the bridge of
the nose or the palate; it could also lead to paralysis, spinal deformity, blind-
ness, and other debilitating conditions. The infection could, and did, prove
fatal for some—but for others, it never progressed beyond the inconvenient.
Indeed, there must have been some syphilitics—perhaps many—who died
without ever knowing they had contracted an infection.
With symptoms that seemed to vary wildly, not just between patients,
but in the same patient over time, venereal disease was both a boon for
enterprising quacks and a puzzle for well-respected physicians, and those
who wrote about the infection offered vastly different opinions about the
nature of the complaint and its relationship to other illnesses.8 While Gideon
Harvey argued that venereal disease was actually a form of scurvy combined
with “manginess,” for example, his fellow physician Nicholas Robinson
claimed that it was a potential cause of both scurvy and gout.9 Robinson
also linked venereal disease with consumption—as did Joseph Cam, who
maintained that many of the deaths recorded in local mortality bills
as “Consumptions” were probably “using another name for the Pox, for a
Consumption is the last Stage of this Disease.”10 Other conditions affecting
the genitalia—herpes, lice, scabies (the “itch”)—were similarly identified
as venereal and connected, to a greater or lesser degree, with the dreaded
“venereal taint.”
Hereditary venereal disease—the condition that we would now call con-
genital syphilis—was believed to be even more likely to appear in the guise of
a non-venereal problem than its sexually transmitted counterpart. According
to the well-regarded French physician Jean Astruc, for example, hereditary
infections could produce “the Rickets or some disorders resembling them,
the King’s-evil or strumous swellings of the meseraick glands, a pulmonary
4 introduction
atrophy, a distortion of the bones, or a gibbosity in the back, and other disor-
ders of a like kind”; similarly, the pioneering Swedish pediatrician Nils Rosén
von Rosenstein believed inherited infections could manifest as “the rickets, or
scrophulæ (des ecroules) or other distempers, that we hardly would expect to
arise from such a cause.”11 And many concurred with Charles Peter’s assess-
ment that infected children were simply doomed to perpetual ill health:
“Children are born of infected Parents; and that which was the Pox in the
Father, may prove the Rickets, Scurvy, Evil, an Asthma, or other Distemper
in the Child, who being always unhealthy is always physicking, yet never
sound; among many of these, there are but few that live to be men, or women,
and of them but few that are prolifick, and of such as are, the breed are scarce
worth the rearing.”12 As Peter’s comments suggest, the heterogeneous symp-
toms of hereditary venereal disease meant that it could presumably go unde-
tected for generations, with families either dying out entirely or producing
increasingly weak and debilitated offspring.
While experts continued to debate the nature, prognosis, and proper
treatment of the disease, all seemed to agree on one thing: the changeable
nature of the infection.13 For Robinson, as for many other medical writers, the
ability to mimic non-venereal conditions was, ironically, the very thing that
set venereal disease apart from other disorders: “Since the Foundation of the
World, I believe there is scarce a Disease risen amongst Mortals, that has put
on so many different Shapes and Changes, so many various Modifications;
and that has been attended with such a Variety of Symptoms, as is frequently
observable in the several Stages and Degrees of the venereal Lues, vulgarly
called the French Pox.”14 This malleability made venereal disease both unique
and uniquely dangerous—and many medical writers characterized the infec-
tion (presumably referring primarily to what we would now diagnose as syph-
ilis) as a shape-shifter, mimic, or figure in disguise. The physician J. Becket,
for example, described venereal disease as “full of Deceit and Artifice,” warn-
ing that “no Mimick has more Power over the Features of his Phiz, or can
throw himself into a greater Variety of Attitudes, than the Pox has of Appearing
in the Form of other Maladies, and assuming the Shapes of different
Ailments.”15 For writers like Becket and Robinson, venereal disease possessed
a peculiar ability to conceal its “true” identity. Ambiguous in nature and
appearance, and sometimes further obscured by feelings of shame or attempts
at secrecy, it disarmed the medical expert’s ability to make diagnostic distinc-
tions between one ailment and another.
introduction 5
Yet at the same time that venereal disease remained shrouded in mystery,
it also seemed to be worryingly present: many eighteenth-century com-
mentators warned that the disease was already rampant and continuing to
spread, and although no reliable data on infection rates exist for this period,
medical historians have speculated that syphilis in particular had reached epi-
demic proportions by the 1700s.16 And of course, even if neither gonorrhea nor
syphilis really was as widespread as was believed, both the conviction that all
incidences of pox and clap were incidences of the same disease and the belief
that many other conditions were actually venereal disease “in disguise” must
have meant that the infection seemed ubiquitous, regardless of whether it really
was. Anybody—indeed, everybody—could be a carrier. And because the dis-
ease was potentially undetectable, it was also potentially everywhere.
Both the prevalence of the disease and the air of mystery that surrounded
it made venereal infection a topic of concern, and this period witnessed an
extraordinary proliferation of not only medical discourse devoted to venereal
disease, but also imaginative works referring to the condition. From the dying
Moll Hackabout of William Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress to the suspiciously
snub-nosed great-grandfather of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, infected
characters abound in the period’s art and literature, and many writers fol-
lowed the example of Jonathan Swift in “A Beautiful Nymph Going to Bed”
or Tobias Smollett in Roderick Random in representing the consequences of
infection openly and explicitly. These literary and artistic portrayals of vene-
real disease suggest that the infection was not just a troubling public health
concern; it was also, as critics such as Margaret Healy and Kevin Siena have
suggested, a powerful and adaptable cultural symbol.17
In this book, I explore what these “fictional” representations of venereal
disease might tell us about eighteenth-century culture, and I consider whether
the apparent ambiguity and changeability of venereal disease as an illness—that
very same combination of being everywhere and nowhere that is highlighted in
texts like Monsieur Belloste’s Hospital Surgeon—might have made it a particularly
useful metaphor for reconsidering social boundaries that also seemed change-
able and ambiguous in the eighteenth-century world. From the Restoration to
the 1800s and beyond, this elusive affliction exerted an extraordinary hold on
the collective imagination, and its power seemed to spring in part from its
ability to bring into sharp focus the fundamental hierarchies—racial, sexual,
financial, political, speciational—on which eighteenth-century British society
was based. It offered writers and artists a means of reconsidering—sometimes to
6 introduction
uphold, but at other times to question or undermine—the distinctions between

male and female, foreigner and native, black and white, Jew and Gentile, simian
and human.
At the same time as the seemingly protean nature of venereal disease made
it a popular symbol, the confusion and secrecy that surrounded its diagnosis
and treatment meant that it was often depicted obliquely, through references
to the people, concepts, or groups with which it was associated.18 Central to
the argument of this book, then, is the notion that venereal disease was both
a prominent metaphor and a phenomenon often represented metaphori-
cally.19 On one hand, infection provided a vehicle for exploring issues such as
globalization (the blurring of distinctions between nations), miscegenation
(the blurring of distinctions between races), and social mobility (the blurring
of distinctions between classes); on the other, it was often portrayed via an
associated object or concept—as a foreign immigrant, a corrupt politician, a
destitute whore, a flat “Aethiopian” nose.
In each of the chapters following this introduction, I consider one group,
object, or concept that was associated with venereal disease in the eighteenth-
century imagination, and I track how that same association could be used in
different ways by writers and artists over the course of the period. In the first
chapter, I explore the connection between venereal disease and masculinity or
male power; in the second, I discuss the relationship between infection and
prostitution. The third chapter examines the long-standing tendency to iden-
tify venereal disease with foreign immigrants and imported goods, and the
final chapter examines the comic association between venereal disease and
deformed or “abnormal” noses.
Although each of these four associations had some basis in perceived or
actual “fact”—promiscuous men and prostitutes were, statistically speaking,
more likely to contract an infection; venereal disease did come to Britain as a
result of foreign travel; infections could indeed cause nasal deformity—in
each case, the imaginative representations extend beyond what medical or
historical realities alone can adequately account for. And since metaphoric
relationships are always two-way, telling us something about the symbol as
well as what it is used to symbolize, the four chapters of this book are also
reflections on eighteenth-century attitudes toward male power, prostitution,
foreign invasion, and genetic debility. Ultimately, these figurative associations
provided writers and artists with a means of scrutinizing not just the disease
itself, but also some of the wider cultural ideologies at work in eighteenth-
century Britain: patriarchy, capitalism, isolationism, white supremacy.
introduction 7
HISTORIES OF VENEREAL DISEASE: NEW AND

EXISTING SCHOLARSHIP
This book is not a medical history; it is not primarily concerned with the
experiences of James Boswell, Charles Hanbury Williams, or any of the other
well-known venereal disease sufferers of this period.20 Rather, it is an attempt
to investigate the wider “uses” or “meanings” of venereal infection—an inves-
tigation that up until now has been conducted primarily with reference to
medical and historical records rather than to literature and art. The cultural
historian Kevin Siena, for example, has convincingly used early modern vene-
reological treatises to demonstrate how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
physicians’ efforts to contain the “venereal contagion” could work to assist
“those who desired to close alehouses, to rid their country of Catholics, to end
the practice of wet nursing, to control female sexuality, or to demonize inter-
racial sex.”21 Marie McAllister has identified similar trends in later eighteenth-
century medical discourse, suggesting that theories about the origins of the
disease could also encode “national, religious, racial, and gender prejudices.”22
Where my analysis differs from theirs is in its attention to imaginative
textual and visual representations. This difference in focus is key, not just
because histories of disease substantially outnumber histories of disease repre-
sentation, but also because the literary and artistic archive examined in this
book includes many representations that complicate, or even challenge, the
received wisdom about “real-life” eighteenth-century attitudes toward vene-
real disease. While historians reading diaries, letters, clinical notes, and other
such records have concluded that the infection was universally loathed and
feared, many prominent literary works from the period dismiss the disease as
laughable or untroubling, and some even celebrate infection as a sign of viril-
ity or sexual courage. Similarly, although scholars of early modern venereol-
ogy have tended to conclude that women were “blamed” for the spread of
venereal disease, many fictional representations of infected women present
them as the innocent victims of male infidelity. Diseased prostitutes, on the
other hand, are often depicted as agents of infection—but they are also often
defined as something other than female, as “monsters” or “demons” distinct
from the rest of their sex. By considering “fictional” portrayals and not just
medical writings, I attempt to expose some of the areas of tension between
historical reality and artistic representation in this period.23 By extension, I
attempt to suggest that the relationships between disease discourse and dis-
ease biology are potentially more complicated than existing histories of vene-
real infection allow.
8 introduction
I am not the first scholar to explore the broader cultural “meanings”

attached to venereal disease or to examine literary references to infection. In
the now classic essay “On the History and Morality of Syphilis,” the medical
historian Owsei Temkin used material from literary texts to argue for a shift
in popular attitudes toward the disease in early modern Europe. According to
Temkin, the “light-hearted” acceptance of infection that prevailed in the sev-
enteenth century—evidenced, he argued, by the period’s comic drama and
poetry—gradually gave way to a more somber view of the condition in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.24 A more recent study by Raymond
Anselment has convincingly challenged this view. Placing material from
satiric poems, Restoration comedies, and other such works alongside histori-
cal records documenting the gruesome realities of living with and treating the
disease, Anselment concludes that the insouciance depicted in some literary
texts is not an accurate reflection of public sentiments, but rather, an attempt
to diffuse the real feelings of fear, shame, and guilt that surrounded the infec-
tion throughout the seventeenth century.25
While Anselment’s and Temkin’s accounts come to contrasting conclu-
sions about public perceptions of the disease, both ultimately seek to recon-
cile the tensions between literary and historical archives. In this study, I take
the opposite approach: I treat these tensions not as a problem to be solved,
but as evidence, first, of the heterogeneous range of responses to an infection
that was itself characterized by heterogeneity; and second, of the extent to
which imaginative representations of venereal disease are never exclusively
about venereal disease. To put this in traditional literary critical terms, the
groups, objects, and concepts that were used to represent venereal disease
figuratively in the long eighteenth century never pertain solely to the “tenor”
of the metaphor (that is, attitudes toward infection); they also tell us some-
thing about the metaphoric “vehicle”—those groups, objects, and concepts
with which infection was associated.
Reconsidered in this way, the picture of venereal infection that emerges
from Restoration and eighteenth-century art and literature is neither exclu-
sively “light-hearted” nor exclusively rooted in fear, guilt, and shame; rather, it
encompasses many different views, with vastly differing depictions of infection
appearing in different contexts. Indeed, the diversity of venereal disease dis-
course in this period is such that imaginative representations of infection can
seem to clash not just with the historical record, but also with each other, and
existing essays on the literary portrayal of infection can seem contradictory
when considered in the aggregate: while Rose Zimbardo, writing about
introduction 9
Restoration drama, argues that venereal disease was used by Tory playwrights to
satirize upwardly mobile Whigs, Leon Guilhamet, writing about Restoration
verse, contends that Whig satirists used accusations of infection to “attack Tory
monarchists and, indeed, all aspects of aristocracy.”26 Similarly, while Guilhamet
concludes that “by 1700 . . . references to the clap and pox in literature gener-
ally and satire in particular were in decline,” essays on later eighteenth-century
visual and textual satires (by Betty Rizzo, Nick Lowe, April London, Hermann
Real, and Emily Cock, among others) suggest that venereal infection remained
a prominent symbol for satirists working well beyond the 1700s.27
As these discrepancies suggest, the archive of venereal disease discourse in
this period is sufficiently heterogeneous that only with a relatively expansive
view can any broader points of continuity emerge. In this book, I attempt to
take that expansive view, surveying the ideas and concepts associated with
venereal infection over the whole course of the long eighteenth century, from
1660 to 1800, and examining the full range of genres and media that we might
now categorize as belonging to “popular culture.”28 While only a privileged
few might have been able to acquire a copy of an obscene Restoration satire
by the Earl of Rochester, say, quite a large portion of the population would
have been able to see the caricatures by James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson
posted in print-shop windows.29 My analysis attempts to consider elite and
popular forms, searching for the common ground between representations
created in different contexts for different audiences.
While the materials discussed in this book offer a testament to the variety
of imaginative responses to venereal disease, this is to some extent a study
focused on continuities: continuities between visual and textual media;
between works in different forms; between works written at different times in
the century; and between works written for different purposes in different
contexts. Thus, I have chosen to organize the book thematically rather than
chronologically. When I discuss the association of venereal infection with
military and elite men in chapter 1, for example, I identify a broad correlation
between disease and male power that persisted throughout the century, even
though certain aspects of that association were more prominent during the
Restoration, and others at the end of the period. Similarly, in discussing the
association of venereal disease with foreignness, I demonstrate how the figure
of the invading foreigner was used to satirize different groups in different
contexts: the Scots carried the “itch” and the “pox” in moments of English
anti-Jacobite or anti-immigrant panic; foreign troops had the “French dis-
ease” in the years leading up to the French Revolution. While I do not wish
10 introduction
to suggest that the experience and understanding of venereal infection

remained unchanged between 1660 and 1800, this book does not primarily
trace development over time, but broader patterns—indicative of broader
problems or tensions—that persisted throughout the period.
The similarities that I identify between Restoration and later eighteenth-
century materials also suggest that my analysis could have covered a longer
time span—and to a certain extent this is true. I argue that the combination of
ambiguity and ubiquity that characterized venereal disease in eighteenth-
century Britain contributed to make this period one in which the infection was
a prominent and potent symbol—but that same combination of ambiguity
and ubiquity was already developing before the Restoration, and some aspects
of it continued into the 1800s and beyond. Studies of earlier seventeenth-
century and later nineteenth-century venereal disease discourse accordingly
reveal some important areas of overlap with this book, even while they also
suggest certain points of difference. Margaret Healy’s discussion of “pocky”
bodies in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century literature, for example, confirms
that venereal infection could boast an “astonishingly wide range of unstable
significations” before the Restoration.30 Focusing particularly on Jacobean
drama, Healy lists “lepers, prostitutes, foreign others, poison and cannibalism”
as some of the recurring “topoi” of venereal disease in this period.31 Two of
these topoi—prostitutes and foreign others—clearly persisted throughout the
eighteenth century; but the associations with lepers, poison, and cannibal-
ism—all of which can be traced back to early medical theories, widely discred-
ited by the mid-seventeenth century, about the origins of the disease—are
absent from the works examined in this book.
Similarly, several studies of venereal disease discourse in the nineteenth
century—most notably, Mary Spongberg’s Feminizing Venereal Disease and
Judith Walkowitz’s Prostitution and Victorian Society—identify a connection
between infection and prostitutes that existed at the beginning of the venereal
disease epidemic in fifteenth-century Europe and that persists to the present
day.32 Imaginative depictions of infection in the Restoration and eighteenth
century used some of the same arguments that Walkowitz identifies with the
“successful feminist campaign” against the Contagious Diseases Acts of the
1860s—yet eighteenth-century works also reflect a unique understanding of
the period’s often-complex relationships between prostitutes, clients, and the
broader system of prostitution. Rather than simply “feminizing” the disease, as
Spongberg suggests of nineteenth-century medical discourse, many eighteenth-
century literary and artistic works explore the relationships between different
introduction 11
kinds of prostitution, and they attribute some forms of pathogenic prostitu-

tion to men. These works also use the connections between prostitution and
infection to differentiate between different kinds of prostitutes—lustful, enter-
prising, heroic, victimized—with only some of these prostitute “types” becom-
ing consistent subjects for satiric attack.
As these details perhaps suggest, there remains much potential work to be
done in connecting the material explored in this book with representations
of infection in other periods, particularly the nineteenth century (where the
focus has been primarily on medical and political texts rather than on litera-
ture and art). The same issue arises in relation to this book’s geographic scope:
while I have focused on works produced in Britain, those who study European
culture will be able to identify similarities with the understanding and repre-
sentation of venereal disease on the Continent. Linda Merians’s collection
The Secret Malady, with its dual focus on France and England, helpfully iden-
tifies some of the links between eighteenth-century French and English dis-
courses around infection, but future work might also usefully compare
venereal disease discourse in Italy, Germany, or Spain.33
A F E W F I N A L C AV E AT S
I have focused my analysis on four associations that appear with particular

prominence or frequency in eighteenth-century works, but these four
associations—maleness, prostitution, foreignness, and nasal deformity—are
by no means the only ones possible. Another study might have highlighted,
say, the link between venereal disease and urban life, or the use of figurative
language and imagery relating to heat: a diseased man’s penis could “burn” his
lover as though she were roasting on a “spit” or blazing on a funeral pyre; or
it could be a “curry’d and spiced” “sausage” that “pepper’d” the unwary con-
sumer.34 While I have divided my sources to illustrate these four categories,
the different figurative terms and images used to depict venereal disease fre-
quently overlap with one another, as well as with the discourse of earlier and
later periods: hence the image of a “curry’d” sausage connects venereal disease
not just with the metaphor of heat or fire, but also with the trope of foreign-
ness in its reference to exotic imported spices.
Just as I am deviating from the scholarly norm in presenting a series of
connected thematic studies rather than a chronological narrative of change,
so I am also deviating from the current trend of relating the eighteenth cen-
tury to the present day by identifying it as the beginning of, or precursor to,
12 introduction
“modernity.”35 Implicit in this book’s analysis is a reminder that there is much

about eighteenth-century culture that still seems idiosyncratic or bizarre to
twenty-first-century eyes. Perhaps the best examples of this cultural obscurity
appear in the puns, jokes, and witticisms that characterize much of the liter-
ary and visual material on venereal disease.36 Some of these jokes remain
funny today, and their wordplay inflects the language of this book. In other
cases, however, it was clear to me only that a particular image, phrase, or term
was meant to be funny, not why it would have been so. While I hope other
readers will be able to spot punch lines that I have missed, there are many
aspects of eighteenth-century venereal disease discourse that remain—to me,
at least—quite remote from modern life.37
Some aspects of the disjunction between eighteenth-century and contem-
porary culture are also inevitably reflected in the language of my analysis.
Readers will see that I have attempted, wherever possible, to follow the exam-
ple of Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Robert French in using terms
that reflect the eighteenth-century understanding of venereal disease rather
than our own diagnostic categories for it today.38 Thus I favor “venereal dis-
ease” or “venereal infection” over STD (sexually transmitted disease) or STI
(sexually transmitted infection), “the itch” over “genital scabies,” “hereditary
venereal disease” over “congenital syphilis,” and so forth. But since many
medical terms still in use today meant something different in the eighteenth
century—Michael Worboys has demonstrated how terms such as “infection”
and “contagion,” for example, have changed over the centuries—some degree
of anachronism necessarily still remains.39
I have also allowed myself some degree of slippage between “British” and
“English,” and readers may notice that the analysis at times shifts between
references to England, Britain, and the United Kingdom. In general, I have
reserved terms relating to Great Britain or the United Kingdom for works
produced after the Act of Union in 1707, but in some cases—as in the attacks
on Scottish immigrants discussed in chapter 3—it is English culture, and
English prejudice, that is specifically at issue.
Finally, I should emphasize that while this book is concerned with visual
as well as literary representation, my discussions of prints and drawings typi-
cally focus on content rather than technique or form. As Diana Donald and
Mark Hallett have noted, the caricatures of this period have far more often
been studied as political commentary than as visual or cultural artifacts, and
while I have relied on the work of Donald, Hallett, and other art historians to
aid my understanding, my own analysis has to some extent perpetuated this
introduction 13
bias.40 Like anyone interested in eighteenth-century graphic art, I owe an

enormous debt to the scholarship of Frederic George Stephens and Mary
Dorothy George, whose detailed descriptions of the period’s political and
social satires are compiled in their eleven-volume Catalogue of Prints and
Drawings in the British Museum. Wherever possible, I have included refer-
ences to the relevant volume and page numbers of the Catalogue in the end-
notes. Readers wishing to examine the book’s visual materials in greater detail
can access high-resolution color images online in the British Museum’s collec-
tion database or the Lewis Walpole Library’s digital collections catalogue
(https://web.library.yale.edu/digital-collections).
chapter 1
fficers and Gentlemen
The good thing about venereal disease is that it isn’t serious—or at least,
it certainly didn’t seem so to a good many eighteenth-century writers and art-
ists. In Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748), for example, the enterpris-
ing young hero casually contracts, and just as casually cures, an infection that
he caught somewhere “in the course of an amour.”1 In Edward Kimber’s novel
The Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson (1783), the protagonist laughingly
recalls the gullible friend who “got into a tete-a-tete discourse with a coronet”
at a masquerade, only to discover the following day that his conquest was
actually “a woman of the town,” who had not only prompted him to spend a
great deal of money, but also—and this is the punch line—given him “the
French Disease.”2 And in his salacious tell-all autobiography, the “profest
Rake and Whoremaster” Gilbert Langley recalls with amusement how he and
his comrade, enjoying a period of unrestrained debauchery, “had almost
drain’d our Pockets . . . and got the French Disease.”3 Whether Langley and
his friend had “almost” contracted the infection or definitely caught it is
immaterial: the possibility doesn’t prevent either man from forming designs
on a beautiful young woman to whom Langley—with no further mention of
the disease—soon after proposes marriage.
Admittedly, such representations emerged from a culture in which vene-
real disease was widely believed to be curable, or at least treatable: as the
notoriously debauched Earl of Rochester put it, even the most extravagant
14
officers and gentlemen 15
use of prostitutes could raise no concern when “the worst you can fear is but
a disease, / And diseases, you know, will admit of a cure.”4 Yet diaries, letters,
and other historical records are full of references to debilitating and disfigur-
ing symptoms—and even Rochester’s poetic boasts take on a grim irony given
his own death from the most horrific complications of tertiary syphilis at the
age of thirty-three. How could so many writers and artists have depicted
venereal disease as unserious—not just dismissing it as untroubling, but
deliberately invoking it as an object of amusement or celebration—when
young men like Rochester were clearly dying from it?
Many historians have argued that there was a more relaxed attitude toward
sexuality in the aftermath of the Restoration, but no enthusiasm for liberti-
nage can quite account for the radical split in this period between the brutal
physiological realities of venereal disease and its insouciant, even cheerful,
treatment in art and literature.5 While Restoration and eighteenth-century
culture probably supported a wide range of attitudes toward the disease at
different moments and among different groups, the many dismissive and cel-
ebratory accounts of venereal infection clearly had something other than
strict medical accuracy in mind. They were informed less by the grisly details
of living with an infection than by broader questions about who or what that
infection might signify.
In this chapter and the one that follows, I ask what imaginative represen-
tations of venereal disease might tell us about Restoration and eighteenth-
century attitudes toward gender and sexuality, and I begin by considering the
portrayal of venereal infections in men. It is no coincidence that many
(though not all) of the positive representations of the disease focus on male
rather than female subjects: as Betty Rizzo has suggested, the sexual double
standard (whereby men were applauded for sexual promiscuity and women
punished for it) played some role in shaping imaginative representations of
the infection.6 But so too, I would suggest, did a culture that linked infection
to manliness and male power. Indeed, while historians working with medical
texts from the early modern period have tended to conclude that the disease
was seen as originating with, and spread by, women, many eighteenth-century
literary and artistic works imagine venereal disease as male—as a condition
predominantly experienced by men, caused by male sexual indiscretion,
and passed on by philandering husbands to their faithful wives and innocent
children.7
The “maleness” of venereal disease in the eighteenth-century imagination
coalesced around two particular groups: officers—a term that I am using very
16 officers and gentlemen
broadly here, to denote military or naval personnel of all ranks—and gentle-

men, my umbrella term for men of leisure, with or without a title. There
was some rationale for this association, in that both groups were believed to
be inherently prone to promiscuity: titled lords and leisured gentlemen had
the time and money to pursue sexual conquests, and to support multiple
mistresses and prostitutes; military men were believed to suffer under their
removal from the stabilizing influence of domestic life, and to seek comfort
in the transient pleasures of the whorehouse.8 Both groups were also tradi-
tionally representative of male power, with the gentleman possessing social,
financial, or political clout, and the officer embodying manly ideals of physi-
cal strength and military skill.9 Accordingly, in connecting officers and gen-
tlemen with venereal infection, writers and artists strengthened an imaginative
association between the disease and male power—and some works even rep-
resented the infection as a badge of sexual or social prowess.
Just as the celebration of venereal disease was a product of patriarchal
structures, so too was the critique of it—a critique that saw infected men
denounced as inadequate leaders, fighters, husbands, fathers, and guardians.
In this context, the maleness of venereal disease could serve as an instrument
for reconsidering rather than reinforcing the criteria by which society
appraised and apportioned male power. In part because of the long-standing
analogy between familial and governmental structures (an analogy perhaps
most famously articulated in Robert Filmer’s tract Patriarcha from 1680), the
link between venereal infection and manly prowess opened out onto broader
fears about the health of the nation under male governance.10 Throughout the
century, satirists used the accusation of venereal disease to attack public fig-
ures—but they also used it to scrutinize the larger social, political, and legal
systems that allowed powerful men to stay in power.
VENEREAL DISEASE IN VOGUE
For the elegant man of fashion, venereal disease was all the rage: according
to some Restoration and eighteenth-century commentators, the infection cir-
culated among the beau monde like a hot new commodity, signaling a life-
style of pleasure and luxury. Some even referred to it as the “modish” or
“fashionable distemper.”11 While remarks on the fashionableness of elite male
infection almost certainly belied the prevalence of venereal disease among
poorer men, it was as much the amused tone of such comments as their
assumptions about the exclusive nature of infection that jarred with reality.12
Even a “moral drama” like Bickerstaff ’s Unburied Dead (1743) played the vene-
real disease vogue for laughs: in the play’s opening scene, a group of undertak-
ers laments the increasing incidence of infection—not because it is killing off
the population, but because it is damaging a brisk side-business in cadavers
for medical dissection: “This fashionable Distemper is a great Loss to us,”
complains the undertaker Quicandead. “We can seldom get a Body sound
enough for the Surgeons; they object, Rotten Bones will never make good
Skeletons.”13
The association of venereal disease with Frenchness seemed further to
cement its imaginative attribution to men of fashion, with writers comparing
the alleged enthusiasm for “French pox” with the rage for other Gallic
imports. In a satire on Restoration courtiers, Samuel Butler joked that healthy
men might even pretend to have the disease just to appear de rigueur:
By sudden Starts, and Shrugs, and Groans
They Pretend to Aches in their Bones,
To Scabs and Botches, and lay Trains
To prove their Running of the Reins;
And, lest they should seem destitute
Of any Mange, that’s in Repute,
And be behind hand with the Mode
Will swear to Chrystallin and Node.14
Here, as in many other denouncements of the “fashionable distemper,” it
is the Francophile aristocracy who seem to constitute the satirist’s primary
target.15 No wonder, then, that one satirist contended “People of Quality”
preferred a French servant to an English one; after all, a Parisian fellow was far
more likely to be able to “assist his Lord in the Cure of a fashionable
Distemper” than a “dull, plodding English Booby.”16
Both the disease’s alleged Continental origins and its association with
youthful male virility made it a common feature in stories of the Grand Tour,
and an ill-timed infection provided comic relief in many an upper-class male
coming-of-age narrative.17 Indeed, among the many casual references to vene-
real disease in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature are anecdotes
attesting to the amusing predictability of such infections among “young
Gentlemen, during their Minority, and before they arrive to Years of Maturity”:
in this context, venereal disease seems to be much like cystic acne, wet dreams,
or any other of the cringeworthy but fundamentally untroubling conditions
that characterize male adolescence.18
For writers who wished to champion a leisured male lifestyle, the associa-
tion of venereal disease with upper-class masculinity could offer a surprisingly
productive means of defending elite male prerogatives. In a remarkable num-
ber of Restoration comedies—William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675),
Thomas D’Urfey’s The Fond Husband (1677), Aphra Behn’s The City Heiress
(1682), John Crowne’s City Politiques (1683), and Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last
Shift (1696), among others—male infections correlate with elevated social
status, and often (seemingly paradoxically) with sexual or physical prowess as
well. In Behn’s play, for example, the hero’s pox poses no impediment to his
pursuit of the heiress of the title; if anything, Tom Wilding’s infection adds to
his desirability as a lover, by sharpening the contrast between his own sexual
confidence and the anxious ambition displayed by his uncle and rival, Sir
Timothy Treat-all.19
Similarly, in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife and John Crowne’s
City Politiques, the association of venereal disease with masculinity is used to
defend upper-class male profligacy and privilege against the dull, civilizing
claims of “business.” Crowne’s and Wycherley’s plays feature a libertine hero
who uses rumors of venereal infection as part of a ploy—and it proves a
highly successful ploy—to seduce the wives of other men.20 In City Politiques,
the roguish Florio pretends to be dying of venereal disease in order to romance
the wife of the idiotic Lord Podesta of Naples. In Wycherley’s The Country
Wife, the rake hero—named Horner in indication of his ability to bestow
cuckold’s horns on other men—enjoys affairs with his rivals’ wives after get-
ting a quack to spread rumors that he has been rendered impotent by some
(successful or unsuccessful) form of venereal disease treatment.21
Like Behn’s City Heiress, Crowne’s and Wycherley’s plays can be read as
political satires, with the libertine hero representative of aristocratic Tory val-
ues, and his cuckolded rivals identified with an ambitious or upwardly mobile
gentry. In this context, the hero’s claims to be suffering from venereal disease
provide one means of ridiculing a Whig satiric tradition that sought to associ-
ate the infection with Tory privilege: the hero’s assertions are believed not
because they are true, this reading suggests, but because his gullible rivals are
swayed by simplistic Whig propaganda.22
Yet it is striking that neither City Politiques nor The Country Wife ever
establishes its hero’s “true” state of sexual health or illness with any clarity;
indeed, both regard the issue as irrelevant. In Wycherley’s The Country Wife—
the first and more complex of the two plays—it is Horner’s treatment-related
impotence that makes him an object of ridicule among his male acquain-
tance, not his infection. In City Politiques, Florio’s claims of illness might pose
a convenient cover for an actual infection—he is certainly sexually daring
enough for it—but the possibility of his having a non-terminal case of vene-
real disease doesn’t seem to damage his status as an eligible bachelor.
In fact, it becomes clear, on considering Wycherley’s play in greater detail,
that The Country Wife doesn’t simply dismiss Horner’s condition as untrou-
bling; it actually creates positive associations between venereal disease and
male power by identifying a robust disregard for the dangers of infection as a
crucial marker of male courage. Horner’s alleged ailment, while on some level
undesirable, is on another level untroubling: no one of his acquaintance
wonders about the source of his infection, or asks whether the treatment that
has rendered him impotent has served its purpose in curing the disease.
Equally, the play’s frequent invocations of “pox” as a curse—most often by
Horner himself—seem to conjure up thoughts of the infection while dismiss-
ing its potential consequences.23 Comparisons of illicit sex with gambling and
hunting—both activities associated with aristocratic male license—further
normalize venereal disease by suggesting that the potential for infection adds
a frisson of danger to the libertine’s exploits.24 Like gambling, sex involves
risk—and like gambling, it is an activity in which the risk is part of the
pleasure.25 Seen in this light, Horner’s willingness to engage in risky multi-
ple affairs becomes an indication not just of his sexual virility, but also of
his valor.
In keeping with this emphasis on sexual machismo, the play’s action con-
sistently presents the fear of contracting venereal infections as a male, not a
female, problem. While the wives of Horner’s acquaintances snub him at first,
it is again not the disease, but the impotence, that accounts for their repul-
sion. Once Horner can prove he is up to the task, so to speak, his sexual suc-
cess is ensured: all the ladies he approaches become his lovers, and none of
them hesitates over the issue of sexual health. Venereal disease may pose a
threat to both men and women, but in the world of Wycherley’s play, only
men are foolish enough to worry about it—or so Horner’s remarks at the end
of act one would suggest:
Why, ’tis as hard to find an old Whoremaster without jealousy and
the gout, as a young one without fear of the Pox.
As Gout in Age, from Pox in Youth proceeds,
So Wenching past, then jealousy succeeds:
The worst disease that Love and Wenching breeds.26
Horner’s witty observations here establish venereal disease as a common-

place condition of male adolescence, just as gout is endemic in men of greater
age. In ridiculing the fastidiousness of young “whoremasters” alongside the
jealousy of old ones, Horner effectually dismisses the dangers of both pox and
gout, identifying jealousy as the “worst disease” because it constitutes the
most serious threat to male sexual license.
With the risk of infection recast as a perverse enticement, it is no surprise
that The Country Wife’s plotline sees Horner triumphing over men who lack
the courage or the initiative to pursue opportunities for extramarital sex. His
exploits culminate in the seduction of the closely guarded new bride—the
“country wife” of the title—of his prudish acquaintance Mr. Pinchwife. In
the course of his conversations with other male characters, Pinchwife reveals
a fastidious distaste for female sexual infidelity that is predicated at least in
part on the fear of contracting a venereal disease: although a “whoremaster”
in former days, Pinchwife opts for marriage over mistress-keeping on the
grounds that he “cou’d never keep a Whore to [him]self ”—and he has chosen
a “country wife” rather than a Londoner because he naively believes he can be
“a little surer of the breed there, know what her keeping has been, whether
foyl’d or unsound.”27 Pinchwife’s unsavory metaphor here equates infected
women with injured (“foiled”) horses, not only characterizing his relationship
with his new bride as one of master to animal, but also establishing his
prospective partner’s sexual health and behavior (“her keeping”) as a more
important factor than her character.
Predictably, Horner’s cavalier indifference wins out over Pinchwife’s fear-
ful anxiety, as the latter’s precautions are subsequently exposed as both naive
and ineffectual. Horner points out that a country wife provides no real secu-
rity against infection: “I have known a clap gotten in Wales, and there are
Cozens, Justices, Clarks, and Chaplains in the Country; I won’t say Coach-
men,” he remarks.28 Horner’s comments here once again implicate men—
justices, clerks, chaplains, coachmen—in the spread of the infection; but they
also identify venereal disease as an almost unavoidable feature of the sexual
landscape, urban or rural. And even though Pinchwife’s new bride, Margery,
turns out to be every bit as ignorant as her husband could hope, her natural
lust tacitly supports Horner’s conception of a society in which both sexual
indiscretion and sexual disease are commonplace.
As a result, Pinchwife’s attempts to ensure his country wife’s fidelity inev-
itably end in failure. Indeed, in the same way that Pinchwife’s own sexual
history as a “whoremaster” foments his desire to monopolize and imprison
Margery, his fears about venereal disease ironically lead him to introduce into
her heated imagination the very possibilities of extramarital sex and conse-
quent infection that he most wishes to keep from her. In describing exactly
the kind of “naughty Town Woman” that he doesn’t want Margery to become,
Pinchwife foolishly gestures toward alternative possibilities for female plea-
sure.29 Similarly, in confining her to the house on the pretense of protecting
her from smallpox, he paves the way for an exchange between Margery and
her maid, Alithea, on the difference between “great” pox and small.30
Ultimately, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, Horner’s exploits are as much
directed at the men he cuckolds as at the women he claims to lust after, and his
victory over upwardly mobile types like Pinchwife can be seen as an explora-
tion of homoerotic desire as well as a celebration of upper-class male privilege.31
Yet the catalytic role played by venereal disease in the play’s plot suggests that
its view of both sexual desire and sexual infection is focused overwhelmingly
on the male partner. In this milieu, the infection and the discourse that sur-
rounds it circulate among men, and the disease is just as likely to afflict the
jealous husband as it is the most debauched of libertines. The last laugh is on
Pinchwife—not because he recognizes venereal infection as a risk, but because
he fails to embrace that risk as the non-negotiable price of male sexual license.
T H E J OY S O F C O N Q U E S T:
V E N E R E A L D I S E A S E I N T H E M I L I TA RY
Just as plays like Wycherley’s worked to cement the association between

venereal disease and aristocratic or gentry life, so other texts and images con-
nected sexual infections with military and naval officers. Within this group,
too, venereal disease was identified as a routine feature of adulthood. Surgeons
dispatched to ships and battlefields expected to deal with the casualties of sex
as well as of war: indeed, the satirist Ned Ward wryly remarked that, aboard
a naval vessel, “one Pocky Whore brings the Surgeon more Grist in, than a
thousand French Cannon.”32 Many medical texts reinforced the association
by presenting officers as case studies, and some specifically remarked on the
relaxed attitude to infection among the troops. To use the tactful phrase
employed by the army physician Donald Monro, military men were appar-
ently “not shy in owning Complaints of that Kind.”33
Indeed, so strong was the associative link between venereal infection and
the military that the period’s novelists, poets, dramatists, and cartoonists
could invoke the diseased officer as a stereotypical comic “type.” In Henry
Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1740), for example, it is an “Ensign of Foot” who

romances the lusty young chambermaid Betty and “raises a Flame in her,
which required the Care of a Surgeon to cool.”34 Similarly, in Roderick
Random, only a seasoned “sea-lieutenant” remains unfazed by the rumors of
disease that trouble the prostitute Miss Williams: in a coarse naval metaphor,
he dismisses such afflictions as akin to the muck that clings to a ship at sea,
but that can easily be removed when the vessel is “hove down” in harbor.35
And in Samuel Garth’s The Dispensary (1699), the surgeon to the king’s troop
of horse guards—named “Guiacam,” after the tree bark sometimes used to
treat venereal disease—is tormented in the underworld by the shades of offi-
cers whose fatal infections he has failed to cure.36
More broadly, the trope of the infected officer could be incorporated into
the commonplace literary comparison of love with war, with writers character-
izing venereal disease symptoms or complications as “battle scars” or “war
wounds.” While use of this metaphor was not, of course, restricted to depic-
tions of infected military or naval men, it reinforced the imaginative association
of venereal disease with manly physical strength and military prowess. Identified
as “honourable scars” rather than as loathsome disfigurements, the symptoms
of infection could be borne with pride and marshaled alongside other signs of
age and experience as proof of the bearer’s intrepidity in younger days.
In several well-known poems by John Wilmot, the second Earl of
Rochester, for example, the disease-as-war-wound conceit is used to justify
and glorify the actions of a libertine speaker. The unregenerate rake writing
“To the Postboy” (1676) boasts that his “Cerecloths and ulcers” are the “heroic
scars” of his encounters with prostitutes.37 Similarly, the speaker of “The
Disabled Debauchee” (1680)—another aging, infected libertine—celebrates
his debilitating disease symptoms as war wounds and compares his past sexual
exploits with great battles fought at sea.38 Likening himself to a retired admi-
ral, the speaker insists that when “Pox and Wine’s unlucky chance” force him
onto “the Dull shore of lazy Temperance,” he will enjoy his “days of Impotence”
as a welcome “respite” from the exertions of naval warfare. Further, he insists
that his diseased body will serve as a source of inspiration, rather than as a
cautionary tale, for young libertines in training:
Nor shall the sight of honorable Scars,
Which my too forward valor did procure,
Frighten new-listed Soldiers from the Wars;
Past joyes have more than pay’d what I endure.39
Much like Wycherley’s Country Wife, Rochester’s poem identifies sexual

“valor” as the key component of male social and sexual worth, championing
a hero who paradoxically uses his own impotence as a means of asserting his
past virility.40 In this context, venereal disease is not dismissed but glorified,
with even the most emasculating of symptoms, impotence, bearing witness to
the officer’s manly bravery. The speaker concludes by asserting that his
“Statesman-like” status will belie his wasted body, and he vows to “valiantly
advise” future libertines.41 However tongue-in-cheek the poem’s overarching
comparison between war hero and whoring libertine, it ultimately accords its
speaker the elevated position—once held by Julius Caesar—of the great mili-
tary leader turned historian.
The same figurative equation of disease symptoms with war wounds
extends, in some texts, into an amused comparison between the accoutre-
ments of warfare and the equipment of sexual pleasure: Samuel Butler’s
mock-epic Dildoides, for example, characterizes dildos as prosthetics for
“Lechers hurt in amorous Fight,” instruments akin to the “artificial Limbs”
prepared “for Soldiers maim’d by Chance of War.”42 Even moral pamphlets,
medical treatises, and quack advertisements routinely characterized infections
as injuries, and prophylactic measures as “armour.” The physician John
Sintelaer, for example, described one of his patients—a colonel in the army,
appropriately enough—as having “receiv’d a very deep Wound in the Wars of
Venus,” and the surgeon Daniel Turner complained that libertines “often
chose to risque a Clap, rather than engage cum Hastis sic clypeatis [with spears
thus shielded].”43 In this latter formulation of the martial metaphor, having
sex with a condom on was like fighting with a sword still sheathed in its scab-
bard: because the “armour” eliminated the need for sexual courage, it reduced
the risk, and thus the triumph, for the warrior.
Condoms were routinely represented using military language and were
closely associated with military personnel; they were also rumored to have
been invented by a colonel in the British army. One comic encomium on the
“device,” a 1744 mock epic entitled The Machine, or Love’s Preservative, uses
the association of officers with venereal infection to commend condoms as a
vital instrument in preserving national security.44 Identifying venereal disease
as a threat to all British men, the poem lauds the prophylactic’s alleged cre-
ator, “Colonel Cundum,” as a hero whose invention has come to play a vital
role in guarding “Albion’s Safety.”45
Although the speaker of The Machine observes that a “willing Maid”
might use a condom in order to avoid an unplanned pregnancy, the poem as
a whole classifies condoms as items primarily of service to men—and primar-

ily of use in preventing venereal disease:
Happy the Man, in whose close Pocket’s found,
Whether with Green or Scarlet Ribbon bound,
A well made Cundum; he nor dreads the Ills
Of Cordees, Shanker, Boluses, or Pills;
But arm’d thus boldly wages am’rous Fight
With Transport-feigning Whore, in Danger’s Spight.46
Here, as in many other works of the period, sex is presumed to involve a
male and a female partner, but only the male partner seems to require a prophy-
lactic to prevent infection—and once again, the language of military conflict is
used to celebrate libertinage: the speaker compares the courage of the condom-
wearing lover to that of “Great Ajax . . . the Grecian Chief ” who, “prepar’d /
With seven-fold Shield, the Trojan Fury dar’d.”47 By contrast, the “hot Youth”
who neglects to place a “sheathing Scabbard on his Metal Blade” is stricken
with sores, “Heat of Urine,” and penile discharge—all the “Sad Symptoms of a
Thousand Woes his Due, / For Vent’ring all unarm’d to th’ hostile Field, / And
slighting Safety in Minerva’s Shield.”48 As in Rochester’s “Disabled Debauchee,”
tongue-in-cheek comparisons between the heroism of classical warfare and the
debauchery of modern life—whether designed to elevate or denigrate contem-
porary behavior—effectually connect the threat of venereal infection with
activities conventionally performed by, or associated with, men.
The same privileging of male prerogative colors The Machine’s compari-
son of commercial sex with warfare. The speaker’s martial vocabulary at times
implicates prostitutes as the “enemy”: one “Wench unchast” is described as
having a “polluted Touch”; another “foul Fair-One” is described as living in
filthy rooms; a third, soliciting men on the streets, is described as a “Nymph
insidious.”49 Yet these epithets, while they malign “polluted” prostitutes,
never extend to a condemnation of either prostitutes in general or the system
of prostitution at large: quite the contrary, the poem’s opening lines com-
mend the nation’s “Whores thrice magnificent,” celebrating not only those
who pleasure kings and employ the “wanton Hours of Garter’d Lords,” but
also those who “strole in meaner Plight” at Temple Bar and in Drury Lane.50
Like the condom, the robust prostitute is identified as a point of national
pride, and the poet’s exhortations to use condoms appear to be aimed as
much at preserving Britain’s tradition of transactional sex as at safeguarding
the health and security of the nation’s menfolk.
Indeed, the poem concludes with a call to arms as the speaker not only
invites his male reader to go forth and “swive each Night” with the protection
of a condom, but also specifically suggests that he satisfy his “best” desires with
an “Exstatic Harlot.”51 Condemning “queer” and “filthy” practices like “flog-
ging,” “Huffling, Gigging, Semigigging, Larking,” and “Barking,” the speaker
insists: “Rather than deal in such unnatural Ways / I’d risk the Pox and naked
swive Nan Hayes.”52 This concluding pronouncement, with its imagined choice
between unprotected heterosexual vaginal sex and allegedly “safer” alternative
practices, both confirms the text’s privileging of heterosexual male desire and
undermines the emphasis on sexual safety, by reinforcing the connection
between venereal infection and masculine prowess. The template for “good”
sex involves a virile male consumer and a compliant prostitute—and even risky
commercial sex is apparently preferable to emasculating practices like mastur-
bation, flogging, or fellatio.53 Paradoxically, then, despite its best efforts to pro-
mote the condom as a manly accessory, The Machine ultimately reinforces a
conception of male sexuality that favors risky pre- or extramarital adventure
over the safety of sex within marriage. If nothing else, the poem’s speaker sug-
gests, at least a bad case of the pox will prove you aren’t a masturbator.
I N F E C T I O N A N D I M P OT E N C E : V E N E R E A L D I S E A S E
A S A C H A L L E N G E TO M A L E P OW E R
While works like The Machine tacitly accepted the maleness of venereal dis-
ease, redeploying the familiar love-as-war and disease-as-war-wound metaphors,
other texts treated the prevalence and potentially serious consequences of male
infection as matters of grave concern. To some extent, even celebratory works
such as Rochester’s “Disabled Debauchee” can be read as casting doubt on the
value of “war wounds” whose consequence is a permanent retirement from the
battlefield. The poem’s concluding lines find the libertine speaker “sheltered in
impotence,” assuming the role of the wise elder statesman—but only because he
is “good for nothing else.”54 He declares that he will “valiantly advise” younger
rakes—but what valor is there in dispensing advice from the sidelines?
Commemorating a libertinage as costly as it is enjoyable, the poem’s ending sug-
gests that there may be a lining of self-parody to this cloak of self-celebration.55
William Hogarth’s Representation of the March of the Guards Towards Scotland,
in the Year 1745 (1750, rpt. 1761)—often known as the March to Finchley—
reflects a similarly ambiguous view of the infected officer (fig. 1.1). Like
Rochester’s poem, Hogarth’s print seems to identify venereal disease with mili-
tary and sexual virility, and like the “Disabled Debauchee,” it presents the life of
the soldier from a perspective uneasily poised between celebration and critique.56
On one level, the scene, which shows the king’s infantry on its way to encounter
the Jacobite uprising in Scotland, might be characterized as “soldiers behaving
badly.” Indeed, according to Frederic George Stephens, its representation of the
royal troops so offended George II that it may have cost Hogarth his chance at
royal patronage.57 Yet the print can also be seen as a celebration of the riotous
enjoyments of military life: Ronald Paulson, Diana Donald, and others have
convincingly argued that the image endorses an English spirit of liberty, implic-
itly attacking George II’s attempts to introduce “slavish” Prussian-style military
discipline into a cheerfully anarchic English army.58
The print depicts the footguards at the Tottenham Court Road turnpike,
enjoying various frolics before they head north from the capital. In addition to
acts of theft—one officer steals a hen while others snatch fresh milk, food, and
beer—the soldiers take sexual liberties: one officer, standing near the entrance
to the King’s Head Tavern, attempts to seize a woman who claws at his face,
fighting him off; another officer, close to the center of the print, grabs a milk-
maid and kisses her, groping for her breast. A drunken officer holds up his
naked bayonet, its erect position and unsheathed edge symbolic of sexual as
well as military aggression. There are suggestions of unplanned pregnancy, one
of which contributes to the focal scene in the print (of an officer positioned
between an old woman and a pregnant young lady). And finally, there is the
inevitable triangulation of officers, prostitutes, and venereal disease: the noto-
rious procuress Mother Douglas looks out of the lower-right-hand window of
the King’s Head while her employees display themselves from the building’s
other windows; on the other side of the road, a soldier with venereal disease
grimaces in pain as he attempts to urinate against the side of the Adam and
Eve tavern. Affixed to the wall in front of him is a bill fittingly advertising the
services of the venereal disease specialist Dr. Richard Rock.
Here the actions of the footguards connect sexual energy with military
energy, with the image of the urinating officer serving as a visual play on the
love-as-war and infection-as-war-wound commonplaces. Like Rochester’s
aging libertine, Hogarth’s guards appear to revel in the disorder they create,
enjoying conquests in the bedroom as well as on the battlefield. Yet there are
hints here too of the high costs of such behavior, with the officers’ actions at
the turnpike inviting a comparison between sexual restraint and military dis-
cipline: many of the men march with their muskets upside down, the reversed
phallic symbol suggestive of both sexual impotence and military incompe-
1.1. William Hogarth, The March to Finchley, first published in 1750 (Reproduced courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
tence. The tavern featured in the print—the King’s Head—bears on its sign
the face of Charles II, a monarch associated not only with sexual license and
its morbid consequences in venereal disease, but also with the rival Stuart
claims to the throne. To the left of the image, just behind the drummer, a
Frenchman is pictured in close conversation with a Scottish Jacobite, with the
former holding out a letter directed “A Monsier ____ a Londre.” The
Scotsman’s face bears a black cosmetic patch of the sort used both to conceal
syphilitic sores and to protect war wounds. Like the image of Charles II on
the tavern sign, the presence of these two men links the threat of venereal
disease with the threat of foreign invasion, and suggests that the king’s foot-
guards ignore both at their peril.59
Ultimately, it remains unclear whether the officers’ penchant for drinking
and whoring will have negative consequences for their success on the battle-
field; the urinating soldier might be seen as a lighthearted comic touch or a
satiric condemnation of military misbehavior. It is the uncomfortable coexis-
tence of these two interpretations that lies behind the contrasting readings
offered by Stephens and Paulson. Like Rochester’s “Disabled Debauchee,”
The March to Finchley is deliberately ambiguous in its manipulation of the
love-as-war metaphor, with venereal disease serving as both a wink at the
raucous, transient life of the young soldier and a gesture toward the larger
dangers—military and ideological—of infection.
The same tension between celebration and critique runs through much of
the eighteenth-century medical and moral commentary on male infection.
The flip side to all those insouciant tales of manly misadventure was a dis-
course warning of the dangers that venereal infection might pose to male
physical, social, political, and familial dominance. Medical writers feared that
the high rates of infection among officers might have disastrous consequences
for national security, for example. Thus, the Scottish physician William Blair
lamented that the disease “deprives the service of a great many useful men,”
and the military surgeon Robert Hamilton complained that soldiers were no
sooner cured of one infection than they blithely contracted another, com-
pletely oblivious of the damage such repeated reinfections might do to their
health and livelihood: “A man who has been frequently affected with this
disease will never enjoy good health, nor be long fit for the duties of a soldier.
If he contracts a confirmed pox, which he can hardly escape, how difficult it
is to eradicate it out of the constitution! even in those that can afford every
conveniency to favour a complete cure, it is sometimes not done without the
utmost difficulty.”60
Several commentators were particularly exercised by the policy of charging

military personnel for venereal disease treatment, objecting that such a scheme
made officers—apparently already blasé about the condition—even less likely to
seek medical attention. According to Robert Somerville, this policy meant that
the disease could fester until “the patient is not only rendered unfit for duty for
many weeks, nay, sometimes months together; but the distemper, and the effect
of the medicines necessary for its cure, make such havocs upon his health, that it
is either broken or greatly impaired for life.”61 Blair agreed: “The disease is
allowed to take root in the system, and acquire a degree of malignancy not easy
to eradicate. Instead of communicating their cases to the regimental surgeon as
soon as they are infected, the men are frequently rendered unfit for duty, and are
necessarily discharged from service.”62 Blair added a warning about the long-
term consequences of infection, reflecting that he had sometimes “been obliged
to dismiss [soldiers] cured indeed of the lues venerea, but with constitutions too
broken and impaired to gain their livelihood in any capacity whatever.”63
Naval officers were seen as equally at risk: Elliot Arthy, a surgeon in the
African and West-India Merchants’ Service, complained that onboard medi-
cal personnel charged fees for their services and employed ineffective reme-
dies.64 The problem was not just a matter of individual men’s health, Arthy
contended; against the backdrop of the French Revolutionary Wars, venereal
infection had serious implications for the security of the whole kingdom: “To
a nation like Great-Britain dependent on the number, the goodness, and the
valour, of her seamen, for her protection against foreign enemies, and whose
commerce extends into almost every known part of the world, the increase
and preservation of her seamen must be, at all times, very highly desirable and
necessary; but now that the nation is engaged in war with all the greatest
maritime powers of Europe, and actually threatened with an invasion, they
become, I conceive, objects of immediate and most serious concern to every
honest Englishman.”65 For Arthy, as for other commentators, venereal disease
threatened to weaken the prowess of British seamen; it was thus a danger to,
rather than a proof of, military “valour.”
H E R E D I TA R Y I N F E C T I O N , PAT R I A R C H Y,
A N D PAT R I L I N E AG E
Over the course of the eighteenth century, writers reflecting on civilian

as well as military life expressed “serious concern” at the spread of male vene-
real infection, not least because it could undermine the very structures that
facilitated men’s profligate—and, ultimately, pathogenic—sexual behavior in

the first place. As a condition affecting those in positions of social privilege, it
had the potential to render men unfit for their roles as heads of families and
as heads of state. This aspect of the disease was considered at length in A
Modest Defence of Publick Stews, a 1724 pamphlet attributed to Bernard
Mandeville, of Fable of the Bees fame. Campaigning for publicly regulated
brothels as the best means of preventing the spread of the infection, Mandeville
condemned the perverse prestige accorded to venereal disease among both the
military and the gentry:
In these Kingdoms [the pox] so seldom fails to attend Whoring, now-
a-days mistaken for Gallantry and Politeness, that a hale, robust Con-
stitution is esteem’d a Mark of Ungentility; and a healthy young Fellow
is look’d upon with the same View, as if he had spent his Life in a Cot-
tage. Our Gentlemen of the Army, whose unsettled way of Life makes
it inconvenient for them to marry, are hereby much weaken’d and
enervated, and render’d unfit to undergo such Hardships as are neces-
sary for defending and supporting the Honour of their Country: And
our Gentry in general seem to distinguish themselves by an ill State of
Health, in all probability the Effect of this pernicious Distemper; for
the Secrecy which most People are oblig’d to in this Disease, makes the
Cure of it often ineffectual; and tho’ the Infection itself may possibly
be remov’d, yet for want of taking proper Methods, it generally leaves
such an ill Habit of Body as is not easily recover’d.66
Here the maleness of venereal infection makes it a threat to the most
important representatives of the social order. Far from marking such figures
as manly exemplars, it renders them unable to defend their country or shelter
their dependents.
Equally worrying was the possibility that men might pass the condition
on to their wives and children: seen in this light, the disease could transform
even the most benevolent patriarch into a cruel husband and heartless father.
This, according to Mandeville, was what made venereal infection “the more
intolerable,” since “the Innocent must suffer by it as well as the Guilty.”67 The
regimental surgeon Robert Hamilton advanced a similar view when he argued
that the infection of a married officer was a far more serious offense than the
infection of a single man. Hamilton not only supported the charging of fines
for venereal disease treatment in the army, but also insisted that married sol-
diers ought to face higher fines, in accordance with the greater severity of
their crime: “When a married man contract[s] the disease, the fine should be
doubled, both from the dire effects it may produce on his wife, and for his
having less temptation than an unmarried man of going astray. Here he breaks
the marriage vow, so solemnly sworn before God and the world; and, to
add to his guilt, he makes the innocent a partaker of a loathsome disease,
which not only may destroy her peace of mind, but her health ever after. I
have but too often seen this the case in military life.”68 Like Mandeville,
Hamilton assumes that male sexual promiscuity is inevitable (particularly
among unmarried soldiers, who face “temptation” without a conjugal outlet
for their desires); yet he, too, clearly fears the inherent threat to patriarchal
institutions from a disease spread through male sexual license.
Within medical treatises as well as social or political discourse, the empha-
sis on male infection translated into a corollary emphasis on male transmis-
sion, as surgeons and physicians told and retold the chastening cautionary
tale of the faithful wife forced to suffer for her husband’s infidelity.69 The case
studies cited by Nils Rosén von Rosenstein, for example, include that of an
innocent woman infected by her husband and treated without her own
knowledge; and that of a long-suffering wife who sickens and dies from the
disease because her husband refuses to admit that he has contracted and
spread the infection.70 Like many physicians writing on the subject, Rosenstein
never entertains the possibility of female adultery, explaining that no confes-
sion can be expected from a “virtuous woman, who is conscious of no evil
intercourse.”71 Instead, he places the burden of responsibility for a married
woman’s health squarely on the shoulders of her husband: “When a woman
of a healthy and jolly appearance, after being married grows lean and sick,
being affected with one unusual distemper after the other . . . then her hus-
band ought to examine his own conscience, and immediately confess himself
to an experienced physician and ask his advice.”72 Here Rosenstein assumes
not just male transmission but also some degree of male promiscuity, his lan-
guage implying that every man who “examines his own conscience” will find
venereal disease lurking somewhere in his past.
John Profily’s Easy and Exact Method of Curing the Venereal Disease (1748)
similarly blames philandering husbands for the infection of married women,
explaining that “many of the female sex, incapable of Vice from virtuous
Sentiments, become daily the wretched Victims of this fatal Enemy, brought
upon them innocently.”73 Rejecting the responses of “Reproach or Ridicule”
that might greet male venereal disease, Profily demands “Pity and Relief ” for
the “disconsolate Female, whose Body is tainted with a loathsome Poison by
the Embraces of a careless vicious Husband.”74 While Profily’s text outlines

several other means by which a woman might catch the disease—it might be
“instilled into her Bosom by the malignant Contagion of a wicked Nurse, or
the ulcerated Mouth of a sucking Infant”—it is notable that none of these
alternative scenarios involves uxorial infidelity.75
Not surprisingly, imaginative representations of the disease often rein-
forced this pattern of male-to-female transmission. Literary and artistic works
condemned the “debauched husband” and condoled with the infected wife—
even when her own conduct might have been less than irreproachable. In the
1712 poem “Cleora,” for example, George Granville tells the story of a young
woman who “weds a Peer” for financial gain and then finds herself punished
for her ambition by “some vile Disease, fresh reeking from the Stews,” con-
tracted by her unfaithful husband and passed on via the marital bed:
The secret Venom, circling in her Veins,
Works thro’ her Skin, and bursts in bloating Stains,
Her Cheeks their Freshness lose, and wonted Grace,
And an unusual Paleness spreads her Face,
Her Eyes grow dim, and her corrupted Breath
Tainting her Gums, infects her Ivory Teeth,
Of sharp nocturnal Anguish she complains,
And guiltless of the Cause, relates her Pains.
The conscious Husband, whom like Symptoms seize,
Charges on her the Guilt of their Disease,
Affecting Fury, acts a Madman’s Part,
He’ll rip the fatal Secret from her Heart!
Bids her confess, calls her ten thousand Names,
In vain she kneels, she weeps, protests, exclaims,
Scarce with her Life she scapes, expos’d to Shame,
In Body tortur’d, murder’d in her Fame,
Rots with a vile Adulteress’s Name,
Abandon’d by her Friends, without Defence,
And happy only in her Innocence.76
Here, as in other such narratives, the association of disease with male aris-
tocratic vice is reinforced by the emphasis on wifely “innocence.” (Henry
Fielding’s final novel, Amelia, discussed at greater length in chapter 4, con-
tains a similar domestic tragedy in its account of Mrs. Atkinson, a virtuous
woman who is raped by an infected lord and then accused of infidelity when
she subsequently transmits that infection to her husband.)77 While Granville’s

poem has a cautionary element for women—it is Cleora’s gold digging that
has gotten her into this situation in the first place—its language ultimately
encourages sympathy for the unhappy wife forced to suffer for her husband’s
debauchery.
Similarly, Restoration and eighteenth-century discourse about inherited
venereal infections tended to emphasize paternal rather than maternal sources
of the disease.78 In medical treatises and advertisements, both the language of
finance and the use of biblical allusions (particularly references to the “sins of
the fathers being visited upon their children to the third and fourth genera-
tion”) worked to code the transmission of congenital syphilis as paternal and
male-male, moving from father to son to grandson.79 Like the association of
venereal disease with male infidelity, this emphasis on paternal transmission
might seem a rare application of the sexual double standard in women’s favor:
just as married women were often portrayed as the innocent victims of male
adultery if they contracted the disease, so unhappy mothers were portrayed as
accessories to, rather than perpetrators of, the still-more-terrible crime of
transmitting the disease to an unborn child. Yet the focus on male transmis-
sion also privileged the role of the father in procreation, supporting what
Thomas Laqueur has identified as the two-sex model of reproduction, in
which men’s bodies provided the active “seed” for a child, while women’s
simply incubated it.80 And insofar as it emphasized continuity between fathers
and sons, the focus on paternal transmission also highlighted the greater
social and economic value of male children.
For families with any accumulated assets, the dangers of hereditary vene-
real disease were financial as well as physiological, since infected patriarchs
might fail to produce an heir, or might produce one who was weak, deformed,
or not “prolifick.”81 If, in turn, large numbers of prosperous families could no
longer provide healthy heirs, then the stability of the existing social hierarchy
might be jeopardized. Just as sexually transmitted infections had the potential
to weaken larger patriarchal structures as well as specific social groups, so pat-
terns of hereditary infection could inflict serious biological damage on upper-
class children, disrupting the very systems that perpetuated elite male power
and privilege in the first place.
To highlight these broader concerns, many medical writers emphasized the
particular seriousness of this issue for the nobility and gentry, using the lan-
guage of financial inheritance to discuss hereditary infections.82 Some even pro-
jected the metaphor of financial inheritance back onto the sexually transmitted
form of the disease, defining “adventitious” infections against “hereditary”

ones.83 Others used the vocabulary of investments, estates, and indebtedness,
either implicitly or explicitly urging their male readers to consider the larger
socioeconomic stakes of infection.
The physician Sir John Floyer, for example, captured the dangers of
hereditary disease in the metaphor of a “docked” financial entail: “Poxes and
Claps, &c. is the greatest Curse that can befall a Man in this Life . . . . for a
Man does not only Ruin himself, but Docks the Intail of his own Blood, and
brings a ne plus ultra on his Name and Family; so that one false Step in the
Whoring-Adventurer is the Ruin of the whole Cargo of Boys and Girls.”84
Extending the health-is-money trope, Floyer later describes inheritors of the
disease as unhappy spendthrifts, consuming “Pills, Potions, and Posset-drink”
and “spending their little Substance among Physick-Harpies, and their raven-
ous Attendants Nurses, Quacks, Apothecaries, &c.”85 Where other heirs expect
to receive land and money, Floyer laments, infected children have only the
perpetual expenditures of chronic illness: they are forced to pay back, in real
financial and physiological terms, the ethical debts accrued by their parents.
Offering an even severer judgment, Charles Peter suggested that it should
be considered tantamount to financial fraud for a parent to promote the mar-
riage of a child known to be diseased, for “ ’tis as great a Crime to cheat a
Family with an unsound Son or Daughter, as with a false Title, or a pre-
mortgaged Estate.”86 Peter’s remarks suggest that the “crime” of hereditary
infection was understood, at least by some medical writers, as having social
ramifications that extended far beyond the individual infant body. And while
the risk of producing sterile or unhealthy children was alarming in its own
right, many reserved an even greater concern for the possibility that those
afflicted with hereditary venereal disease might themselves bear children, pro-
ducing yet more sickly, degenerate weaklings. The disease might sterilize its
victim—“dock the entail”—but so too might it borrow against his future
with compound interest, increasing in severity as it passed from father to son.
In this scenario there were biological risks to consider alongside financial
ones: the survival of the entire nation, perhaps the entire species, was at stake.
Infected children could “grow tender and weak, as also their offspring, from
generation to generation,” Rosenstein warned, so that “in such a manner a
whole nation may degenerate and be corrupted.”87
Indeed, the anxiety surrounding hereditary venereal disease was sufficiently
widespread for the erstwhile physician Sir John Hill to publish a satire in 1750
urging women to drive out paternally transmitted infections by isolating them-
selves from men and conceiving children on their own.88 Addressing himself to
“all ye battered Rakes,” Hill mocked the discourse by which upper-class men
championed infection as a sign of prowess, condemning “the Havocks of that
honourable Disease, of which thousands of your Forefathers have died, and
whereof yourselves so vain-gloriously boast in Taverns and Coffee-houses, to
the great Advancement of Virtue and Morality.”89 Although Hill acknowl-
edged that the disease could be transmitted from wives to husbands, he too
used the metaphor of an entail to emphasize the effects of paternally transmit-
ted disease on future generations of the wealthy and powerful:
Nor does the Evil end with Life, but revives again in the Posterity, is
entailed on the Heirs of great Families, inherited in sure Succession,
and oftentimes, too often, proves the only thing that is inherited by
Heirs of noble, but corrupted Blood. Hence arises an enervated Prog-
eny, weak in their Persons, and weaker in their Understandings; a
puny, ill-compounded, unmanly Race, who bear about them the
Marks of their Father’s Wickedness in most legible Characters, and
though liable to be blown away by every blast of Wind, have the Ar-
rogance to strut through the Mall with Swords by their Sides, and
fancy themselves Men. Alas! their Mother’s Chambermaids wou’d
make better Men.90
While it is difficult to gauge Hill’s irony here, so similar is his rhetoric to
that of the more zealous disease prevention tracts, his phrasing demonstrates
that the association between hereditary infection and men of the nobility or
gentry was strong enough to provide the basis for a parody of contemporary
medical science. (Hill’s work was intended as an attack on the Royal Society.)
Indeed, Hill’s absurd solution to the problem places his work firmly in the
tradition of satires like Swift’s Modest Proposal (1726), and he includes a nod
to Swift’s essay in his recommendations for eradicating venereal infection:
If all in Female Shape (for I dare not call them all Women) will agree
to seclude themselves from the foul Embraces of Men for one Year
(which I account a very modest Proposal, as I offer them a better Grat-
ification in lieu of what they are to forfeit), this ruinous Plague must
cease from among us.91
Here Hill plays on the association of infection with maleness, concluding
that the segregation of the sexes will not only “drive out the P——x from his
Majesty’s Dominions,” but also enable women to beget “healthy and vigorous”
children without the danger of paternally transmitted disease.92 Asking “whether

the present Race of Fathers, especially those in high Life . . . are qualified
to beget Children at all,” he concludes by taking such arguments to their
(il)logical extreme:
When Women are left to breed of themselves, and the Vener[e]al Dis-
ease is banished from among us, we may then hope to see an Offspring
robust and healthy; British Valour will then recover its ancient Glory;
new Cressys, new Agincourts, new Blenheims succeed to grace our An-
nals, Nor Henry be the last that conquers France.93
Hill’s triumphalist conclusion here nicely parodies the nationalist rhetoric
employed in texts like Rosenstein’s and Peter’s, suggesting, with tongue in
cheek, that if paternally transmitted infections can destroy Great Britain,
then perhaps only miraculous conceptions can secure its future.
Similar concerns about the paternal transmission of venereal disease appear
in Restoration and eighteenth-century novels, poetry, and caricatures, with
many literary and visual satires from this period attacking the figure of the
infected patriarch. While some of these works clearly aim to elicit laughter,
others point more darkly toward tragedy, condemning individual men or a
broader patriarchal culture dismissive of male infection. One example from the
darker side of the spectrum is Hogarth’s well-known Marriage A-la-Mode
(1743–45). In this set of six images—one of the popular print series that tackled
what its creator called “Modern Moral Subjects”—Hogarth depicts the dete-
rioration of a loveless dynastic marriage contracted between the son of a bank-
rupt aristocratic family, the Squanderfields, and the daughter of a wealthy
alderman. The series makes frequent allusions to disease, as several critics have
noted—but it is male venereal infection in particular that forms the primary
vehicle for the work’s tacit questioning of class and gender boundaries.94
From the very first frame, the aristocratic Squanderfield men are an object
lesson in the perils of primogeniture: in an enactment of all those metaphorical
warnings comparing paternally transmitted infections with indebted estates
and docked entails, the Squanderfields’ diminishing fortune—indicated in
part by the unfinished building project visible outside their drawing-room
window—is paralleled by the men’s deteriorating bodies: the aging earl, his
right hand pointing to a lavishly illustrated family tree, has a gouty foot
wrapped in bandages; his son, gazing contentedly at his own reflection in the
mirror, has a black skin lesion—of the sort characteristic of scrofula—on his
neck (fig. 1.2). While nonsexual in nature, both scrofula and gout were
1.2. William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode, plate 1, first published, 1743–45 (Reproduced courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
connected with venereal disease by eighteenth-century medical writers, and

scrofula in particular was often (incorrectly) identified as one of the many
potential symptoms of hereditary venereal infection.95 Not surprisingly, the
groom-to-be also appears to be exactly the sort of foppish young man-about-
town identified by eighteenth-century commentators as likely to catch the
“fashionable distemper.”
As this print suggests, Marriage A-la-Mode centralizes both the maleness
and the paternity of venereal disease, coding the earl’s condition as a tainted
legacy passed on, like his indebted estate, from father to son. Paternal trans-
mission is also referenced metaphorically in plate 1, in the large portrait of the
earl that hangs in the Squanderfield drawing room: pictured as a young man
of military and sexual prowess, the earl poses with his sword at his side and an
unsubtly phallic cannon firing off between his legs. This imagery—a visual
play on the sex-as-war analogy—recurs in the second plate of the series, in
which the newly married viscount is portrayed sprawled in a chair after a
night on the town, a broken sword on the floor in front of him. (The sugges-
tion of sexual infidelity is reinforced by the woman’s lace cap protruding from
his pocket.)
Plate 3 confirms that the young viscount has succeeded to his father’s ill
health as well as to his estate: not only is Squanderfield carrying a venereal
infection, but he has also passed it on to his disturbingly childlike mistress. In
this image, Squanderfield is pictured in a quack’s shop, remonstrating with
the proprietor over an unsatisfactory purchase. Accompanying him is a tiny,
forlorn girl who looks to be about thirteen or fourteen (fig. 1.3). She dabs at a
sore on her lip, appearing, with the handkerchief pressed close to her face,
more like a child about to cry than a willing participant in her partner’s sexual
pleasures. The viscount seems unfazed by the nature of their errand: although
apparently seeking compensation for some ineffectual mercury pills, his
relaxed posture and conciliatory smile suggest no real anger at the quack or
concern over his own or his mistress’s condition. The older woman who
stands behind the viscount, perhaps the mother of the young girl, stares at
him with the rage he seems to lack: her expression poses an implicit challenge
not just to this powerful man, but also to the larger discourse of dismissal—
venereal disease as “gentleman’s sniffles”—that his smiling face represents.96
While Lady Squanderfield is by no means blameless in the deterioration of
her marriage—among other things, the series exposes her affair with the family
lawyer, Mr. Silvertongue—she, like her husband’s child-mistress, is presented
largely as a sufferer from, rather than a source of, venereal infection. In the first
1.3. William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode, plate 3 (Reproduced courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
plate, she appears to be of healthier stock than her aristocratic husband—and

it is noticeable that she never shows any signs of infection, despite giving birth
to an infected child. The series, like the marriage, finally reaches its tragic con-
clusion with her suicide in plate 6—but the Squanderfield family legacy lives
on, with the recognizable signs of hereditary disease dooming yet another heir
(fig. 1.4). Torn from the arms of his dead mother, the deformed boy depicted
in plate 6 enters the world already possessed of a miserable biological inheri-
tance: his rickets and stunted growth, like his grandfather’s gout and his father’s
scrofula, are signs of a degeneracy associated with hereditary infection.97
Although the series as a whole is careful to apportion blame to both partners
in the marriage, the final plate could easily serve as a bracing illustration of
some of the moralizing medical discourse on male venereal disease, so promi-
nent are the types of the wronged wife and innocent child.
Similar portrayals of paternally transmitted infection also appear in well-
known works of eighteenth-century literature—often, as in Marriage A-la-
Mode, as a means of questioning elite male prerogatives. In Daniel Defoe’s
poem The Reformation of Manners from 1702, for example, Casco is con-
demned for his “Paternal Vice”—an evil that he has inherited from his father
and passed on, in turn, to his sons:
Casco’s debauched, ’tis his Paternal Vice;
For Wickedness descends to Families:
The tainted Blood the Seeds of Vice convey,
And plants new Crimes before the old decay.
Thro’ all Degrees of Vice the Father run
But sees himself out-sin’d by either Son;
Whoring and Incest he has understood,
And they subjoyn Adultery and Blood.98
Here not just “tainted Blood,” but “Wickedness” itself, is passed along the
paternal line. The subsequent verses identify Casco’s first son, Ignatius, as a
lawyer who seduces and then murders the “innocent” women for whom he is
meant to advocate; his second son, Milo, is “the vilest Magistrate the Nation
knows,” a tyrant who rules “Britain’s Eastern Provinces . . . / With a polluted
Tongue and bloody Hands.”99
While the poem uses these “polluted” men as examples, it ultimately tar-
gets systemic rather than individual corruption, since the speaker contends
that men like Casco are all the more dangerous because of the powerful social
positions to which they are promoted:
1.4. William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode, plate 6 (Reproduced courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
Contagious Vice infects the Judgment-Seats,

And Vertue from Authority retreats:
How shou’d she such Society endure?
Where she’s contemn’d she cannot be secure.100
Here “Contagious Vice” extends outward from individual patriarchal fig-
ures to broader social structures like the legal system, with Defoe’s speaker
warning that “all Reformation stops when Vice commands.”101 Although the
poem as a whole takes aim at women as well as men, lower-class as well as
upper-class misbehavior, the conventional feminization of virtue here heightens
the preceding contrast between corrupt, powerful men and innocent, victim-
ized women. It is male and not female wickedness that “descends to Families”
in this account of the modern age.
A similar alignment of moral and physical degeneracy appears in Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels (1726). During his time on Glubbdubdrib, the Island of the
Sorcerers, Gulliver asks the governor to call up the shades of deceased “Counts,
Marquesses, Dukes, Earls, and the like,” with their ancestors, so that he might
trace the progress of hereditary venereal infections through multiple genera-
tions.102 His curiosity piqued at the prospect of seeing these reanimated patri-
archs, Gulliver hopes to discover “who first brought the Pox into a noble House,
which has lineally descended in scrophulous Tumours to their Posterity,” as well
as “how Cruelty, Falsehood, and Cowardice grew to be as Characteristicks by
which certain Families are distinguished as much as by their Coat of Arms.”103
Here, as in Reformation of Manners and Marriage A-la-Mode, venereal disease is
not only associated with a male ruling elite and affiliated with male moral fail-
ings; it is also traceable along a paternal rather than a maternal line. (Swift’s
account also testifies to the commonplace belief that inherited infections could
manifest as non-venereal conditions like scrofula.)
As Leon Guilhamet has observed, texts like Defoe’s and Swift’s express “con-
cern about the transmission of venereal disease to future generations, particu-
larly those to whom England was looking for leadership”—an observation that
seems especially apt given Gulliver’s specific request to see “a Dozen or two
Kings with their Ancestors.”104 Satires on Charles II and James II were particu-
larly enthusiastic in invoking the specter of hereditary infection, as were attacks
on George IV at the end of the subsequent century.105 Although these three
monarchs may have been popular targets in part because of their well-publicized
relationships with Catholic women, it is worth noting that many of these satires
implicate the male ruler, and not his foreign consort, in spreading the infection.
The poem “Advice to a Painter to Draw the Duke by” (1673), for example,
offers a relatively sympathetic portrait of the future James II’s Catholic bride-
to-be, Mary of Modena:
Then draw the Princess with her golden locks,
Hast’ning to be envenom’d with the pox,
And in her youthful veins receive the wound
That sent Nan Hyde before her under ground;
That wound wherewith the tainted Churchill fades,
Preserv’d in store for a new set of Maids.
Poor Princess, born under a sullen star,
To find this welcome when you’re come so far!106
Here three women—Mary of Modena, Anne Hyde (the Duke of York’s first
wife), and Arabella Churchill (one of his mistresses)—are identified as the
victims of James’s morbid inheritance. The corollary issue of producing a
healthy heir is highlighted in the subsequent lines, as the poet predicts that
Mary will “die before twenty, rot before sixteen.”
Even the outlandish rumor that the Earl of Southesk had attempted to
end the Catholic royal line by deliberately contracting a venereal infection
and passing it on to the future James II via his wife (with whom James had
been having an affair) pits the spread of infection as a conflict between men
in which women and children are merely conduits or pawns. The satire A
Catholic Hymn on the Birth of the Prince of Wales from 1688 summarizes this
popular story—and expresses the widely held belief that Southesk’s motives
were political rather than personal:
When enrag’d Southask
In his Female’s Womb cast,
A Clap which cost twenty Guinny’s
A project he had
Of Revenge on the Dad,
And to blow up the Race of the Ninnys.
The Poyson soon wrought
Which his Highness had caught,
And Nancy was tainted soon after;
Soe the Infection prevail’d
That the Pox was intail’d
Sans distinction on Son and on Daughter.107
Although venereal disease is linked with prostitution here (the infection

“cost twenty Guin[eas]”), female sexual agency—whether that of Southesk’s
wife or that of the nameless prostitute—is largely elided, and the conflict is
presented as a political battle rather than a marital dispute. Once again both
“Nancy” and Mary are portrayed as faithful partners “tainted” by James’s
infection: Mary’s miscarriages, like Anne Hyde’s sickly children—all of them
“brought forth in a Stinking condition,” according to the speaker—are the
products of paternal corruption. And although the “Pox was intail’d / Sans
distinction on Son and on Daughter,” it becomes clear that father-to-son
transmission is of paramount concern when the speaker reminds us that “a
Boy [must] be had” in order to secure the succession.108
Concerns about the quality of the nation’s male leadership were similarly
reflected in satires on lesser public figures. The metaphor of hereditary disease
remained effective as a means of condemning individual men and of denounc-
ing the longer-term effects of their actions. In Dryden’s The Medal (1682), for
example, the Whig “hero,” Lord Shaftesbury, is described as both a carrier
and a propagator of hereditary venereal disease:
But thou, the Pander of the Peoples hearts,
(O Crooked Soul, and Serpentine in Arts,)
Whose blandishments a Loyal Land have whor’d,
And broke the Bonds she plighted to her Lord;
What Curses on thy blasted Name will fall!
Which Age to Age their Legacy shall call;
For all must curse the Woes that must descend on all.
Religion thou hast none: thy Mercury
Has pass’d through every Sect, or theirs through Thee.
But what thou giv’st, that Venom still remains;
And the pox’d Nation feels Thee in their Brains.109
Here Shaftesbury is figured as the seducer who has “whor’d” and “pox’d” a
vulnerable nation by failing to protect those under his patriarchal aegis.
Dryden’s language, with its warnings of a “blasted Name,” a terrible legacy
“that must descend on all,” and a “curse” that will pass from “Age to Age,”
deliberately recalls the Old Testament condemnations of fathers whose sins
are visited on their children “unto the third and fourth generation.”110 Like a
philandering husband who risks transmitting the disease to his faithful wife
and innocent children, Shaftesbury has tried—unsuccessfully—to cure his
ailment, with the unhappy result that he has transmitted his dose of mercury
poisoning along with the infection it was intended to treat. Shaftesbury’s

shifting political and religious allegiances may be mercurial, Dryden’s speaker
suggests—but such “Mercury” cannot effect a cure for either the Whig
leader’s—or the “pox’d nation’s”—affliction.
ADVENTITIOUS INFECTION AND PUBLIC LEADERSHIP
Just as the metaphor of hereditary venereal infection prompted eighteenth-

century satirists to speculate on the long-term consequences of male misbe-
havior, the trope of “adventitious,” or sexually contracted, infection tended to
inspire warnings about the immediate dangers of poor political or military
governance. In “The Men of Honor Made Men Worthy,” a satire from 1687,
for example, the conventional link between sexual and political ethics is
invoked to condemn the actions of Arthur Herbert, first Earl of Torrington,
during his tenure as commander in chief of the British naval forces at Tangier:
Witness Tangier: his honour there was shown
Not in heroic service for the Crown,
But drinking, pox, and whores of high renown.111
Here the “pox” contributes to a broader contrast between Herbert’s dis-
reputable conduct and the honorable behavior expected of military leaders.
Torrington is portrayed as a “brutal mercenary” who exploits the advantages
of high life while ignoring his patriarchal responsibilities: instead of perform-
ing “heroic service for the Crown,” he becomes a connoisseur of what the
satirist wryly terms “whores of high renown.” The accusation of venereal
infection here stands alongside charges of lechery, drunkenness, and violence
as evidence of Torrington’s grossly unheroic leadership.
Similarly, Isaac Cruikshank’s Preparing for Action; or an English Man of
War Engaging Two Dutch Doggers (1793) uses the suggestion of venereal dis-
ease to undermine the military authority of the Duke of York. In this image,
Cruikshank questions York’s role as commander of a British contingent of the
Coburg army by depicting the campaign in Flanders (in which York and his
men fought on behalf of the Dutch against the French Revolutionary army)
as a sordid sexual exchange between gullible British johns and thieving, dis-
eased Dutch prostitutes (fig. 1.5).112 The print’s title, like its imagery, plays on
the love-as-war and disease-as-war-wound metaphors, as the “English Man
of War”—York himself, portrayed as a randy officer in an enormous pair of
breeches—appears more intent on sexual than military conquest. Flanked
1.5. Isaac Cruikshank, Preparing for Action; or an English Man of War Engaging
Two Dutch Doggers, 1793 (Reproduced courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library,
Yale University)
on either side by an ugly, corpulent prostitute (the two “Dutch Doggers” of

the title), he looks amorously at one of his companions and extends his purse
to the other. Off to the left and with his back to the viewer, a second officer
urinates painfully against a cannon, that familiar sex-as-combat symbol. The
lines above his head declare, “wine cannot cure the Pain I Indure / for my dear
Chloes Sake.” Here Cruikshank uses the rhetoric of venereal disease to con-
nect the individual bodies of military men with the collective body (the mili-
tary “corps”) under York’s governance. The implications of the officer’s
“injury” are clear: British involvement in the Franco-Dutch conflict comes at
too high a cost, with the nation’s military prowess compromised by York’s
leadership of the Flanders campaign.
As Cruikshank’s use of the infection-as-war-wound metaphor perhaps
suggests, many of the same venereal disease tropes mobilized to champion or
defend upper-class male prerogative were also used to connect and condemn
forms of elite male vice. Thus, while the fashionableness of venereal disease
was being invoked in celebrations of aristocratic privilege, it was also being
marshaled as a means of attacking men of fashion, often via the well-known
equation of fashionableness with weakness or effeminacy.113 In the 1799 car-
toon The Bond Street Battalion—or the Hospital Staff from Holland!!!, for
example, the suggestion of venereal disease is used to ridicule the vogue for
feigning war wounds after the return of the British troops from Holland. The
print depicts a group of foppish men, all of whom boast some apparatus
indicative of injury: a sling, a knee brace, and so forth.114 The man at far left,
who is staring at a nearby woman through an eyeglass, stands on an advertise-
ment for “Leakes Pills.” Here, the flyer for a well-known venereal disease
remedy works as both an indictment of men of fashion and a visual reference
to the conceptualization of disease symptoms as war wounds. The implica-
tion is that venereal disease is the only “injury” from which these fops might
genuinely suffer.115 Similarly, in Modern Paradise or Adam and Eve Regenerated
(1786), a satire on the spendthrift future George IV and his lover, Maria
Fitzherbert, Adam (George) is portrayed as a modish man-about-town, his
fashionable lifestyle derided by an advertisement for Dr. Rock’s venereal pills
that covers his genitals in place of the conventional fig leaf. In this debauched
paradise, the image suggests, venereal disease replaces nakedness as the source
of man’s shame.
The same link between infection and fashion appears in attacks on individ-
ual public figures, with satirists using the “modish disease” to condemn both
Whigs and Tories, in-party and cross-party rivals. In some works, this associa-
tion provides a platform for broader social critique, enabling writers and artists
to interrogate the criteria—intellectual, political, economic, military—by which
society apportions male power. For example, in Rochester’s “My Lord Al-Pride”
(c. 1679), a lampoon on John Sheffield, first Duke of Buckingham and
Normanby, venereal disease imagery deflates the duke’s pretensions to fashion,
wit, gallantry, and military prowess—all the qualities that have helped secure
him a powerful position in Charles II’s court:
Bursting with pride the loath’d impostume swells;
Prick him, he sheds his venom straight and smells. . . .
Against his stars the coxcomb ever strives,
And to be something they forbid, contrives.
With a red nose, splay foot, and goggle eye,
A ploughman’s looby mien, face all awry,
With stinking breath and every loathsome mark,

The Punchinello sets up for a spark.
With equal self-conceit, too, he bears arms,
But with that vile success his part performs
That he burlesques his trade, and what is best
In others turns, like Harlequin, to jest. . . . .
This Knight o’th’Burning Pestle makes us sport.116
Here Rochester compares Sheffield with an “impostume”—a purulent sore
like the skin ulcers that sometimes occur in secondary syphilis. Sheffield is
depicted as both infection and symptom, with his social, political, and military
aspirations accruing like pus inside a sore on the body politic. The speaker is
keen to ridicule Sheffield’s status as a would-be man of fashion—he is a “cox-
comb” and a “spark”—but the use of disease rhetoric also connects Sheffield’s
foppery with his pretentions to literary and military greatness. (Sheffield served
in the navy under Charles II and was subsequently given enviable commissions
as a naval commander and army colonel.) Here, it is less Sheffield’s desirability
as a lover that is thrown into question by the suggestion of venereal disease
than his claims to patriarchal power: his social status, his talent as a swords-
man, his intellectual prowess as a would-be “wit” at court.
At the other end of the period but similar in its aims and methods is Robert
Dighton’s 1796 caricature of William Douglas, fourth Duke of Queensberry
(fig. 1.6).117 In this print, Dighton links the aging duke’s lechery with his fash-
ionable attire, using the suggestion of venereal infection to question both
Queensberry’s moral character and his public position as a peer. Lampooned as
Old Q-uiz, the Old Goat of Piccadilly, the duke is pictured standing next to an
attractive young milliner, one hand reaching out to encircle her waist, the
other concealed inside an enormous brown muff. Queensberry’s interest in
fashion—signaled both by the milliner’s profession and by his own foppish
appearance—is connected with his sexual misbehavior: he approaches the
young woman in an attitude of sexual interest, his hand thrust into an item of
clothing symbolic of the female genitalia.118
Both the duke’s aristocratic status and his legendary sexual prowess are
called into question by the suggestion that he has a venereal infection: a bottle
of Velno’s Vegetable syrup, a widely advertised venereal disease remedy, pro-
trudes from his left coat pocket. The label below the image lauds Queensberry
as “A Shining Star—in the British Peerage / And a usefull Ornament to
Society” before dismissing this commendation as “Fudge.” In Dighton’s
1.6. Robert Dighton, Old Q-uiz, the Old Goat of Piccadilly, 1796
(Reproduced courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
assessment here, Queensberry illustrates the contrast between the trappings

of male power and the criteria for moral worth: despite his wealth, position
in “the British Peerage,” and legendary sexual appetite, the duke is exposed as
no “usefull Ornament to Society” at all. The medium of Dighton’s denuncia-
tion further emphasizes the connection with fashion, the luxuriant pinks,
blues, and browns of the print reflecting back on Queensberry’s obsession
with personal “Ornament.”119
A roughly contemporaneous work by James Gillray, Lordly Elevation
(1802), adopts a similar mode of critique (fig. 1.7). Here it is Sholto Henry
McLellan, the deformed peer who had recently succeeded to the title of Baron
Kirkcudbright, who is ridiculed as a vain man of fashion.120 A dwarfish
Kirkcudbright is pictured standing on his baron’s coronet, using the symbol of
his newly acquired power as a stepping stool by which to see into the mirror
1.7. James Gillray, Lordly Elevation, 1802 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
above his dressing table. He admires his own reflection as he makes his toi-
lette, adopting a swaggering pose that exposes his pretensions to sexual as well
as political prowess. Kirkcudbright’s aspirations, like Queensberry’s, are sig-
naled by his attire: his purple court suit reflects his aristocratic status; his large
sword symbolizes hoped-for military and sexual prowess; and his bagwig sug-
gests a Francophile attention to fashion. Here, once again, the conventional
markers of male power are used to expose the unworthiness of their bearer, as
Kirkcudbright’s diminutive stature and hunched back make a mockery of his
ambitions. (These features also, of course, align him with Napoleon—as does
the small tricorne hat he holds in his outstretched right arm.)
The most striking feature of the portrait, however, is Kirkcudbright’s
facial profile: exaggerated to appear almost concave, his flattened face is sug-
gestive of syphilitic deformity—a suggestion corroborated by the bottle
labeled “Velno” positioned prominently on his dressing table. Kirkcudbright
speaks to his reflection in the mirror, extolling the virtues of his appearance in
lines that link him with another diminutive and disfigured man, Shakespeare’s
Richard III:
Methinks I’m now, a marv’lous proper Man,
I’ll have my Chambers lin’d with Looking Glass,
And entertain a score or two of Tailors,
To study Fashions to adorn my body.121
Here once again, attention to fashion provides the means of exposing a
mismatch between interior and exterior worth, with Kirkcudbright’s infec-
tion, like his deformity, undermining his pretensions to fashion and to power.
He might possess the trappings of elite masculinity—a position at court, a
sword, and the wealth to hire “a score or two of Tailors”—but it is very clear
that Kirkcudbright, like the Shakespearean antihero he quotes, falls far short
of the criteria for “a marv’lous proper Man,” in morals as well as in stature.
J O H N D U R A N T B R E V A L’ S T H E P R O G R E S S O F A R A K E :
OR, THE TEMPLAR’S EXIT (1732)
While many eighteenth-century imaginative works touched on the links

between masculinity and venereal disease in passing, a few used the issue of
male infection to reconsider more extensively the conventional hallmarks of
patriarchal power (physical strength, military skill, social status, political
authority, financial clout). I would like to conclude this chapter by examining
one such text—John Durant Breval’s poem The Progress of a Rake: Or, The
Templar’s Exit, from 1732—in detail. Breval’s text captures both aspects of
what I began by calling the “unserious” nature of male infection, its imagina-
tive portrayal of a diseased libertine shifting awkwardly between brash comic
celebrations of male prerogative and darker satiric reflections on the misuse of
financial and sexual power.
Written in clunky “Hudibrasticks” (feminine-rhymed iambic tetrameter),
Breval’s ten-canto comic narrative was probably produced in anticipation of
William Hogarth’s keenly awaited A Rake’s Progress, due to appear later that same
year.122 Hogarth’s eight-print series follows the fortunes of an ill-fated young
spendthrift, Tom Rakewell, as he descends from financial and sexual profligacy
into poverty, crime, and, ultimately, madness: the last plate shows Tom commit-
ted to Bedlam, too delusional even to register his own wretched condition.
While Hogarth’s work was to have its own, rather more elevated literary accom-
paniment in verses by Dr. John Hoadly, Breval’s anticipatory narrative is telling
in its identification of venereal disease, rather than madness, as the obvious

pathogenic outcome of the libertine’s favorite pastime. In presenting infection
as both a comic inevitability and a tragic consequence of elite male sexual license,
Breval’s Progress constitutes a useful illustration of the contradictory attitudes
toward male venereal disease that characterize eighteenth-century literature and
art as a whole. The poem’s unevenness and bathos (evident not least in Breval’s
use of a comic verse form to tell a story about disease, disgrace, and suicide)
mirror these thematic tendencies on a formal level.
The first few pages of the book suggest that Breval’s rake, the aptly named
“Dick” (Richard), will be an undignified, perhaps unlikable, hero: the fron-
tispiece shows him standing in his bedchamber, clownishly lamenting the
early signs of venereal infection in and on his person (fig. 1.8).123 Although
this image suggests that Dick has been at least in part the maker of his own
misfortunes, it also seems to implicate the broader culture from which he has
taken his values—a culture in which male promiscuity is not just tolerated
but expected, and male infection is seen as a sign of virility. The copy of
1.8. Frontispiece to John Durant

Breval, The Progress of a Rake, 1732
(*EC7 B7577 732p, Houghton Library,
Harvard University)
Rochester’s poems that lies on Dick’s bedside table, like the framed engraving
of plate 3 from Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress that is pinned to his bedroom wall,
reminds us that the libertine, however foolish or reprobate, does not act in a
cultural vacuum.
Like the text, the frontispiece focuses on the consequences of male sexual
misbehavior, but its features seem to invite both moral reflection and light-
hearted amusement. Where poems like Rochester’s “Disabled Debauchee”
equate sexual risk-taking with military courage, this rake’s cringing posture
suggests cowardice, and the excerpted lines of dialogue expose an unmanly—
even childish—response to his morbid discovery:
But three Days past—Oh! Needles, poynts of Pins,
My Back—My Head—My XXXX Oh! my Shinns,
Lets see my Shirt Oh! Spots of Green and Yellow
What will my Father say—A Pretty Fellow.124
Both the rake’s cries of pain and his fear of impending parental judgment
seem absurd, particularly given the use of Hudibrastics—but the explicit refer-
ences to penile pain and discharge make it difficult to see this as an insouciant
dismissal of male infection. The same contradictory impulses inform other
aspects of the book’s front matter: the bent sword that appears on Dick’s bed-
room floor would appear to imply—as in plate 2 of Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-
Mode—both a breach of gentlemanly conduct and the physiological consequences
of that breach in sexual dysfunction. Yet the potential for somber moralizing is
compromised by the title page’s description of the work as “intersper’d with inno-
cent Mirth, good Morals, and too much of the Author’s own Experience”—phrases
that suggest Breval’s intentions in writing the work were at least partly comic.
Within the text of the poem, Dick’s infection and death seem, even if not
fated, then certainly predictable from childhood. As the eldest and favored
son of an ambitious country squire, Dick is destined for a life of privilege, and
he early on assumes the “polish’d” manners and fussy attire of a would-be man
of fashion:
Dick was design’d for something great;
For Dick must have the whole Estate:
Dick wore a Hat with silver Lace;
Red Tops of Shoes did Dicky Grace:
And Master Richard wore a Chit—
Terlin, and Ruffles like a Cit.125
Here the young libertine seems more fool than villain, with the clunky
non-rhyme of “Chit[terling]” and “Cit” suggesting he has more in common
with the social-climbing tradesmen of Restoration comedy than with
Wycherley’s or Crowne’s urbane rake-heroes.
Sent away to school to acquire whatever knowledge he might need as Squire
Roger’s heir, Dick quickly discovers sex and its seemingly inevitable conse-
quences in venereal infection. Within a week, he has begun exploring under
girls’ clothes; shortly thereafter, he obtains the affections of a local girl by plying
her with “Nicknacks, Rings and Laces”; and finally, finding both his person and
his pocketbook damaged, he is obliged to ask his father for more money and is
sent “Crowns and Spankers, / Enough to get, and cure the Shankers.”126 In all
these details, Dick’s story follows a conventional elite coming-of-age narrative,
with “shankers” (syphilitic chancres) dismissed as simply another amusing
inconvenience in the transition from boyhood to adult life.
By canto 3, Dick has graduated to more serious offenses and been packed
off to “Brazen-Nose” College in Oxford, but his actions are still largely pre-
sented as the natural outgrowth of youthful male virility.127 Influenced by
“Example, Custom, Appetite,” Dick has never been taught to control his
desires:
No wonder then ungovern’d Youth,
Who Calf like, has Sugar Tooth,
Nor Sense, or Reason can controul,
Shall run the hazard of his Soul,
To search for Sweets in dirty Holes.128
Dick’s behavior may be “dirty” and threaten “his Soul,” but it still seems
to be typical conduct for a man of his class and age. The fault lies not in his
having “Sugar Tooth”—as all young animals apparently do, according to
Breval’s speaker—but in the “Example” and “Custom” that allow for the
appeasement of those cravings “in dirty Holes.” If Dick’s early adventures are
meant to serve in part as a cautionary tale, then they certainly don’t make for
a particularly harrowing one: not only does Breval’s characterization suggest
commonality by invoking the stereotype of the spoiled heir or prodigal son,
but his description of the hero as a calf defuses the suggestion of misconduct
by implying that Dick’s flaws are simply the product of youth and natural
high spirits.
After short stints as a dissenting minister and as a quack—the latter epi-
sode reminiscent of Rochester’s brief incognito period as the mountebank
Alexander Bendo—Dick at last succeeds to his father’s estate.129 Grieving for

the late Squire Roger and tormented, Hamlet-like, by visions of his father’s
ghost, Dick begins to drink heavily, and is soon after lured into a brothel by
a conniving madam:
A Baud i’ th’ Hundreds coax’d the Cull,
Whilst thus he lay, of Whimsies full.
And such Temptations did procure,
She had him, and his Money sure;
And when he lag’d, or seem’d to think
Of Daddy dead, and dying Chink,
Up came fresh Bottles, and fresh Glasses,
And what they falsly call fresh Lasses.
Our Youth too often find ’em stale,
And sting without a Coat of Mail.130
Once again Dick’s behavior is identified as characteristic of “Youth,” with
the conventional sex-as-war metaphor—evident here in the description of
prophylactics as “a Coat of Mail”—linking the conventionally rakish attri-
butes of sexual rapacity, physical aggression, and extravagant expenditure.
Yet this episode is also a crucial turning point in the poem’s account of
male agency, the moment when Dick’s previously innocuous propensity for
libertinage intersects with seemingly fated circumstances. Like a low-rent
Oedipus, Dick makes bad decisions, but he is also the victim of social forces
that encourage him in his misbehavior, forces initially represented by a
debauched school friend and now exemplified, more dangerously, in the fig-
ure of the mercenary bawd. Introduced to diseased prostitutes and confidence
tricksters who pose as noblemen, Dick begins to lose both his fortune and his
good health. The eighth canto of the poem accordingly sees another shift in
tone, as the comic narrative of Dick’s early misadventures gives way to an
apparently earnest lament for the hero’s hard fate. As in the earlier compari-
son of Dick with a young calf “search[ing] for sweets in dirty holes,” this
passage shifts the blame away from the rake and onto the “deceitful Whores
and Bitches” who allegedly tempt him to profligacy: where earlier in the
poem Dick is described as a “Brute,” here he is a “harmless pretty Youth” who
has been “Caught by these Sirens cursed Wiles.”131
Yet even here, the poem’s sober message is compromised by its inherently
jocular verse form, as an account of Dick’s unfortunate condition degenerates
into a glib rhyming couplet:
Poor Dick, thy Parts were never great,

The less we pity thy Estate;
Thy Innocence was never known,
Thou wast a most unlucky one;
And hadst a stupid Education,
Therefore thou’st past no Transformation.
Yet thou an Object art of Pity,
To all who hear thy fatal Ditty.132
The tension between sentiment and expression here—rather neatly encap-
sulated in the idea of a “fatal Ditty”—makes it difficult to classify this passage
as either serious moralizing or lighthearted satire. Like the segments that fol-
low, this section of the Progress seems to want both to exculpate Dick and to
condemn him. By extension, his subsequent diagnosis with venereal disease
seems to be relished both as an opportunity for black comedy and as a plat-
form for condemning aristocratic vice. And it is no coincidence that Dick’s
physical condition deteriorates alongside his financial health: just as
Wycherley’s Country Wife sees Horner championing elite male prerogatives by
equating high-risk sex with high-stakes gambling, so Breval’s poem connects
its hero’s misfortunes with financial profligacy. Like Horner, Dick enjoys tak-
ing risks—but unlike Horner, Dick has the misfortune of discovering that the
house always wins in the end.
Obliged to sell his estate to pay off his debts, Dick “begins to know / His
fate” only when it is too late to seek help.133 The speaker’s rueful references to
Dick’s terrible future—at times breathtakingly explicit—are also at times
softened by references to a common humanity, or destabilized by the reemer-
gence of a comic grotesquerie. A paragraph that begins with sobering details
of Dick’s illness, for example, soon devolves into an absurd lament for his
injured penis and testicles:
His Nose, his Throat, his Back, and Shins,
All preach Repentance for his Sins;
And that which was chief Instrument,
To make him Sin, does now repent
Of Stings like Conscience, and it weeps,
Both when he wakes and when he sleeps;
It girds him ’till he grinds his Teeth,
Above it shoots, and underneath
Hangs such a Load—such Bags of Sorrow,

Pandora might a Box full borrow,
They’d overrun Pandora’s Box
With Plagues, and fill her with a Pox.134
Once again, the tone seems to move unevenly between sympathy, con-
demnation, and ridicule, as synecdoche attributes to little-d dick the “weep-
ing” and “stings of conscience” that we would otherwise expect to encounter
in capital-d Dick. Solemn allusions to the biblical “weeping and gnashing of
teeth” are replaced by grotesque descriptions of penile discharge and bone
pain; a moralizing reference to the myth of Pandora’s box is undermined by
the ludicrous description of Dick’s testicles as “Bags of Sorrow.”135
The penultimate canto of the poem sees Dick discovering an advertise-
ment for a quack remedy and immediately sending off for the nostrum,
delighted by the false promises of a quick and easy cure:
A Bolus small of Montpelier,
And two, or three, or four of these,
Made up about as big as Pease,
Will cure a stubborn Gleet. O brave
Who’d not be Clap’d such Cure to have.136
Whether the final comment here is an early example of free indirect dis-
course (in which case it aims to convey Dick’s newfound hopefulness at being
able to treat his infection) or an illustration of the speaker’s ironic detachment (in
which case it aims to mock Dick’s credulity in purchasing the pills), the invita-
tion to “be Clap’d” parodies the bravado characteristic of both quack advertise-
ments and libertine literature. Its absurd logic implicitly questions not just Dick’s
thoughtless behavior, but also the broader cultural conception of male venereal
infection as untroubling and commonplace: like Rochester’s satire “Against
Marriage,” it promotes male promiscuity on the grounds that “the worst you can
fear is but a disease, / And diseases, you know, will admit of a cure.”
Predictably, Dick’s trials continue when he discovers that his treatment is
likely to prove substantially more costly and less effectual than the advertise-
ment had led him to believe. After sending half a crown for the first potion,
he learns that he must purchase additional powders, lotions, and ointments if
he wishes to treat additional symptoms. Throughout this episode, the speak-
er’s perspective remains ambiguous, with some sections seemingly condemna-
tory in tone, and others reveling in the grotesque and the ridiculous: Dick’s
fear that he will require an amputation of the penis is risible (“Gods! here’s a
Cord,—and here’s a Lump, / The Doctors will not leave a Stump!”);137 but his
remorse, expressed in a soliloquy that is overheard by his landlady and results
in his eviction from her property (“all is gone, and I deserve / In Garret thus
to rot and starve”) is less easily dismissed as empty mockery.138
The final canto witnesses the culmination of Breval’s effortful attempts to
combine “innocent Mirth, good Morals, and too much of the Author’s own
Experience,” as the poem’s competing comic and tragic impulses reach a cli-
max with the hero’s death. Having already attempted suicide once without
success, Dick lights on the idea of hanging himself from the “Nail i’ th’ Wall”
to which his print from Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress is affixed. Dick’s preferred
method of suicide, while chosen on the grounds that he will be able to turn
“his A[rs]e upon / Those Whores by which he was undone”—also casts him
in the role of the condemned criminal: we are told that he “hang’d himself as
decently, / As if ’t was at the Triple Tree” (a reference to the three segments of
wood used to make a gallows).139
As the comparison between nail and gallows suggests, Dick’s final act places
him on the wrong side of both Christian morality and contemporary law. Yet
the poem’s description of his death—much like the passages in which the
speaker condemns the “Whores and Bitches” who seduce him, or the
“Gamesters, Bites, and Bubbles” who cheat him at the gaming table—displaces
the blame for these illicit actions by explaining that the “Devil put it in his
Head” to hang himself.140 Indeed, at the very moment when Breval’s speaker
seems most likely to moralize on Dick’s choice, he validates the hero’s suicide by
reclassifying this ostensibly diabolical act as a feat of unregenerate courage:
Without that Cowardice, a Qualm,
Of Life departing dying Psalm,
The Rope he fix’d beneath his Ear,
And neither cried or piss’d for fear,
But from a Stool his Body whirl’d,
And dying, curs’d and d——’d the World.
Thus like a Hero Dick did swing,
A pretty Spark ne’er grac’d a String.141
Suddenly, Dick is commended for his manly fortitude: no longer the fop-
pish young man spoiled by his father’s overindulgence, he chooses to die “like
a Hero” rather than to suffer the indignities of late-stage venereal disease. Like
Horner in The Country Wife, he privileges courage over all else, even when that
courage leads him to his death. The endorsement of Dick’s tearless and stoical
end here seems strangely hagiographic, but the references to pissing and cursing
make this account a blasphemous reworking of the saint’s life—an example of
what Ronald Paulson has identified in Hogarth’s works as “sacred parody.”142
The unsettling effects of this death scene are enhanced by a final, post-
mortem episode in which an unnamed fellow rake, hearing that Dick’s body
has been denied a Christian burial, resolves to give a eulogy “O’er Dicky’s
Corps, in Roman Fashion, / Since Dick like Valiant Son of Rome, / Ne’er staid
to wait, but met his Doom.”143 While the hyperbolic language here suggests
that this is at least in part a comic gesture, it seems the darkest of dark
humor—certainly dark enough to trouble the text’s promises of “innocent
Mirth” and “good Morals.” Like the libertine speaker of Rochester’s “Disabled
Debauchee,” Dick’s eulogist champions “valiant” aggression over civilized
obedience, and his admiration suggests that Dick’s actions—much like those
of the debauchee—have exercised an important influence on other would-be
libertines. The poem ends with the text of this “Funeral Sermon,” presented
without commentary as a kind of epilogue to the narrative.144
Commending Dick’s manly bravery in the face of death, the unnamed
eulogist reaffirms a libertine code of conduct that identifies infection as a
badge of male sexual valor. In yet another allusion to Rochester, he self-
consciously invokes neoclassical heroic ideals, placing Dick’s suicide on a par
with the death of the stoical Roman statesman Cato:
Courage is an Heroic Glory,
And shines immortally in Story;
And tho’ Historians it has ’scap’d,
If great Men kill’d themselves, being clap’d,
Who doubts but this the secret Cause
Of Cato’s Death, and others was?145
The eulogist then speculates that Aristotle too might have suffered from
the venereal disease symptoms of “Shankers and Corde,” using the compari-
son to situate Dick’s death within a noble classical tradition of protest suicide:
This being then a Custom antique,
Why should we reckon Dick was frantick?
Heroick Dick could not this cross over,
And therefore dy’d like a Philosopher.146
Here, as in much libertine literature, libertinism is championed not just

as a set of behavioral patterns, but also as a coherent worldview—a libertarian
rejection of the limitations placed on elite male freedom.147 According to
Dick’s eulogist, then, “a Life is nobly spent” in “decent Whoring, / Good
Liquor, and a little Roaring.”
The text concludes on a similar note of encomium, with the eulogist
imagining how Dick might have served as a kind of libertine raconteur had
he lived to pass his “Experience” and “Knowledge” on to others:
The Saints would call thee Son of Thunder
They’d force thee to their Tables daily,
And stuff thee full, and dress thee gaily,
And place thee in an Elbow-Chair,
Th’Adventures of thy Life to hear.148
Once again there are echoes of Rochester’s debauchee here, with the aging
rake accorded the position of elder statesman and revered for histories that are
loved all the better because they are “a little Smutty.”149 The reference to
Dick’s listeners as “Saints,” rather like the contemporaneous use of the term
“nun” for “prostitute,” elevates sex to the status of a religion, parodically cast-
ing the libertine as a member of the spiritual elite. The tales of Dick’s past
exploits, in turn, become “Lectures . . . on Humane Nature”—sermon-like
illustrations of the centrality of sexual desire and sexual fulfillment to human
experience.150 Dick in his dotage embodies the values of Wycherley’s and
Crowne’s comedies, inhabiting a world where sex is natural, and the ability to
laugh at it as important as the ability to pursue and enjoy it. Venereal infec-
tion, in this context, becomes not just a marker of elite male prerogative—the
freedom to consume, to conquer, to enjoy—but also an example of what
Dick’s eulogist calls the “Liberty to joke”: the freedom to make a sport of
danger, to overwrite brutal physiological realities with phallocentric myths of
strength, virility, and courage.
Ultimately, then, works like Breval’s Progress of a Rake illustrate not just
the multifaceted nature of the connection between venereal disease and male
power in this period, but also the extent to which positive, as well as negative,
representations of male infection remained a part of British imaginative cul-
ture throughout the long eighteenth century. In championing venereal dis-
ease as an emblem of potency and a marker of elite status, Breval’s poem
seems to reflect an ethos more commonly associated with the libertine poets
and dramatists of the 1660s and 1670s. At the same time, however, the
Progress’s satiric passages reflect critiques of male misbehavior that were intro-
duced in the early eighteenth century by groups like the Society for the
Reformation of Manners, and that remained central to the public discourse
around male manners and conduct long into the nineteenth century.
While scholarship by Tim Hitchcock, Michèle Cohen, Philip Carter, and
others has shed new light on the ways in which standards of male sexual and
social conduct changed over the course of the eighteenth century, texts like
Breval’s remind us that artists, poets, and novelists could create a world gov-
erned by the values of an imaginary past rather than those of a changing pres-
ent.151 Indeed, with its strange combination of roguish comedy and po-faced
sermonizing, Breval’s Progress is indicative of the extent to which fictive rep-
resentations could both diverge from and potentially trouble real-life social
norms by championing alternative models of behavior or offering competing
assessments of misconduct. Above all, the Progress exemplifies the contradic-
tory attitudes toward male infection in the eighteenth-century imagination,
its unsettling narration proving capacious enough to allow for both raucous
celebration and vicious ridicule, both the use of laughter to dismiss disease as
an inconvenient consequence of male power, and the use of laughter to con-
demn disease as a sign of power misused.
chapter 2
he Pox and Prostitution
In a foul, rat-infested attic room, the prostitute-heroine of Jonathan Swift’s

“A Beautiful Nymph Going to Bed” performs the loathsome nightly rituals
that palliate her advanced venereal infection, removing the props that conceal
her missing teeth and hair, and applying plasters to her various “Shankers,
Issues, [and] running Sores.”1 Wiping off the “Dawbs of White and Red” her
wounds leave behind, Corinna “takes a Bolus e’er she sleeps”—only to rise
again the next morning to the “Anguish, Toil, and Pain” of reuniting her
“scatter’d Parts.”2 Even decked out with props and cosmetics, she is too gro-
tesque to withstand further scrutiny from Swift’s “bashful Muse”; he con-
cludes that “Who sees [her], will spew; who smells, be poison’d.”3
While Swift’s account of Corinna constitutes a grotesque extreme,
eighteenth-century portraits of infected prostitutes are not hard to find:
from the noseless “blear-eyed Moll” of Henry Fielding’s Amelia (1752) to the
disabled madam in Thomas Rowlandson’s A Bawd on Her Last Legs (1798),
the “poxy whore” was a well-represented type in both art and literature,
invoked as an object of ridicule, a symbol of vice, a cautionary figure, and
much else besides.4 Even Breval’s Progress of a Rake—the poem that concluded
the previous chapter’s discussion of the “maleness” of venereal disease—at
some points attributes its hero’s fatal infection to the work of malevolent
prostitutes:
62
the pox and prostitution 63
Dick’s Preaching and his Praying now,

Were turn’d to wallowing like a Sow,
In miry Holes, and dirty Ditches,
Amongst deceitful Whores and Bitches,
Witches, I mean, tho’ sure there’s no Man
Will call a common Whore a Woman;
They’re such degenerated Devils,
From Nature, that their monst’rous Revels
Can never be out-done in Hell,
Where Sinners d——’d, and Devils yell.
To see a harmless pretty Youth,
Most happy in his native Truth,
To London come, with no Defence
Against them, but his Innocence;
Caught by these Sirens cursed Wiles,
Feign’d Love, and counterfeited Smiles,
Would it not grieve a Stoick’s Soul,
To see him wreck’d and burnt t’a Coal;
Drain’d of his Vitals—not a Penny
Left of a plenteous Patrimony;
Then left to painful Operations,
Without a Friend, without Relations;
Hard Fate it is, tho’ very common,
Contriv’d by what Heav’n made, a Woman.5
Here the prostitute is morally rather than physically repugnant, her
“counterfeited Smiles” concealing the deadly infection that will leave a man
“Drain’d of his Vitals” and obliged to undertake “painful Operations.” As in
Swift’s poem, venereal disease is used to expose a prostitute’s ability to deceive
her clients: though she may appear “what Heav’n made, a Woman,” she and
her fellow whores are really “degenerated Devils” beneath the surface.
Even given the unstable irony that dominates The Progress of a Rake, the
vitriol of Breval’s attack on “Whores and Bitches” seems like evidence of a
more extensive attitude of misogyny—and indeed, much of the scholarship on
eighteenth-century culture has argued that women were “blamed” for the ori-
gin or spread of venereal disease in this period.6 Yet Breval’s speaker doesn’t
actually blame women for his hero’s downfall; he blames prostitutes, and his
account ultimately takes great pains to distinguish between the two—not least
64 the pox and prostitution
by vilifying prostitutes as “Devils” and insisting that “no Man / Will call a com-
mon Whore a Woman.” This distinction between “good” women and “evil”
prostitutes, along with an equally unstable distinction between prostitutes as
individuals and prostitutes as part of a system, were central, I would suggest, to
the representation of infected women in the eighteenth-century imagination.
It is worth emphasizing that neither of these distinctions could be main-
tained, or even consistently made, in the real world of eighteenth-century
Britain: not only were terms like “whore” and “prostitute” applied inconsis-
tently, but, as work by Tony Henderson and others has demonstrated, many
women moved back and forth between prostitution and other forms of labor.7
Undoubtedly, biographers could identify a few angry philanderers from the
period who cursed the female sex in general when an extramarital liaison
resulted in an infection; equally, cultural and medical historians have argued
that the popular medical theory tracing venereal disease back to the womb of
a promiscuous Native American might have been used to regulate and control
the behavior of all women, not just prostitutes.8 Yet while the boundary
between infected women and infected prostitutes remained problematic in
reality—indeed, perhaps because that boundary was so problematic in
reality—it continued to be energetically asserted and policed in imaginative
representation. In Breval’s text and in other eighteenth-century poems, nov-
els, plays, and prints, infected prostitutes were routinely defined not as
women, but against them.
In this chapter, I examine the broad range of connections between vene-
real disease and prostitution in eighteenth-century literature and visual art. In
the process, I suggest that this period’s imaginative conceptions of the rela-
tionship between female sexuality and venereal disease were both more
nuanced and more complex than a blanket charge of misogyny allows. If the
many sympathetic portraits of infected wives discussed in the previous chap-
ter constitute a challenge to the scholarly commonplace that women were
blamed for the disease, then so too do the many neutral, and even positive,
representations of infected prostitutes in this period.9 While some writers and
artists clearly did vilify or ridicule diseased streetwalkers, some sympathized
with them or campaigned for them; some celebrated them as examples of
social mobility, sexual vigor, or physical resilience.10 Further, while many
eighteenth-century satirists marshaled the association between prostitution
and disease to condemn female public figures, these attacks almost always
extended beyond the individual target to implicate wider moral or social evils.
Indeed, a small but significant portion of the discourse linking venereal infec-
tions to prostitution is not focused on women at all; rather, it uses this long-
standing association to condemn other forms of self-selling, including
activities (such as political campaigning) that were more commonly the prov-
ince of men.
For many writers and artists, the association between prostitution and
disease offered a means of interrogating not just the business of exchanging
sex for money, but also the pursuit of any undignified activity for the pur-
poses of personal gain. As Laura Rosenthal has shown, literary representations
of prostitutes used them to symbolize both the advantages and the disadvan-
tages of the new capitalist economy; similarly, representations of prostitute-
borne infection often conveyed broader anxieties about the commercialization
of eighteenth-century familial or political life.11 In these kinds of scenarios,
the prostitute could be male or female, and could stand in for the sycophantic
politician or hack writer as well as for the class warrior, social climber, or
exploited worker. The prostitute’s infection, in turn, could represent not only
what April London terms “the rottenness of the new monied order,” but also
other forms of corruption.12
A N I G H T W I T H V E N U S , A L I F E T I M E W I T H M E R C U RY:
S AT I R I C AT TA C K S O N P R O S T I T U T E S
The link between venereal infection and prostitutes, like all the other
associative relationships examined in this book, had its basis in perceived real-
ity: from a statistical perspective, women with many sexual partners had a far
greater risk of contracting an infection than faithful wives or those guilty of
the occasional indiscretion.13 Yet much like the disease’s association with mas-
culinity, its connection with prostitution could be figured in many ways, and
some representations departed so markedly from reality that they implicated
the prostitute in dangers far greater than her infection alone could justify.
These texts and images depicted the diseased body of the prostitute in ways
that were exaggeratedly, even impossibly, grotesque, combining elements
from discrete stages of syphilitic infection or incorporating symptoms from
different venereal conditions.
Indeed, in some Restoration and eighteenth-century satires, the infected
prostitute seems to have functioned much like the biblical scapegoat, cast out
from society and made to bear its sins in the form of particularly loathsome
corporeal disfigurements. Swift’s Corinna, tending to her missing teeth and
infected sores in the privacy of her bedroom, constitutes one example of this
type, as does the actress Mrs. Bewley—accused of both whoring and spread-
ing infection—in Robert Gould’s satire from 1682, Love Given O’re:
When all her Body was one putrid Sore,
Studded with Pox, and Ulcers quite all o’re;
(Which show’d most specious when they most beguil’d)
Sh’enrolled more Females in the List of Whore,
Than all the Arts of Man e’re did before.
Prest with the pond’rous guilt, at length she fell,
And through the solid Centre sunk to Hell.14
Here, as in Breval’s Progress of a Rake, the diseased prostitute is condemned
as subhuman, a demonic creature. Like a number of Restoration and early-
eighteenth-century satires on women, Gould’s poem does at times conflate
the categories of “woman” and “prostitute.” (Indeed, according to Felicity
Nussbaum, the “satiric myth” of this period “defines women by their very
nature as whores.”)15 Yet it is significant—and, I would argue, characteristic of
the period—that when venereal disease enters the terms of insult, only the
prostitute is targeted. The poem’s subtitle declares it to be “A Satyr Against the
Pride, Lust, and Inconstancy, &c. of Woman,” but Bewley alone is relegated to
hell, so riddled with disease that she becomes its metonym as a “putrid Sore.”
Grotesque imagery could be used not just to attack prostitutes, but also to
caution men against the dangers of whoring, with the focus moving from the
body of the infected streetwalker to the sufferings of her “victim.”16 In an
epistle from 1689, Gould warns a male friend against enjoying a “sallacious
Punk” on the grounds that his pleasures will be “attended by a lasting sting”
from venereal disease: “It rots the marrow and consumes the Brain, / And all
the Spirit of the Blood does drain.”17 Similarly, Louis Philippe Boitard’s depic-
tion of the Penlez riots, The Sailor’s Revenge (1749), uses the attack on a notori-
ous London brothel to highlight the sufferings (or, perhaps, the folly) of
infected former clients: one thin, wasted man in the foreground complains,
“The Jades have reduced me to a Shaddow,” and another, whose face bears the
tell-tale nasal disfiguration of tertiary syphilis, asserts: “Had this been some
years ago I’d sav’d my nose.”18
Equally, in poems such as Swift’s “Beautiful Nymph” and “The Progress
of Beauty,” a graphic description of the prostitute’s body ultimately gives way
to a satiric judgment that privileges male experience: just as the portrait of
Corinna ends with an assertion that he who sees her will “spew” and he who
smells will “be poison’d,” so “The Progress of Beauty” moves from an account
of the horrific symptoms that await the beautiful young prostitute Celia to a
celebration of the male desire for healthy female bodies.19 Drawing a parodic
analogy between his heroine and the goddess Diana, Swift compares “the
Moon’s Decay” with Celia’s gradual “rotting” from venereal disease. Since the
moon becomes so thin within half a month that even an astronomer can “see
but her Forehead and her Chin,” the speaker concludes that Celia, outfitted
with an earthly rather than a heavenly body, must expect such proportion-
ately severer wasting as befits her sublunary status:20
For sure if this be Luna’s Fate,
Poor Celia, but of mortall Race
In vain expects a longer Date
To the Materialls of her Face.
When Mercury her Tresses mows
To think of Black-head Combs is vain,
No Painting can restore a Nose,
Nor will her Teeth return again.21
Here, as in “A Beautiful Nymph,” the speaker dwells on the most gro-
tesque complications of venereal disease, contrasting the beauty of Celia’s cos-
metics and hair accessories with the disfigurement she will experience as her
infection progresses. The satiric commonplace of attacking a woman for her
“deceptive” use of consumable aids to vanity leads into an account of Celia as
herself a consumable product—one whose “Materialls” also, unfortunately,
have a limited sell-by date.22
The concluding stanza of the poem reinforces the casual objectification of
the prostitute’s body as Celia is dismissed as only one of many short-lived
“Beautyes” whose sole purpose is to be used and then discarded by men:
Ye Pow’rs who over Love preside,
Since mortal Beautyes drop so soon,
If you would have us well supply’d,
Send us new Nymphs with each new Moon.23
In these lines, as in his summary description of Corinna in “A Beautiful
Nymph,” Swift moves from a denunciation of the diseased female body to a
validation of the primacy of male experience: evidently, it is the health of the
john, and not that of the prostitute, that is the important issue here.
The same privileging of male perspective characterizes the opening pages

of this period’s most extensive and detailed diatribe against prostitutes,
Richard Ames’s The Female Fire-Ships (1691). In an introductory “Epistle to
the Reader,” Ames directs the poem’s cautionary message to a male audience,
explaining that his verses have been occasioned not by his own “swelling
Groin, or Weeping Clap, / Or Bubo, or venereous Shanker,” but rather, by
the experiences of a deceased friend:
If you needs must know th’Occasion,
Which put my Muse in such a Passion:
A Friend of mine Young, Airy, Witty,
Rich, Gallant, Well-belov’d and Pretty,
In two Years Time, by Punks in London,
Was Clapt and Poxt, and clearly undone,
Diseas’d and miserably Poor,
And by his Friends turn’d out of Door,
To Country goes to find Relief,
Where in two Months he dy’d of Grief.24
Here it is the rakish young man-about-town, rather than the faithful wife
of a philandering husband, who is cast as the “innocent” victim of infection.
Like the heroes of libertine comedy, Ames’s friend starts out “Rich, Gallant,
Well-belov’d and Pretty”—but where the rake-hero successfully pursues his
conquests, Ames’s friend finds himself vanquished by infected “Punks,” in an
unnatural overturning of the gender hierarchy.
As this introduction suggests, Ames’s poem not only assigns prostitutes a
key role in the spread of venereal infection but also suggests that their transmis-
sion of the disease is malicious and deliberate. Indeed, the very title of The Female
Fire-Ships, with its comparison between prostitutes, who spread the burning sen-
sations of gonorrhea, and fireships, old vessels deliberately set alight to ignite an
enemy fleet, identifies prostitutes with danger and malice: men are the enemy
here, infection the weapon. Metaphors of war or violent conflict recur through-
out, with “punks” and “whores” frequently cast as the aggressors. Ames’s use of the
sex-as-battle/love-as-war conceit also intersects—through the motif of piracy—
with broader concerns about commerce: not only does the poem identify avarice
as the prostitute’s primary motive, but the imagery also consistently aligns the
transmission of venereal disease with the circulation of goods or currency.
Framed as an address from a married Londoner (Amintor) to an innocent
young man on his first visit to town (Strephon), the Female Fire-Ships employs
a series of naval metaphors that portray men as vulnerable sailors, goods-

laden ships, and pirates’ booty, and that vilify prostitutes as predatory vessels
or seafaring mercenaries. While Amintor warns his young friend against pros-
titutes of all ranks, including the “First Rate Whores” who take multiple lov-
ers to increase their profits (they “can never sail, unless they are well Man’d”),
he is particularly condemnatory of the “Night-Walkers,” who solicit custom
indiscriminately on the streets:25
These Pyrates of the Night no prizes spare,
From Callow Youth, to Age with Silver Hair,
Who greedily the curst occasion snatches,
Board you, and clap you underneath their Hatches.26
Here the pun on “clap” connects the prostitute’s infection with her greed,
identifying the male body as both a ship and an item of commercial value; the
prostitute, in turn, becomes a pirate rather than a fireship: in servicing her
client, she robs him of both the money that is “clapped” into her “hatch” and
the health that is compromised by a gonorrheal infection.
The poem’s discussion of “Play-house Punks” similarly exploits the lan-
guage of exchange, identifying these “Whores of Second Rate” as both physi-
cally and financially costly to the unsuspecting lover:
The Play-house is their place of Traffick, where
Nightly they sit, to sell their Rotten Ware;
Tho’ done in silence and without a Cryer,
Yet he that bids the most, is still the Buyer;
For while he nibbles at her Am’rous Trap,
She gets the Mony, but he gets the Clap.27
Here again, Ames uses the terminology of getting and spending to link
the transmission of venereal disease with the mercenary motives of the pros-
titute. Won by the highest bidder, the playhouse punk exchanges “the Clap,”
and not just the enjoyment of her person, for the cash provided by her client.
As these passages suggest, the financial language of Ames’s poem is fre-
quently used to target the prostitute’s cupidity—yet the work is also critical of
her male clients and the larger commercial system of prostitution. The lines
that follow Amintor’s description of playhouse punks, for example, reiterate
the transactional nature of the sexual encounter between john and prostitute
and of the pathological “transfer” of venereal infection, but they figure male
lust as akin to financial greed: initially enjoying what seem like “stollen
snatches of unlawful Love,” the unwary john ultimately finds that “the total
Sum of all his gains, / Are Saffold’s Pills, to Cure all sorts of Pains.”28 Here the
client’s desires are translated into economic terms, with the male partner
rather than the avaricious prostitute cast as the plunderer keen to enjoy the
“unlawful” goods he has “stolen.” In this context, venereal disease becomes
part of a wider attack on the economics of prostitution—an economics that
requires at least two participants, a buyer and a seller, for each transaction.
More broadly, the poem’s comparison between the transmission of venereal
disease and the circulation of capital potentially ascribes an element of cor-
ruption to all forms of commercial exchange.
Other aspects of Ames’s poem reinforce this emphasis on broader eco-
nomic processes. For one thing, while the poem’s satiric argument relies on
the dismissal of economic necessity as a motive for the prostitute’s choice of
trade, its structure betrays a keen awareness of financial status: the speaker
moves by “degrees” from wealthy courtesans down to the most destitute of
streetwalkers, and venereal infection is associated only with the lower orders.
Thus, while the “first rate” whore is accused only of deception, avarice, and
inconstancy, the “Night-Walker” and the “Common Whore” breed serious
infections.29 The final section of the poem separates these impoverished pros-
titutes from the wealthier kept mistresses and playhouse punks, dramatizing
this shift in subject matter as an unwelcome physical relocation into a quar-
antined zone of infection:
Breath, breath [sic] a while, my over-heated Muse,
Before you enter their accursed Stews;
Where Aches, Buboes, Shankers, Nodes and Poxes,
Are hid in Females Dam’d Pandora’s Boxes.30
Where the bodies of courtesans and playhouse punks are simply decep-
tive, the vagina of the common whore is a “pandora’s box” of evils, and the
brothel an insalubrious environment in which economic deprivation is
reflected in physiological decay. While the inverse relation between economic
prosperity and likelihood of infection here does not translate into greater
sympathy for the lower-class prostitute—quite the contrary, since Amintor
seems to loathe the squalor of destitution almost as much as he loathes the
spread of disease—the passage does implicate poverty, and not just avarice, in
the spread of infection. In these lines too, then, the poem’s account of prosti-
tution seems to be informed by a broader mistrust of circulating capital, with
the motif of contagion used to attack the need as well as the greed for money.
The same principles operate in the poem’s description of the diseased lib-
ertines who, having visited infected brothels, repent too late of their desires:
Step to the Lock in Southwark any day,
Where you will with a kind of Horror view,
Clapt Sparks in Fluxes, Penitently stew;
The Sight’s so nauseous, in my Soul I think,
This very instant Time, I smell the Stink.31
Here again the commercial nature of prostitution allows for an equation of
lust with greed, since Ames’s categorization of infected johns as “Sparks”—a
derogatory term used to describe fashionable or foppish young men—connects
desires for commodified fashion with desires for commodified sex. Just as the
impoverished whore’s need for money and the mercenary prostitute’s desire for
it are condemned through the association with venereal infection, so the liber-
tine’s greed for purchasable pleasures is punished by a swift transition from
circumstances of luxury to circumstances of squalor.
Crucially, the poem’s structural distinction between prostitutes of different
degrees is complemented by a broader framework that uses the threat of vene-
real infection to contrast the evil prostitute with the virtuous woman who
remains unsullied by both commercial and sexual intercourse. Like Breval’s
denunciation of “whores and bitches” in The Progress of a Rake, the opening
and closing sections of The Female Fire-Ships take pains to define “whores”
and “women” as discrete categories. Amintor insists to his young friend that
while prostitutes may appear female, they are really creatures of a completely
different kind: “Women indeed to outward view they seem, / But [they] are
their Sexes scandal, blot, and shame.”32 However angelic on the outside, they
host a “frightful Fiend within, / Who whets their lewd desires, and eggs them
on,” he explains.33 Once again, prostitutes are identified not just as unwom-
anly, but as inhuman, compelled by a demonic force to behave in ways unnat-
ural to their sex.34
The conclusion of the poem sees Amintor reiterating this split between
“good” women and “bad” prostitutes as he encourages his young addressee to
follow his example and marry:
And now with me will Gentle Strephon joyn,
And think a Vertuous Woman all Divine;
By contraries some things are best set off,
For let the vicious Libertines still scoff,
If Strephon’s happy in a Charming Bride,

In Lifes rough Seas with her we’ll safely ride.35
Here, once again, Ames is at pains to isolate prostitutes as a discrete group,
with the corrupted whore and the “Vertuous Woman” established as “contrar-
ies.” Whereas diseased prostitutes are pirates, “keen to clap [men] underneath
their Hatches,” virtuous women are honest shipmates, protected from the
corrupting influence of money and content to sail on “Lifes rough Seas” with-
out desiring it.36
“A T I N C T U R E O F T H E T I M E S ” :
THE INFECTED PROSTITUTE IN CONTEXT
Texts such as Ames’s Female Fire-Ships used the contrast between wife and
whore to condemn the prostitute as an emblem or agent of infection, but the
same opposition was routinely invoked in attacks on male sexual inconti-
nence. Thus, a essay on anger by Thomas Gordon in 1720, for example, reviles
the libertine alongside the “beastly Strumpet, poison’d with Quicksilver and
the Pox,” for whom he “flings away his Health, and risques his Soul, kills, or
rather murders his innocent Wife, and most paternally entails Rottenness and
an infamous Example upon his Posterity.”37 Similarly, Daniel Defoe’s Conjugal
Lewdness of 1727 condemns lust by invoking the stock scenario of the hus-
band who transfers an infection from his “Strumpet” to his “innocent Bride.”38
Even Swift’s condemnations of prostitutes in “The Progress of Beauty” and “A
Beautiful Nymph Going to Bed” exist within a poetic oeuvre that portrays
women as the victims of male sexual vice, too: in “Phillis, or the Progress of
Love,” for example, a young woman turns to prostitution in order to meet the
financial demands of her spendthrift husband—and contracts a venereal
infection in consequence.39 In these texts, the diseased prostitute appears as
just one of many character “types” implicated in a wider moral decline.
Indeed, while many eighteenth-century writers and artists condemned the
figure of the infected prostitute, few condemned her in isolation. Attacks on the
“poxed whore” often fed into critiques of the wider systems and structures that
facilitated transactional sex and the concomitant spread of venereal disease.40
Some representations of eighteenth-century prostitution even made the issue of
the prostitute’s agency explicit: in the anonymous A Conference About Whoring
(1725), for example, a debate over the culpability of prostitutes is dramatized as a
conversation between an alderman’s wife and a visiting country gentleman. The
gentleman begins by denouncing prostitutes as “filth” and insisting that “to be
seduced by such, is like going gradually and deliberately into a Pest-house; or

bartering our Reason for a Distemper.”41 Like the speakers of Breval’s Progress of
a Rake and Ames’s Female Fire-Ships, he defines streetwalkers as nonfemale and,
ultimately, subhuman: when a woman is no longer modest, he explains, “she
becomes quite another Creature than God made her” and is “a Monster and a
Dunghill.”42 He also ascribes a malevolent agency to the prostitute’s transmission
of venereal disease, imagining how such “monsters” might “inveigle an heedless
Lad” in order to “pick his Pocket, ruine his / Body, [and] prophane his Mind.”43
Yet the lady of the house counters these arguments with the suggestion
that such “poor Wretches” should be “lamented” as well as condemned, since
they are the victims as well as the abettors of corruption: “Tho’ they are highly
to blame and unjustifiable, yet they are not only to blame; they have a Tincture
of the Times they were bred in; and are almost kept in Countenance by the
Looseness of the Age, to which you Men have not a little contributed; by ill-
using, or not wisely exerting the Power properly lodg’d in your Sex.”44 Here
the infected prostitute is identified not as an isolated predator, distinct from
the rest of her sex and even her species, but as part of a larger system—a semi-
autonomous figure whose actions, though morally wrong, are nonetheless
demanded and perpetuated by economic processes outside her control.
Other works spread the blame by implicating the quacks, pimps, and
other mercenary figures who profit from the prostitute’s labors. In Gould’s
1689 satire The Play-House, for example, an attack on prostitutes gives way to
a diatribe against the surgeons who “heap up an Estate by our Debauches.”45
Like Ames, Gould is concerned with the financial ramifications of prostitu-
tion, but his poem condemns the commercialization of venereal disease treat-
ment as well as the commercialization of sex. While he begins by attacking
the “reeking Punks” who solicit business in the playhouse, he goes on to
declaim against the surgeons who, “for their single share, / Pocket at least five
hundred pound a year”:
So cunning too are these Pox-Emp’ricks grown,
Live ye, or dy, they’l make the Cash their own;
Expensive Malady! where people give
More to be kill’d than many wou’d to live!
Some get Estates by other deaths, but here
The very dying does undo the Heir.46
Gould’s satire takes in all those who support the economics of prostitu-
tion, including surgeons and their patients as well as the women he describes
as “Factresses for death.”47 Gould ultimately extends his critique to include

not just those who inhabit the morally bankrupt realm of the playhouse, but
city dwellers at large: “The Town may be concluded curst, / For here few dy
but are half rotten first.”48 In this account, as in the Conference about Whoring,
the prostitute, while blameworthy, is still only a cog in a much larger machine,
with greed ultimately held responsible for the range of human vice.
HISTORICAL FIGURES DENOUNCED AS PROSTITUTES
While many satires, including Gould’s, imagined the figure of the infected
prostitute as a general “type,” offering a vision of the broader consequences of
commercialized sex, others used the link between venereal disease and prosti-
tution to target specific female public figures. In these works, political as well
as financial power was often at issue, and the stigma of infection was used to
undermine women who appeared to be getting too close to monarchs, minis-
ters, and other important men. Venereal disease in this context frequently
symbolized the moral or ideological corruption resultant from petticoat gov-
ernment, with powerful women accused of prostituting themselves for finan-
cial gain or political advantage.
Several satires on Charles II’s court targeted the king’s French mistress
Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, for example, by portraying her
as a diseased prostitute. Here is one example, taken from a scathing attack on
Kéroualle and the Catholic Duke of York (the future James II) in 1680:
Portsmouth, that pocky bitch,
A damn’d Papistical drab,
An ugly deform’d witch,
Eaten up with mange and scab.
This French hag’s pocky bum
So powerful is of late,
Although it’s both blind and dumb,
It rules both Church and State.49
In these lines, Kéroualle is characterized as a “drab”—another term for a
prostitute—and credited with introducing into Charles’s court some of the
foulest symptoms of venereal infection. Her presence carries a twofold threat,
symbolizing not only her emasculation of the king, but also her ability to
spread the infection of her “Papistical” views throughout “Church and State.”
A similar rhetoric prevails in a Restoration satire probably written around

1677 and published in 1704 in Poems on Affairs of State. The poem’s title rather
explicitly summarizes its subject: “The Downfal of the French Bitch, England’s
Metropolitan Strumpet, the Three Nation’s Grievance, the Pickled Pocky
Whore, Rowley’s Dalilah; all in a word, The damn’d dirty Dutchess.”50 This
foul-mouthed attack condemns Kéroualle—at this point probably genuinely
suffering from a venereal disease and rumored (incorrectly, as it turned out)
to be losing her position in Charles II’s court—by using terms that align her
with filth and disease. The “Duchess I’the’Dirt” is said to have been given “a
Glister” (an enema), to stink so “vilely” that “If Rowley [the king] should
smell her, ’twould give him a Stool,” and to be more “noisom” than “the thing
that beshit us having got the wild squirt” (the shit that spoils clothing during
a bad bout of diarrhea).51 While fecal imagery predominates here, the poem
ultimately identifies Kéroualle with venereal as well as scatological squalor,
casting the duchess and her fellow royal mistress Nell Gwynn (originally from
the parish of St. Martin’s) as infected prostitutes:
The Wench of St. Martins who gave us the Clap,
Or Nelly, drawn in Kennel, as ’twas her Mishap,
Or the thing that beshit us having got the wild squirt,
Was nothing so noisom as Dutchess i’th’Dirt.
Then faugh! Carwel, faugh! for a stinking French Bitch;
Jane Shore was more wholesome when dead in a Ditch.
How came the Mischance, if it was one, let’s know?
Had the spoil of the Land o’erballanc’d her so,
That she sunk by the Weight her Whoredom had gotten
To be her support now her Carcase is rotten?
Never Whore so mistaken! Faith, Rowley, her Grace
Is lame on all four, not fit for the Race.52
Here Kéroualle (“Carwel”) is compared to the notorious prostitute Jane
Shore, with the “rot” caused by venereal disease used to attack both her greed
for money—Kéroualle was Charles’s most costly mistress, given a large annual
pension and her own set of apartments at Whitehall—and her Francophile
influence on English politics. Denounced as less “wholesome” even than
Shore, Kéroualle is also the more corrupt of Charles II’s “two Whores”: while
Nell spreads “the Clap,” Kéroualle carries a full-blown pox. Both mistresses
are also figured as subhuman, with Gwynn likened to a dog “in Kennel” and
Kéroualle to a horse “lame on all four” and “not fit for the Race.” The poem
concludes by anticipating Kéroualle’s “Fall,” predicting that “As Rowley grows

stiff, and can leap her no more, / She’ll rot in a Ditch as her Sister Jane Shore.”53
As these concluding lines suggest, “The Downfal of the French Bitch”
isolates Kéroualle as an agent of infection, and while there is some implicit
critique of Charles for allowing such a creature into his court, the primary
target of the poem is clearly his mistress. Such specificity of focus, however,
was relatively rare: most other Restoration and eighteenth-century satires
using the link between prostitutes and disease to attack a specific public figure
also targeted the people around her, and while women were certainly more
likely to be caricatured as prostitutes, they were by no means more likely to
be charged with carrying or spreading the disease. In satires on royal mis-
tresses or well-known adulteresses, the female figure often appeared as one-
half of a corrupt couple, or as one of many willing to prostitute themselves for
social or political power. In this context, the trope of the diseased prostitute
was frequently used not just to attack an individual’s behavior but also to
condemn the prostitution of the self more broadly.
Activities like hack writing and political campaigning offered obvious paral-
lels with sexual prostitution, and visual and literary satires from the period used
the similarity to depict both male and female public figures as infected prosti-
tutes. One example of this flexible use of the trope appears in the cluster of
caricatures attacking Charles James Fox and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire,
in the run-up to the notorious Westminster elections of 1784. Georgiana’s pas-
sionate endorsement of Fox—which included financial support and allegedly
culminated in the duchess’s exchanging of kisses for votes, according to opposi-
tion slander—left her open to the charge of prostituting her physical charms,
and she was alleged (perhaps unjustly) to be having an affair with Fox at the
time.54 Yet many of these caricatures use the link between prostitution and infec-
tion to attack bribery, pandering, and other dubious campaigning practices,
rather than to accuse Georgiana herself of sexual misbehavior. Indeed, while
almost all these prints make the conventional parallel between physiological and
moral decay, they vary noticeably in their use of the prostitution motif, examin-
ing different kinds of prostitution as well as different satiric targets. Those cari-
catures that portray the duchess as an infected prostitute focus as much on her
involvement in politics as on her love life; other images use the tropes of disease
and prostitution to attack Fox alone, to condemn both Fox and Georgiana, or
to implicate the couple alongside other agents in the campaigning process. In
these images, sexual and political prostitution are one and the same, with men
as well as women capable of spreading infectious party politics.
Some satires very clearly equate Georgiana’s political work with sexual pros-
titution. In Thomas Rowlandson’s Dark Lanthern Business, Or Mrs Hob and
Nob on a Night Canvass with a Bosom Friend (1784), for example, Georgiana is
pictured standing outside the notorious Covent Garden bagnio Haddocks with
two other women: her fellow political campaigner Albinia Hobart and an
unidentified figure, presumably the “bosom friend” of the title (fig. 2.1).55 All
three women are apparently prostitutes, with the unidentified “friend” dashing
into the bagnio with a man while Hobart and the duchess remain outside, solic-
iting business.56 Both Georgiana and Hobart hold up lanterns, and Georgiana
attempts to lure in a young man whom she has taken by the arm, and whom she
advises to “vote for whom you please but Kiss before you poll.” Here Rowlandson
directly refers to the kisses-for-votes rumor, equating political canvassing with
distributing sexual favors.57 The young man declines Georgiana’s invitation,
insisting, “Tis too much, neighbour! I could not go through with it”—perhaps
because he has seen the black spot on the bosom friend’s cheek, or the suspicious-
looking pocks on the duchess’s uncovered breasts.58
2.1. Thomas Rowlandson, Dark Lanthern Business, 1784 (Reproduced

courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
Signs of disease and debility appear not just on the women, but also on their
voter-customers, in a technique that obliquely invokes the analogy between the
body natural and the body politic. While Georgiana grasps an attractive young
specimen, Hobart holds up her lantern to reveal two disabled men: a ragged-
looking pensioner with an eye patch, and a black amputee who supports him-
self on crutches. Remarking on her ill fortune, she exclaims, “D——n the
Duchess, She got all the young voters.” In the two women’s “clients,” as in their
contrasted appearances (both are portrayed as corpulent, but Mrs. Hobart’s
unattractive features seem designed to remind us of Georgiana’s reputed
beauty), the print comments on a preference for style over substance, in politi-
cal as well as in sexual partnership. At the same time, the contrast between the
two women’s political views—Hobart was canvassing for Fox’s opponent, Sir
Cecil Wray—suggests that Rowlandson’s larger target was the practice of cam-
paigning rather than Georgiana or the Foxite Whigs specifically.
While Dark Lanthern Business invokes the trope of the diseased prostitute
to ridicule the efforts of female canvassers, other satires on the Westminster
election use the same metaphors of prostitution and infection to attack cam-
paigning male politicians. In Isaac Cruikshank’s Carlo Kan (1784), for exam-
ple, Fox is depicted as having burst his breeches through the physical exertions
required to “cajole the Westminster Electors” (fig. 2.2).59 With his hands
clutching at his lower abdomen and a pained expression on his face, Fox is
described as a “State Tinker in Sundry pursuits not for fame but Cash.” In
this image, it is Fox rather than Georgiana who has prostituted his person,
and Fox whose health has been damaged in consequence: the caption explains
that “Poor Carlo” has burst under the strain of pleasing the electorate, and
that, despite the efforts of “several medical people of little fame,” his has been
pronounced “a ruptured case and incurable” by “B——d.” Here, in a straight-
forward application of the politics-as-prostitution analogy, Fox’s political
exertions are figured as sexual exertions, his political failures as sexual disease.
(The connection with venereal infection is suggested not only by his unbut-
toned breeches, but also by the blanked-out name’s fitting that of William
Bromfield, then surgeon at the London Lock Hospital.)
Another print from 1784, The Devonshire Method to Restore a Lost Member,
uses the charge of infection to critique Georgiana and Fox together (fig. 2.3).
Here the Westminster election campaign is imagined as a visit by the couple
to an apothecary’s shop to purchase a remedy for venereal disease.60 Once
again, political and sexual misbehavior coincide, with synecdoche used to
equate Fox’s sexual “member,” apparently “lost” to an infection and about to
2.2. Isaac Cruikshank, Carlo

Kan, 1784 (© The Trustees of the
British Museum)
be “restored” with the apothecary’s treatment, with his political status as a

sometime Member of Parliament, now campaigning to regain his lost seat.
This time the duchess flaunts her financial rather than her personal assets,
handing a coin purse to the apothecary and issuing the command, “His Tail
restore, you shall have more.” The apothecary, in return, promises his assis-
tance, boasting, “My Famous Pills cure many Ills.”
Significantly, although it is Georgiana who purchases the remedy, the
image as a whole identifies Fox rather than his patroness as the infected party:
two small bottles marked “Mr. Fox” sit on the shop counter, and he trails
behind her with an anxious expression on his face, his foot trapping a flyer
advertising “Dr. Leakes Antivanerial Drops.” A woman standing behind Fox
predicts his political defeat with another coarse pun, exclaiming, “Oh poor
Fox will Loose his tail.” By identifying the embattled politician with his ani-
mal namesake—the perennial object of the hunt—she highlights the danger
to both man and beast with the reference to a fox losing his tail (a reference
that is cleverly echoed in the fox-fur muff around her hands). Once again the
2.3. The Devonshire Method to Restore a Lost Member, 1784 (Reproduced

wording and imagery allow for a series of double entendres as “looseness” is

equated with “losing,” and Fox’s imperiled political career is emblematized by
his imperiled sexual parts.
While this image places emphasis on the male rather than the female
body, with both text and image insinuating that Fox suffers from venereal
disease while the hardened Georgiana soldiers on, it reverses the financial
circumstances of conventional sexual prostitution, with Fox cast as the impov-
erished creature whose patroness must pay for his cure. Rather than invoking
works that depict the male client as a fragile victim of the diseased prostitute’s
malevolence, this image brings to mind plate 3 of Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-
Mode, in which the wealthy Viscount Squanderfield is shown visiting an
apothecary’s shop with his young mistress to procure a remedy for venereal
disease. The emphasis on Fox’s infected body also links the Devonshire Method
with a range of other eighteenth-century caricatures—including Thomas
Rowlandson’s Kings Place and James Gillray’s Blood & Co. Setting Fire to the
Tower (1788), as well as Carlo Kan—that attribute the symptoms of venereal
disease to Fox alone, or to Fox in the company of other men.61
Other satires on Georgiana and Fox ridicule the diseased couple alongside
other campaigning politicians. In Fox and Burke as Hudibras and Ralpho (1784),
for example, a scene from Samuel Butler’s satire on the English Civil War is
used to raise the issue of political corruption, but Georgiana and Fox are pic-
tured with Fox’s ally Edmund Burke (fig. 2.4).62 Fox is given the role of Butler’s
hero, the self-righteous Presbyterian “knight-errant” Hudibras, with Burke cast
as his equally fanatical and foolish squire, Ralpho, and Georgiana appearing as
the wealthy widow to whom Hudibras has been paying his addresses. The print
illustrates a scene from book 2 of Butler’s poem, in which Hudibras and Ralpho
are rescued by the widow after having been captured and placed in the stocks
by a group of bear baiters. In this version of the scene, however, the two men
are held in a debtor’s prison—a detail that reflects Fox’s financial bankruptcy, as
well as his diminished chances of regaining a parliamentary seat.63
Bills on the prison wall invoke the motifs of prostitution and venereal
disease, with one advertisement announcing “Several Pouting lips to be hired
by the day by Deven” and another touting “Leakes justly famous pills for cur-
ing the vener[e]al [disease].” The question here, however, is who is exploiting
whom: while Georgiana is accused—again via the kisses-for-votes rumor—of
prostituting her personal charms, Fox is the one trying to secure the assistance
of a wealthy lover. It is his person—and Burke’s—that is seemingly up for
purchase, since the men’s release can be secured only through a financial
exchange between patron and keeper. The only difference is that in this case,
the keeper is not a bawd running a brothel, but a turnkey running a prison.
The same varied use of the prostitution-disease link characterizes some of
the many satiric prints attacking the well-publicized affair between the future
George IV and his lover, Maria Fitzherbert. Much like the rumored relation-
ship between Georgiana and Fox, the liaison between George IV and
Fitzherbert—a Catholic widow some six years his senior—made the pair an
obvious target for caricaturists working in the final decades of the eighteenth
century. And once again, while these images routinely connect venereal dis-
ease with sexual promiscuity, the satiric target shifts from print to print. Some
images focus on George alone, some attack both partners, and some con-
demn George and Fitzherbert in the context of a wider group.
Many caricatures produced in the decades before George’s assumption of
the regency in 1811 use the metaphor of prostitute-borne infection to criticize
the young prince’s hedonistic lifestyle, identifying his behavior as a potential
threat to the health and wealth of the monarchy. The “spending” being inter-
rogated in these satires is as much financial as sexual, with images of George
2.4. Fox and Burke as Hudibras and Ralpho, 1784 (Reproduced

in the company of pockmarked prostitutes used to implicate the royal incum-

bent as both a spendthrift and a “whoremonger.” In Isaac Cruikshank’s A
Meeting of Creditors (1795), for example, George is confronted by a group of
angry madams—one with a heavily pockmarked face, another sporting the
disfigured nose characteristic of advanced venereal infection—each of whom
holds out an unpaid bill for services rendered (fig. 2.5).64
Similarly, many prints condemn the prince’s behavior through tactful “prod-
uct placement,” showing George with well-known venereal disease remedies in
his possession. James Gillray’s well-known A Voluptuary Under the Horrors of
Digestion (1792), for example, while it focuses on the prince’s gluttony—George
is shown reclining after a large meal, the one fastened button on his waistcoat
straining against his bloated belly—also hints at other forms of excess: on the
table behind him are the familiar bottles of Velno’s and Leake’s venereal disease
remedies (fig. 2.6).65 In this caricature, as in Cruikshank’s Meeting of Creditors,
the reference to infection contributes to an attack on George’s habits of con-
sumption—habits that apparently include the liberal purchase of sex, as well as
of food, drink, and other commercially available pleasures.
2.5. Isaac Cruikshank, A Meeting of Creditors, 1795 (Reproduced

2.6. James Gillray, A Voluptuary under the Horrors of Digestion, 1792

Other prints from the 1780s and 1790s use the symbols of disease and
prostitution to ridicule George and Fitzherbert as a couple. Fitzherbert’s sta-
tus as a Catholic widow made her particularly likely to be identified in the
satiric imagination with prostitution and its pathological consequences, and
of the many caricatures from this period that condemn the prince’s playboy
lifestyle by depicting him in the company of one or more of his lovers, only
those that show him with Fitzherbert make persistent and emphatic use of the
link between profligacy and venereal disease.66 As a woman who had outlived
two previous husbands, Fitzherbert was already a target for the stereotype—
exemplified by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Sterne’s Widow Wadman, among
others—of the sexually rapacious widow. But her Catholicism and ostensible
ties with France (she spent a period there in 1784—ironically, to discourage the
prince’s advances) also put her in line with the many eighteenth-century texts
and images that connected the “French pox” with French “popery.” Caricatures
of Fitzherbert from this period often identify her as both a lustful whore and
a pious Catholic—an ironic combination that chimes with the contempora-
neous use of “nun” as slang for “prostitute.” Pictured with her legs apart or her
breasts exposed, she is also rarely without a rosary or some other symbol of
Catholic ritual.
As with the satires on Charles II and Kéroualle or the attacks on Fox and
Georgiana, the attacks on George and Fitzherbert have a political dimension
that extends beyond the female partner: with the king’s health deteriorating
and the young prince set to assume the throne, George’s infatuation with a
Catholic widow meant that he was unlikely to pursue a more appropriate
marriage partner or sire the legitimate heirs necessary to continue the royal
line. (The king would never have authorized a union between his son and
Fitzherbert, and marriage to a Catholic would have obliged George to forfeit
his right to the throne in any case, under the regulations laid out in the Act
of Settlement of 1701.)67 Accordingly, just as the attacks on Fox and Georgiana
also condemned corrupt campaigning practices, and the satires on Charles II
and his French mistress exposed wider concerns about “Papistical” contagion
and petticoat government, so the caricatures of George and Fitzherbert used
the symbols of infection and prostitution not just to vilify Fitzherbert, but
also to question the integrity and judgment of the soon-to-be monarch. These
images, like those of Fox and Georgiana, are not uniform in identifying the
female partner as the source of contagion: some implicate the prince along-
side his lover, and some suggest that Fitzherbert might be a victim of George’s
behavior rather than an aider and abettor of it.68
The print The King’s Evil (1786), for example, initially appears to be point-
ing the finger of blame at Fitzherbert, the print’s title seeming to implicate her
as a malign influence on the future king (fig. 2.7).69 Arrayed in dishabille and
with legs akimbo, Fitzherbert is pictured sitting at a small table on which are
placed several bottles and a note. She has evidently just received the bottles—
containing some sort of remedy for venereal disease—along with the instruc-
tions for their use: with one hand, she holds a letter opener that points toward
the prince; with the other, she points at the note, which advises application “to
the part affected.” Fitzherbert’s posture and attire clearly imply the sexual avail-
ability, even if not the actual status, of a prostitute, and her gestures seem to
identify her as the agent in this scenario: it is she who appears to have ordered
this medication and now commands its use, she who directs—both with the
pointing letter opener and with her pointing finger—the prince’s future.
Yet neither the image nor its title is wholly unambiguous in blaming
Fitzherbert. Is she really the “evil” the caricaturist seeks to attack? Or might the
“king’s evil” be the moral corruption his infection represents, with the substi-
tution of a sexual disease for a bacterial one intended as a critique of the prince’s
dissolute habits?70 While the image implies that Fitzherbert is promiscuous
and aggressive (a kind of prostitute-virago in the style of the “dirty duchess”
Louise de Kéroualle), it also seems to condemn the actions of her foolish lover.
George is pictured standing next to Fitzherbert in the posture of a pouting
child, his arms crossed over his chest and a sour expression on his face—but his
apparent passivity is compromised by the privileged status reflected in his cos-
tume: he grips a riding crop and wears riding boots, and these, along with the
garter ribbon that is tacked to the wall above Fitzherbert’s head and arranged
to appear like a leash or halter, suggest that he was, at least initially, the one who
pursued the relationship: he is cast as the hunter or the rider here, and
Fitzherbert as his mount or his prey.
Further, if the “evil” of the title is meant to refer to venereal disease, only
George appears to be suffering from it: Fitzherbert’s pointing finger seems to
be instructing the prince on a course of treatment that applies to him alone,
and the two upside-down pistols mounted on the wall behind him imply that
he is, to use modern parlance, “firing blanks.” The gun barrels point at George’s
head, signaling the threat to his, and perhaps the nation’s, future—but the
print as a whole implies that George is at least partly responsible for his afflic-
tion. Like the image of Georgiana and Fox in the apothecary’s shop, The King’s
Evil focuses on the dangers of infection for men—but once again, this bias can
be interpreted in two ways: on one hand, it may indicate that only male infec-
2.7. The King’s Evil, 1786 (Reproduced courtesy of

the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
tion is of consequence; but on the other, it may mean that the satirist wishes to
brand only the male partner with the stigma of venereal disease. Ultimately,
the print might best be understood as critical of both parties: Fitzherbert may
be an “evil,” but George hardly fares better as the impotent fool.
James Gillray’s caricatures of the couple are similarly complex and ambigu-
ous, with some using venereal disease imagery to offer a more sympathetic view
of Fitzherbert’s role in the affair. In Dido Forsaken (1787), for example, Gillray
attacks the prince’s betrayal of his lover when, to support a bid for more money
to cover his rising debts, George falsely claimed to his parliamentary ally Charles
James Fox that there had been no marriage, legal or illegal, between himself and
his mistress (fig. 2.8).71 (George and Fitzherbert were married in a clandestine
service in 1785.) Here, satire on the prince’s profligacy—both financial and
sexual—makes Fitzherbert a victim as well as a perpetrator, with Gillray casting
George’s denial of the union as Aeneas’s abandonment of Dido, queen of
Carthage, in book 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid. Like Dido, Fitzherbert throws herself on
a burning funeral pyre in her despair. And like Dido, she can be understood as
occupying a number of conflicting symbolic roles: she is a foreign other, a poten-
tial antagonist (or at least a distraction) for the hero; she is a seductress, a living,
breathing embodiment of dangerous sexual desire; but she is also a woman
betrayed, a dignified queen whose unhappy situation warrants our sympathy.
In Gillray’s image, as in many other such caricatures, Fitzherbert’s
Catholicism and her sexuality intersect. Holding a crucifix, she wears a belt
marked “chastity” that has been broken open, and at her feet are a number of
apparatuses designed for the mortification of the flesh, some of which conve-
niently double as sexual fetish items: a bed of nails (with a sheet of paper
directing its use “for the conversion of Heretics”), a whip, a pair of birch rods,
an axe, shackles. While these items represent Catholic barbarity and supersti-
tion, they also potentially identify Fitzherbert as a prostitute: in a number of
prints from this period, prostitutes are shown with birch rods in their posses-
sion, and Fitzherbert’s exposed right breast aligns her with the many bare-
breasted prostitutes featured in popular eighteenth-century caricatures.72
Yet these emblems don’t necessarily vilify Fitzherbert outright, particularly
when considered alongside her role as the abandoned queen of Carthage. As
Dido, Fitzherbert is the injured party, and George her betrayer; to wit, in
Gillray’s image, the “logs” of Fitzherbert’s funeral pyre are shaped like enor-
mous penises, their blackened skins implying that the “fire” on which she has
been left to burn is a venereal infection courtesy of her faithless partner. (Here,
as in many other satires from the period, fire is used to symbolize the burning
2.8. James Gillray, Dido Forsaken, 1787 (Reproduced courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
sensations caused by gonorrhea.)73 This reference to disease is reinforced by a

clever detail: all the penis-logs are shown with their foreskins retracted, as
though erect, except for one, near the center of the pyre. This penis has the
tightened, narrow foreskin characteristic of phimosis, a condition sometimes
identified by eighteenth-century medical writers (albeit incorrectly) as a symp-
tom of male venereal infection. While the condition is relatively obscure
today, it would have been very familiar to Gillray’s audience from the elabo-
rate joke about Tristram Shandy’s “accidental circumcision” (an injury that the
family physician, Dr. Slop, believes will “end in a phimosis”) in Sterne’s popu-
lar comic novel. These details suggest that the sexual and moral corruption
tainting George’s union with Fitzherbert originates in his, rather than her,
misconduct. However unchaste or untrustworthy in her own right, Fitzherbert
is also in some sense a victim, and Dido Forsaken cleverly exploits this unstable
distinction between Fitzherbert’s alleged power as an influence on the prince,
and her ultimate powerlessness as his cast-off mistress.
The print’s composition reinforces this sense of imbalance by visually
separating male from female, agent from acted-upon: the image of Fitzherbert
on the left is balanced by the retreating figures of George and his political
allies—Fox, Burke, and Lord North—as they sail away, in a boat ironically
named Honor, on the right. George looks back at his lover and treacherously
declares, “I never saw her in my Life,” his allies supporting his betrayal with
cries of “No, never.” Fitzherbert may be publicly branded the whore, but here
it is George who compromises his “honor” in exchange for money, George
who is guilty of prostitution. In another innovative visual pun, Gillray depicts
William Pitt and Henry Dundas, the two men who negotiated an increase in
George’s allowance on the basis of his denial of the marriage, as the two zeph-
yrs who waft the little boat out to sea: full of hot air, they push George along,
working—literally as well as figuratively—behind Fitzherbert’s back.
A subsequent print by Gillray, The Lover’s Dream (1795), is similarly mixed
in its assessment, identifying Fitzherbert once again as an “evil,” but reserving
its strongest condemnation (and the symbols of prostitution and disease) for
George (fig. 2.9).74 In this image—a satire on the recent negotiations between
the prince and his father, whereby the former agreed to marry on the grounds
that his debts be paid and his income increased—George is pictured asleep
and dreaming of his bride-to-be, Princess Caroline. A winged cupid and a
winged figure of Hymen fly toward them, while a smiling George III and
Charlotte look happily on, the king holding a bag labeled “£150,000 per
annum,” and the queen a book on “The Art of Getting Pretty Children.” The
2.9. James Gillray, The Lover’s Dream, 1795 (Reproduced courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
print is labeled with lines paraphrased from Milton’s Comus that describe the
soul of a chaste lady, adapted into a tongue-in-cheek encomium on the
eagerly-awaited Caroline: “A Thousand Virtues seem to lackey her, / Driving
far off each thing of Sin & Guilt.”75 Here, as in Dido Forsaken, it is George
who prostitutes himself, in this case quite openly trading sex for money, since
the “virtues” of an increased allowance evidently come with an obligation to
be fruitful and multiply.
Fitzherbert appears to the left of the sleeping prince, her face among the
things of “Sin & Guilt” allegedly driven off by Caroline’s arrival. Pictured
alongside her are Fox, who holds a dice box; Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who is
dressed as a Jew; and two of the prince’s other mistresses. Fitzherbert’s position
within this grouping reinforces her status as a subordinate figure: clearly, sex is
only one of the many vices on which George now turns his back, and Fitzherbert
only one of several women he has taken up and subsequently abandoned.
Indeed, although all three of the women of “Sin & Guilt” bear pockmarked
faces, it is George who appears to be the source of the contagion, since a large
bottle of Velno’s syrup sits in a chamber pot next to his bed. In this scenario,
the prince’s venereal infection has potential repercussions not just for him and
his former mistresses, but also for the next generation of Hanoverian rulers: the
king and queen require a healthy heir, and the book in Charlotte’s hands,
Claude Quillet’s poem La Callipedie ou l’art d’avoir de Beaux Enfans (written in
1665, and first published in English in 1710 as Callipaedia, or the Art of Getting
Pretty Children) was an early foray into what we would now call eugenics, com-
plete with a warning about the dangers of hereditary infection.76
C O M M E M O R AT I O N , C E L E B R AT I O N , C O M E DY:
M E M O I R S O F B AW D S A N D P R O S T I T U T E S
From poetic attacks like Swift’s “Beautiful Nymph” to caricatures like

Dido Forsaken, the satiric archive in literature and visual art testifies to the
diversity and complexity of eighteenth-century conceptions of prostitutes
and prostitution—even when those conceptions were primarily condemna-
tory. Alongside these attacks, however, were works that portrayed the figure
of the infected prostitute in less critical terms. These novels, poems, memoirs,
and engravings—some of them, like Gillray’s caricatures, focused on real
public figures, others partially or entirely imaginative—provide a counterpart
to the satiric material, demonstrating that women who prostituted them-
selves could be celebrated or admired, as well as denounced and ridiculed.
The many memoirs of bawds and courtesans published in this period offer
a particularly useful comparative in this regard. As Laura Rosenthal observes,
these narratives ask readers “to view the world through a whore’s perspective,”
and they tend to approach prostitution from a stance of either sentimental
engagement or libertine enthusiasm.77 In these texts, venereal infection can
serve a number of purposes: it can humanize the prostitute and elicit sympa-
thy for her sufferings, or it can showcase the prostitute’s resilience, establishing
her as the indomitable antiheroine of a life of vigorous sexual adventure.
Where satiric attacks on prostitutes routinely invoked the tragedy of male
infection to warn men of the dangers of whoring, the many picaresque-style
memoirs devoted to celebrating robust madams, courtesans, and streetwalkers
replayed that tragedy as farce, sometimes quite explicitly contrasting the hardy
prostitute with her debilitated client.
In the Genuine Memoirs of the Late Celebrated Jane D****s (1761), for
example, the exploits of the eponymous heroine (presumably the well-known
prostitute Jane Douglas) are interspersed with tales of other sexual adventur-
ers, including that of a foolhardy man who assumes that his use of a condom
will keep him completely safe from infection:
He soon afterwards found himself p——d in the most shocking man-
ner imaginable; and having unfortunately fallen into the hands of an
unskilful surgeon, he lost the part which he thought so well secured by
the instrument above-mention’d.
It was cut off inch by inch, and his groin being covered with
buboes, he one day, in the height of misery, took a knife and cut and
gash’d himself in a most terrible manner.
In a short time after he died a sad example of the fatality of that
machine, called a [condom]; and tis to be hoped our readers will take
warning by his fate, and not place too much confidence in such weak
armour.78
The moralizing conclusion to this episode seems to identify prostitutes as
a potential danger even to those who take sensible precautions, with the
narrator’s description of the disfigured male body implicitly contrasted
with the seeming good health of the young prostitute who infects him. Yet
the absurdity of the john’s medical treatment—not so much a surgical castra-
tion as a piecemeal penis amputation—rather undermines the cautionary
message, as does the narrator’s breezy dismissal of this “tragical” story to
“conclude . . . with a merry tale.”79 Here the infected client is not a
“Martyr” to the prostitute’s malevolent cupidity, but rather, the butt of a

coarse joke.
Similarly, in the biography of Ann Catley, we are introduced to the actress’s
sister Poll, who, while working as a prostitute to support her young lover,
contracts a venereal disease that inconveniences her—but kills him:
Poll was obliged to retire into Dr. Stephens’s hospital near Dublin, and
the student was taken home by his friends, but his disease baffled
every art; the violence of the medicines administered, and the process
of cure he underwent, reduced him to a decline, without radically
expelling the virulent poison in his blood, and he died a miserable
martyr to gross debauchery.
Poll, however, recovered, and having a tolerable voice, and a name
which would make an attracting figure in a country play bill, got an
engagement in a strolling company, from which time Fame has
neglected to report the incidents of her life.80
Here again the caution against “gross debauchery” is easily lost in the
narrative’s brisk and eventful plotline, its brief lamentation over the male
“victim” of venereal disease followed by a celebration of the robust young
prostitute who emerges unscathed from yet another perilous encounter.
Admittedly, there is some sense in which these tales of resilience might be
seen to privilege male interests, by dismissing the danger of disease for prosti-
tutes and thus potentially supporting the stereotype of the “happy hooker” (a
type perhaps best exemplified in eighteenth-century literature by John
Cleland’s Fanny Hill, who never once contracts an infection, despite a long
and varied career in prostitution).81 Yet stories like Poll’s must be seen in rela-
tion not just to those texts and images that portray the prostitute as a cheer-
ful, hot-blooded creature, but also to the many memoirs that champion the
prostitute as a figure of strength, self-discipline, or ambition.82 The heroines
of these tales are effectively the female analogues of Rochester’s and Wycherley’s
rake-heroes, dismissing venereal infections as an inconvenient but largely
untroubling dimension of adult sexual life. Where such memoirs often differ
from male libertine literature is in their treatment of class conflict: while the
rake-hero typically seeks to reinforce gentlemanly privilege, the ambitious
prostitute often blurs or challenges class boundaries. In some such works, she
becomes sufficiently wealthy or well connected to abandon prostitution for a
more lucrative or respectable position elsewhere. Venereal disease in these
tales is identified as a universal problem, suffered by rich and poor; it can even
serve as another means by which the prostitute-heroine effects the social level-
ing that she otherwise pursues through transactional sex.
In Charles Walker’s Authentic Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues and Adventures
of the Celebrated Sally Salisbury (1723), for example, the eponymous heroine is
championed as an ambitious and cunning avenger, determined to exact a
physiological as well as a financial toll on her well-to-do clients.83 In one epi-
sode, Sally is accosted by a foreign nobleman who denounces her as a “Damn’d
Confounded Pocky Whore” and threatens her with violence for infecting
him: “I am glad we are met, for now will I give you as many Stripes as I’ve
taken Pills, Bolus’s, and other Hellish Slip-slops on your account.”84 After
defusing his anger with “sham Tears” and promises of free no-strings-attached
sex, Sally takes her revenge, introducing the baron to a debauched young
woman with whom he falls in love, and for whose debts to Sally he is subse-
quently imprisoned (at Sally’s bidding, of course) after they are married.85
While Walker’s narrative ostensibly exposes criminal behavior, its editorial
tone is jocular, and the entertaining tales of Sally’s exploits frequently have the
effect of championing her as a class warrior rather than condemning her as a
renegade.86 A good portion of the text is constructed from letters purportedly
sent to Walker by Sally’s disgruntled former clients—but these too are often
amusing, and some take on the ludicrous aspect of an outraged “Dear Sirs”
letter to a local newspaper, with the irate letter writer becoming the butt of
the joke. Although the work does not always cast Sally in a flattering light, it
is far more directly critical of her clients and detractors: in the text’s epistle
dedicatory, for example, Walker denounces as “presumptive hypocrites” those
women who would presume to judge Sally’s conduct while maintaining “an
unsuspected Gallantry with Thousands” themselves.87
It is perhaps further worth noting that the Authentic Memoirs identifies
Sally not just as a source of venereal infections, but also as a recipient of them:
according to Walker, the young Sally “could not boast of very many Triumphs,
before she fell into the Hands of an uncautious, roving Libertine, who had
like to have made her fall a Victim to the Tomb of Venus.”88 This early
encounter leaves Sally with what turns out to be a very serious infection, and
she is saved from death at the age of fifteen only by the extraordinary exer-
tions of her madam, the notorious Elizabeth Wisebourn (or “Mother
Wybourn”). Here, as in the pseudo-biography of her published in 1721,
Wisebourn is commended for her skill in treating “venereal cases”: Walker’s
text claims that her “care was so great to keep every thing safe and sound, That
she us’d often to say of her Girls, These Chitty-Faces make me undergo more
Fatigue than a Vintner’s Boy, for I scower their Insides as clean, every Night, as if
I made use of Shot and a Bottle-Brush.”89 Here Wisebourn’s pragmatic approach
to sexual hygiene is a source of coarse humor—she compares her role in
“scouring” the insides of prostitutes’ vaginas with the role of a vintner’s ser-
vant tasked with scrubbing out empty wine bottles—but it is also an unsubtle
reminder that the dangers of venereal disease apply to prostitutes as well as to
the men who visit them.
In the fictional Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Maria Brown
(1766)—sometimes misattributed to John Cleland—prostitute-borne infection
is treated with a similar combination of pragmatism and bawdy humor. Like
Sally, Maria contracts and spreads venereal disease—but where Sally metes out
infections like a headmistress administering discipline, Maria intends no harm
to her lovers, and is mortified to discover that she has passed the disease on to “a
young fellow, that lodge[s] in the same house” as she does.90 While Maria has
none of Sally’s ambition, her transmission of the disease likewise brings class and
gender hierarchies to the fore, since the young man in question—a hack writer
named Mr. Williams—no sooner learns of his situation than he launches into a
self-indulgent “soliloquy” on “the lamentable state of a poor bachelor.” Without
the finances to marry immediately, and fearing imprisonment for “crim-con”
(criminal conversation, that is, adultery) if he resumes an abortive affair with
another man’s wife, Williams sees his condition as a gross injustice, complaining
that “if a man lives single his constitution is destroyed, and his health and purse
are made the prey of quacks and empirics.”91 While Maria tactfully suggests that
his energies might more usefully be spent in locating “some skilful surgeon or
apothecary” to cure him, she privately questions Williams’s implicit assumption
that sex is somehow a basic right for a man in his position. The obvious alterna-
tive to risking infection, Maria wisely observes, would have been “to surmount
all such passions, till such a time as he could meet with a woman who was
capable of making him happy in the married state.”92
Despite such somber reflections, Maria Brown ultimately identifies vene-
real disease as a treatable problem, and the infection episode becomes broad
comedy when Williams’s search for medical assistance leads him to a “high
German doctor” very much like the absurd Dr. L—— in Tobias Smollett’s
novel Humphry Clinker, from 1771.93 In Maria Brown, the pretentious physi-
cian, a popular stock character of eighteenth-century comic fiction, serves as
both exemplar and expert, with the German doctor’s prolix disquisition on
the nature and origins of venereal disease undermined by his own syphilis-
ravaged features:
Mr. Williams stared at him for the first time, and espying he had no
nose, he began to withdraw from any farther examination, as he im-
mediately was struck with an opinion, that he could have no great skill
in venereal cases, who had not the talent to save his own nose.94
While the doctor eventually perceives his patient’s alarm and explains that
he was born with a nasal deformity from “some infection that had been com-
municated between his father and mother in the very act of generation,”
Williams excuses himself and returns home, relating the whole encounter to
Maria as a joke:
When the author returned, and gave an account of his adventure with
the learned doctor, I could not refrain from laughing, though it was
upon so melancholy a subject; as he heightened the detail by a ludi-
crous description of the doctor’s dress and appearance, which must
have been very ridiculous, considering his physiognomy in a volumi-
nous three tailed periwig, and a short flash pocket olive-colour frock,
with a broad gold lace.95
The episode concludes with Maria’s summary explanation that “we both
soon got well, without applying farther to the high-German doctor, the aid of
an incision, or even the loss of a nose.”96 Here, then, as in much libertine
literature, venereal disease is invoked in its full physical horror only to be
dismissed as a remote and somehow untroubling risk.
While texts like Sally Salisbury and Maria Brown temper the terrifying
realities of infection by exploiting its potential for dark comedy, other courte-
sans’ memoirs maintain a more somber view of infection, and some implicitly
suggest that it ought to be regarded in more tragic terms. In A View of the
Beau Monde: or, Memoirs of the Celebrated Coquetilla (1731), for example, the
heroine’s infection initially seems to be presented as a kind of penalty for her
coquetry—but it quickly develops into something far more serious:
All the Rakes of Quality visited her; nay, she often dined or supped at
the Tavern with twenty of them at a Time, till at last, a certain Knight
of the —— made her a very cruel Present, of which, according to his
wonted Goodness and Generosity, he publickly boasted. This made
her begin to think a little; but, alas! it was too late; yet she took no
Care to be cured, but drank, as she called it, to drown Sorrow, till her
Distemper began to appear in dismal Simptoms. She now found her-
self deserted by all; the little she brought from Mrs. H——ll’s, was
lavished away; nor could she get Bread, but as she was sent for by
Mother N——m, to sing to Company.97
In this account, Coquetilla’s imprudent behavior—both in entertaining
twenty men at a time and in taking “no Care to be cured”—appears to be a
contributing factor in her infection, but her subsequent poverty, isolation,
and physical suffering still invite the reader’s sympathy. The same language of
exchange that often characterizes satiric attacks on prostitutes is here used to
defend the heroine, since the ironic description of an infection as a “Present”
works to expose the absence of “Goodness and Generosity” in the john, rather
than to condemn the avarice of the prostitute. And unlike Sally Salisbury,
who proves to be all the more dangerous for her ability to spread disease,
Coquetilla finds that her condition prevents her from obtaining work, and
thus robs her of what little power—sexual and financial—she might have had
to begin with. Although she meets with a lucky escape, captivating a colonel
who falls in love with her and pays for her treatment, the chance nature of
Coquetilla’s rescue reinforces the sense of her vulnerability.
One of the heroines of Love a la Mode: or, the Amours of Florella and Phillis
(1732) is similarly endangered by a client’s pathological “present.” Here, as in
Coquetilla’s narrative, venereal infection initially seems to be a kind of punish-
ment for misbehavior: living as the kept mistress of a general, Phillis duplicitously
“honour[s] a French Nobleman with her Company” for “a Present of 20
Guineas”—only to receive, along with her cash reward, “a Present very common
to that Nation, which she communicated to the General,” and for which he vows
to strip her and turn her out onto the street.98 Although Phillis escapes before the
general is able to make good on his threats, she still ends up destitute, infected,
and alone: the lover with whom she subsequently seeks refuge runs off with her
possessions and leaves her “once more expos’d to the World . . . but in a much
worse Condition than before; for the nauseous Distemper increas’d daily, and the
few Trifles she had left, which she happen’d to have about her, when the Villain
ran away with the rest, were not sufficient to raise Money enough for her Cure.”99
While Phillis’ infidelity to the general is a crucial factor in her first infection,
her punishment seems disproportionately harsh, not least because a subsequent
episode sees her infected by an unfaithful keeper—and this time, the infection
is sufficiently severe that both partners “very narrowly escap[e] with Life.”100
While the philandering lover expresses remorse for his behavior and promises
to compensate Phillis financially for “the injury he ha[s] done” her, their recon-
ciliation—cemented by a stay at his father’s country seat in Wales—ends with
his contracting and transmitting “the same dreadful Distemper” to her again as
soon as they return to London.101 In what seems a near-inevitable addition of
insult to injury, this same man, having subsequently inherited his father’s title
and estate, fails to make good on his earlier financial promises, and when
Phillis’s new husband attempts to sue him for the promised allowance, her
name is blackened in court by his allies: “Such a horrid Pack of Witnesses were
produced, for no other end but to traduce the unhappy Lady; by endeavouring
to prove, that she had given my Lord the Distemper by which he had twice near
kill’d her; [and] the Jury in their great Humanity, thought fit not only to decide
in favour of his Lordship, but order’d the Diamond Necklace [he had given to
Phillis] to be return’d to him.”102 Here, once again, venereal disease becomes a
means of emphasizing a prostitute’s vulnerability rather than her predatory
power, since Phillis’s compromised social position prevents her from defending
her reputation or securing her property. Just as the vicious john’s “gift” to
Coquetilla is anything but an act of “Generosity and Goodness,” so Phillis’s
infection exposes the prejudice and cruelty (rather than the “great Humanity”)
of those who presume to sit in judgment on her.
S Y M PAT H Y F O R “ D E G E N E R AT E D D E V I L S” :
A HARLOT ’S PROGRESS (1732) AND RODERICK
RANDOM (1748)
Whether wholly fictional or rooted in real experience, memoirs such as

Love a la Mode provided a more nuanced as well as a more sympathetic view
of the infected prostitute, demonstrating, among other things, how the social
distinction between “women” and “prostitutes” could be used to penalize
those who left the profession as well as those who remained in it. These texts
could champion marginal characters and espouse unorthodox, even radical,
politics—but they ultimately constituted only one tradition within a literary
and artistic culture that could imagine the life of the infected prostitute in
compassionate as well as condemnatory terms. Indeed, although we now tend
to associate the stereotype of the “fallen woman” with the nineteenth-century
novel, this figure was already popular in the 1700s, with a number of
eighteenth-century writers using the techniques of sentimental literature to
identify the diseased prostitute as an object of charity rather than of reproach.103
One of the most notable sympathetic portraits of an infected prostitute to
emerge in fiction appears in Tobias Smollett’s 1748 novel The Adventures of
Roderick Random. I mentioned this novel’s relatively uncomplicated attitude
to male venereal infection in the preceding chapter, but the inconvenience

suffered by Smollett’s hero is explicitly contrasted, near the end of the first
volume, with the far more serious consequences of venereal disease for a
young prostitute named Miss Williams. Just as the distinction between robust
whore and debilitated male client could be used either to condemn prosti-
tutes or to champion them as models of resilience, so the comparison between
Roderick’s merely uncomfortable symptoms and Miss Williams’s near fatal
ones encourages the reader to feel sympathy for the infected streetwalker.
Smollett plays up the contrast between the two infected characters by draw-
ing psychological, social, and spatial parallels between them: not only do
Roderick and Miss Williams end up renting adjacent rooms in the same house,
but their lives are connected by a previous encounter. When Roderick over-
hears groans of pain and rushes to his neighbor’s assistance, he is shocked to
discover that the woman he finds next door, in a “deplorable” state, is “the same
individual lady, who had triumphed over [his] heart” in an earlier affair—a lady
whose fate had always seemed to him to be “inseparably joined” to his own.104
The revelatory exchange between Roderick and Miss Williams that fol-
lows this reunion relies heavily on the conventions of the sentimental novel,
with the distressed prostitute reviving from her initial fainting fit only to
return her rescuer’s embraces, “shed a torrent of tears” and then “relaps[e] into
another swoon.”105 Roderick, having heretofore occupied the role of enter-
prising young picaro, now embodies the values of the man of feeling, his
breast “filled with compassion” at the sight of his distressed former lover.106
His sympathy for Miss Williams persists despite her subsequent revelations
that she “had a base design upon [Roderick’s] person,” that she is now “a
woman of the town,” that she is “dangerously infected,” and that she “put
herself into the hands of an advertising doctor, who, having fleeced her of all
the money she had, or could procure, left her three days ago in a worse condi-
tion than that in which he found her.”107
While Roderick does register some disapproval of Miss Williams’s past
conduct, the narrative notes only that he “moralized upon these particulars”—
and such oblique moralizing, crucially, does not preclude his undertaking sev-
eral concrete acts of charity. Having already pledged to “share [his] last farthing
with her,” Roderick subsequently invites Miss Williams to move into his room
and promises to “undertake her cure as well as [his] own.”108 Like his exclama-
tions of pity on first seeing Miss Williams—he insists that “such extremity of
distress must have waked the most obdurate heart to sympathy and compas-
sion”—Roderick’s actions here seem designed to challenge the reader to emu-
late his kindness.109 That message is reinforced by a plotline that proves

Roderick’s generosity to have been well placed, since Miss Williams turns out
to be “not only an agreeable companion . . . but also a careful nurse.”110
In the scenes that follow, Roderick and Miss Williams are increasingly
identified as equals in their intelligence and resourcefulness, differing in their
fortunes primarily because of the greater economic and social opportunities
afforded to men. Indeed, the novel’s next chapter—a lengthy interpolated nar-
rative entitled “The History of Miss Williams”—serves as a kind of counter-
point to the main plotline, giving us insight into a life that, while less detailed
in the telling than Roderick’s, is no less complex and varied in its experiences.
Unlike Walker’s Authentic Memoirs of Sally Salisbury and other such “factual”
accounts, the history of Miss Williams is written in the first person, and its
detailed anatomizing of the heroine’s motives and feelings both humanizes the
prostitute and distinguishes her from the stereotype of the predatory “fire-
ship.” Miss Williams’s account also seems designed to expose social, economic,
and sexual biases; we see her being penalized for some of the same experiences
that add pleasure and variety to Roderick’s life. Like Roderick, Miss Williams
is thoughtful and audacious; like him, she has enjoyed an early life full of
experimentation and adventure; and like him, she has taken sexual risks that
have resulted in a venereal infection. But whereas Roderick has taken those
sexual risks by choice, Miss Williams has been forced into them by necessity:
her narrative details how an early suitor seduced her and then disappeared,
leaving her without any means of financial support.
The narrative of seduction and abandonment that characterizes Miss
Williams’s early life might now seem a cliché, familiar from its extensive use
in nineteenth-century novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, and oth-
ers, but Smollett’s use of the trope here confirms that such stories were already
in circulation by the mid-eighteenth century; it also suggests that early ver-
sions of the “fallen woman” narrative could be both explicit and sympathetic
in their account of the dangers of venereal disease for prostitutes.111 Indeed,
“The History of Miss Williams” not only predates the more obliquely told
tragedy of Eliza Brandon in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, for example, by
some fifty years, but also reworks some of the key elements in A Harlot’s
Progress, William Hogarth’s print series from 1732—which Sophie Carter has
identified as a synthesis of earlier popular narratives about prostitutes.112
(While some of these earlier narratives are unabashedly condemnatory, oth-
ers—such as the Spectator’s account of a “beautiful Country-girl” who is
targeted by “the most artful Procuress in the Town,” made “a prey to Lust,”
and finally “delivered over to a Famine”—are, like Smollett’s novel, more

sympathetic.)113
I discuss A Harlot’s Progress in greater detail in the final chapter of this
book, but, in brief, the six images of Hogarth’s series depict scenes in the life
of Moll Hackabout, a beautiful Yorkshire girl who comes to London to find
work as a seamstress, is lured into prostitution by a madam (identifiable in
the first plate as the notorious Mother Needham), and ultimately falls prey to
venereal disease (figs. 2.10–2.15). As a narrative of “progress,” the series charts
the downward mobility of its heroine from an initially comfortable position
as a kept mistress, to the more precarious life of a common prostitute, to a
stint in Bridewell prison, and, finally, to a painful and futile death from vene-
2.10. William Hogarth, A Harlot’s Progress, plate 1, first published, 1732

2.11. William Hogarth, A Harlot’s Progress, plate 2 (Reproduced

real disease. Since each image in the series represents just one moment in
Moll’s life, however, much of the heroine’s story remains open to interpreta-
tion, and the viewer is not only invited to decipher the many details in each
image, but also required to fill in the blank spaces between images.
Because it leaves so much unexpressed, A Harlot’s Progress asks, but never
really answers, the question whether Moll is to blame for her own misfor-
tunes.114 On one hand, the series seems to condemn her as financially and
sexually rapacious, and to present her infection as a deserved punishment.
Despite having a choice between prostitution and “honest” labor, she clearly
agrees to work for Mother Needham when she arrives in London (plate 1).
She also clearly decides to betray her keeper, a wealthy merchant, and so paves

the way for her own demotion from mistress to common whore (plate 2).
Finally, she chooses to associate with criminals, and so becomes a criminal
herself: the third plate in the series shows Moll in a state of undress, with a
wig box belonging to the highwayman John Dalton—presumably a former
client—sitting atop her bed. Sir John Gonson, the magistrate famed for his
raids on Covent Garden brothels, is pictured entering the room with three
armed bailiffs, presumably to arrest Moll for prostitution. The pocket watch
that she holds out to the viewer implies involvement in petty theft; it also
connects this image with the many eighteenth-century prints and caricatures
that depict prostitutes as pickpockets.115
Yet the Progress’s first plate also clearly identifies Moll as a victim of cir-
cumstance. Hogarth trades on the stereotype of the country bumpkin to sug-

gest that Moll’s Yorkshire upbringing has left her innocent and ignorant,
making her an easy target for sexual predators. She fails to recognize the dan-
ger lurking behind Mother Needham’s overtures of kindness, or to identify
the conspiratorial relationship between Needham and the man standing out-
side the Bell Tavern (identifiable as the convicted rapist Colonel Charteris),
for whom Needham is clearly procuring female company. A goose in the
foreground is labeled as a gift from Moll to her loving cousin, but that
cousin—who was presumably engaged to meet her upon her arrival in
London, and whose presence would have protected her from Charteris and
Needham—has failed to appear. A nearby clergyman might also have been
expected to help—but he has buried his head in a pastoral letter. These details
lead us to question the inevitability of Moll’s fate, because the subsequent

events of Moll’s life follow on from this one highly contingent moment. Yes,
Moll has chosen a profession that isolates, imprisons, and finally infects her—
but has she chosen it consciously? If we consider the ambiguous first plate of
the series alongside the more condemnatory third, A Harlot’s Progress seems to
be advancing the same view as the alderman’s wife in A Conference About
Whoring: prostitutes are “highly to blame . . . yet they are not only to blame.”
Venereal infection, in this context, becomes something like an occupational
hazard: predictable, given the nature of the profession—but nonetheless lam-
entable when it happens.
Smollett’s “History of Miss Williams” offers a much fuller account of its
heroine by virtue of its prose medium—yet Smollett’s narrative is also far

more directive in its treatment of the prostitute’s “progress,” openly encourag-

ing us to sympathize with her, and to see her disease as an injustice rather than
a punishment. There are many similarities with Hogarth’s series: like Moll,
Miss Williams is recruited by an unscrupulous madam; and like Moll, she
experiences the life of a prostitute as an increasingly precipitous descent down
the social ladder. She too initially occupies the relatively prosperous position
of a kept mistress, but is subsequently forced to “entertain in a public man-
ner.”116 In Miss Williams’s account, however, we get a much fuller sense of the
indignities of life as a common prostitute, as she recalls the mistreatment she
was forced to endure in her lowered position: “I was obliged to retrench, and
enter into articles with the porters of certain taverns, who undertook to find
employment enough for me, provided I would share my profits with them—
Accordingly, I was almost every night engaged with company, among whom
I was exposed to every mortification, danger and abuse, that flow from drunk-
enness, brutality and disease.”117 Here, as in Ames’s The Female Fire-Ships,
disease is clearly associated with lower socioeconomic status, thriving in the
insalubrious atmosphere of the tavern, and circulating among brutes and
drunkards. And because Miss Williams’s social descent seems inevitable, so
too, perhaps, does her infection with venereal disease.
Yet Miss Williams’s narrative also consistently reminds us that she has been
“obliged” to serve as a prostitute, rather than choosing it designedly. Indeed,
the account of her misfortunes invites us to see her as the victim of exploitation
by those who wish to profit from her desirability—a list that includes the tav-
ern porters, as well as their clientele. This emphasis on the larger structures that
facilitate prostitution, rather than on an individual prostitute’s “choices,” is
reinforced by exclamations in which Miss Williams urges Roderick to pity not
just her, but every woman in the profession: “How miserable is the condition
of a courtezan, whose business is to sooth, suffer and obey, the dictates of rage,
insolence and lust,” she exclaims.118
Similarly, while Miss Williams’s declining fortunes, like Moll’s, bring her
into contact with criminals and result in her arrest and imprisonment in
Bridewell, there are crucial details of plot and motive that lead us to identify
Miss Williams as an object of sympathy rather than censure. Unlike Moll,
Miss Williams never deliberately beds a criminal, and never engages in petty
theft—but she is nonetheless unjustly arrested as a “thief ’s accomplice” when
a client flees from a bagnio, leaving her “answerable, not only for the reckon-
ing, but also for a large silver tankard and posset bowl, which he had carried
off with him.”119 These details, like Phillis’s conviction by a merciless jury in
Love a la Mode, highlight the prostitute’s vulnerability, implicitly suggesting
that the blame for her misfortunes must be placed on all those who mistreat
her, including those (like the judge who presumes Miss Williams’s guilt and
sentences her to prison) who are motivated by prejudice instead of lust.
Unsurprisingly, neither Miss Williams nor Moll Hackabout manages to
thrive in Bridewell—but after this episode, Smollett’s account of his prostitute-
heroine begins to diverge more markedly from that of Hogarth’s Moll. Initially,
Miss Williams’s fortunes seem to revive: she regains her good health and begins
working at another brothel, conquering her feelings sufficiently to appear “in the
most winning and gay manner [she] could assume.”120 Her charm secures her a
growing reputation and increasing prosperity—and only when the madam of
the house, jealous of her success, spreads false rumors that she is “unsound” does
she fall once again into “want of gallants [and] want of money,” and face renewed
detention for debt.121 (Interestingly, the vicious madam seems to take a leaf out
of Sally Salisbury’s book in her manipulation of Miss Williams here, “purposely”
lending Miss Williams money so as to be able to arrange for her arrest.)
While this episode seems initially to support the misogynistic common-
place that male mistreatment of women pales beside women’s brutality to one
another, the madam’s savagery is rivaled, even surpassed, by the cruelty Miss
Williams endures from the brothel’s male customers. Not only do they respond
to the news of her alleged infection by treating her with “aversion and dis-
dain,” but they ridicule her distress when a bailiff arrives to arrest her for debt:
“They even laughed at my tears, and one of them bad me be of good cheer, for
I should not want admirers in Newgate,” she recalls.122 In another similarity
with Phillis in Love a la Mode, Miss Williams is presumed diseased, just as she
was earlier presumed guilty of theft—and like Phillis, she is assumed to be the
source rather than the recipient of the infection.
In the end, only a chance encounter with an unnamed “sea-lieutenant”
enables Miss Williams to escape imprisonment, but, as in the Memoirs of the
Celebrated Coquetilla, the contingency of the rescue seems designed to highlight
the precariousness of the prostitute’s position. Indeed, the sea-lieutenant turns
out to be exceptionally, even implausibly, generous: he not only discharges the
bailiff by paying Miss Williams’s debts, but also remains unfazed by her
“unsound” condition, defending her against the “wit” who denounces her as a
“fire-ship,” insisting that she is “more like a poor galley in distress that has been
boarded by a fire-ship such as you.”123 Here, in a clever reworking of the con-
ventional metaphor that women are “vessels” intended for male use, the sea-
lieutenant questions the presumed transmission pattern from prostitute to
client, attributing to the john rather than to Miss Williams the hostility and
dangerousness of a “fire-ship.”124
While a happy interval as the sea-lieutenant’s mistress initially protects
Miss Williams from further injury, she is subsequently obliged to return to the
streets, and a real infection soon takes the place of a rumored one. In this
context, venereal infection is portrayed as the culminating injury in a series of
violent encounters: “When I lighted on some rake or tradesman reeling home
drunk, I frequently suffered the most brutal treatment; in spite of which I was
obliged to affect gaiety and good humour, tho’ my soul was stung with resent-
ment and disdain, and my heart loaded with grief and affliction.—In the
course of these nocturnal adventures, I was infected with the disease that in a
short time render’d me the object of my own abhorrence.”125 Once again the
narrative both humanizes the infected prostitute and prompts us to regard
prostitution as an exploitative industry rather than an individual “lifestyle
choice”: unlike the cheerful, lusty prostitutes who often feature in pornogra-
phy, Miss Williams plies her trade unwillingly, feigning “gaiety and good
humour” because she has no alternative. And as in many prostitutes’ memoirs,
the damage caused by unscrupulous male clients is psychological and patho-
logical, with infection presented as the final and possibly fatal calamity in a
narrative that borrows deftly from the conventions of sentimental tragedy.
Roderick’s response to all this testimony reinforces the text’s interrogation
of gender hierarchy, since he compares Miss Williams’s situation with his own
and finds it “a thousand times more wretched.”126 While he himself might have
recourse to “a thousand different shifts” to earn his living, without ever “forfeit-
ing [his] dignity” or “subjecting [him]self wholly to the caprice and barbarity of
the world,” Miss Williams is forced into a profession that “entails upon her the
curse of eternal infamy.”127 Roderick’s observations keep the emphasis on pros-
titution as a system; he begins openly to question the larger structures that
restrict opportunities for women and then excoriate them for practicing the
one profession that remains within their reach. Crucially, although Roderick’s
initial assessment of these injustices focuses specifically on Miss Williams, he
concludes by echoing her earlier expressions of sympathy for all prostitutes,
regardless of their circumstances: “Of all professions I pronounced that of a
courtezan the most deplorable, and her of all courtezans the most unhappy.”128
Just as Roderick’s reflections here expose and question gender hierarchy, so
Miss Williams’s final remarks on prostitution interrogate hierarchies of wealth
and class. In a radical reassessment of the infected prostitute, Miss Williams
concludes her history by exposing as fraudulent the long-standing conception of
venereal infection as a disease of the poor—a conception not just promoted by,
and productive of, eighteenth-century satires against prostitutes, but also invited
by her own complex history. Imagining the “progress” of a prostitute who, like
Hogarth’s Moll, moves swiftly from a position of affluence to one of indigence,
Miss Williams argues that nothing more than one unlucky encounter separates
the celebrated society mistress from the despised, penurious streetwalker:
I have often seen . . . a number of naked wretches reduced to rags and
filth . . . some of whom, but eighteen months before, I had known the
favourites of the town. . . . And indeed the gradation is easily conceived:
the most fashionable woman in town is as liable to contagion as one in a
much humbler sphere; she infects her admirers, her situation is public;
she is avoided, neglected, unable to support her usual appearance, which
however she strives to maintain as long as possible; her credit fails, she is
obliged to retrench and become a night-walker, her malady gains ground,
she tampers with her constitution, and ruins it; her complexion fades, she
grows nauseous to every body, finds herself reduced to a starving condi-
tion, is tempted to pick pockets, is detected, committed to Newgate,
where she remains in a miserable condition, ’till she is discharged because
the plaintiff will not appear to prosecute her. Nobody will afford her
lodging, the symptoms of her distemper are grown outragious, she sues
to be admitted into an hospital, where she is cured at the expence of her
nose; she is turned out naked into the streets, depends upon the addresses
of the lowest class, is fain to allay the rage of hunger and cold with gin,
degenerates into a brutal insensibility, rots and dies upon a dung-hill.129
The extraordinary level of detail in this account not only allows Miss
Williams to create a suffering individual character out of a reviled urban “type”
(compare, for example, Polly Peachum’s brisk account of the virgin turned pros-
titute who “rots, stinks, and dies, and is trod under feet” in John Gay’s Beggar’s
Opera), but also enables her to suggest how close that reviled figure might be—
in social, financial, and even spatial terms—to the middle- or upper-class
reader.130 Roderick’s declaration that Miss Williams is “unfortunate, not crimi-
nal” implicitly supports this final point about the instability of social boundar-
ies: just as there is little that separates the toast of the town from the despised
streetwalker, so there is little that separates the “unfortunate” woman from the
“criminal” prostitute. Seen in this light, Smollett’s narrative ultimately ques-
tions not only the relegation of venereal disease to the “lowest orders,” but also
the denunciation of infected prostitutes as “degenerated Devils.”
T H E S E N T I M E N TA L I Z E D P R O S T I T U T E A N D
CALLS FOR REFORM
On the basis of my account here, Roderick Random may sound more like
a polemical pamphlet than a novel, and it is worth emphasizing that Roderick’s
encounter with Miss Williams constitutes only one episode in a much longer
text. Yet the popularity of Smollett’s novel, both in its own time and in the
decades immediately following its first publication, makes it seem likely that
Miss Williams’s story exerted at least some influence on subsequent accounts
of “fallen women.” Sentimentalized portraits of infected prostitutes appeared
in a number of eighteenth-century medical texts and moral treatises, and

some of these explicitly invoked the prostitute’s plight in order to campaign
for social or health care reform.131
One of the most controversial of such texts was Thelyphthora, or a Treatise
on Female Ruin (1780) by the Anglican clergyman Martin Madan. Madan
invoked the sentimental narrative of an innocent woman forced into prostitu-
tion and subsequently infected with venereal disease, arguing that “every man
who has seduced a woman, whether with or without promise of marriage,
should be obliged to wed her publicly.”132 His text advanced the radical claim
that there would be “no street-walkers, whores, and common prostitutes—no
medicines taken to procure abortion . . . [and] no venereal disease” if Britain
made its legal system conform to the biblical marriage laws in which female
polygamy was forbidden but “monogamous and polygamous contracts were
equally valid and binding . . . on the man’s side.”133
Crucially, Thelyphthora’s argument for legal change was predicated on the
assumption that women never chose a life of prostitution, but rather were forced
into it by men who had seduced and then abandoned them “to infamy, want,
misery, disease, and even death itself.”134 Madan’s views on the subject seem to
have been influenced at least in part by narratives like that of Miss Williams in
Roderick Random—and certainly he exploits the trope of the betrayed innocent
to appeal to his readers’ sympathies, returning again and again to the pathetic
image of a woman “perishing with disease and filthiness.”135
While Thelyphthora did acknowledge the spread of venereal infection to
other segments of the population, Madan identified prostitutes as its chief
victims. This bias may have added to his work’s emotional force, but it prob-
ably diverged substantially from his own experience: as the chaplain of the
Lock Hospital, Madan would have encountered just as many infected men as
infected women, because the hospital admitted roughly equal numbers of
male and female patients.136 While prostitutes were statistically more likely to
contract an infection than, say, monogamous wives, Madan’s text deliberately
emphasized the helpless “innocence” of the disease’s female victims. As Kevin
Siena has noted, Madan maintained a similar focus on infected women and
children in his sermons and annual reports for the hospital: “One might well
imagine that the Lock specialized in treating such patients, for they dominate
the discussion. Throughout the century the Annual Account stressed the ‘many
poor creatures, labouring under this disease, [who] are in themselves no way
culpable, as it may have been occasioned by bad husbands, diseased parents,
suckling children born with the disease, or children that have imbibed it from
their nurses.’ ”137 While Siena has argued that this trend is unusual “because
much of the prevailing discourse surrounding the disease in this period tended
to present women as the cause of the disease, rather than its victims,” the con-
tradiction he identifies is itself indicative of the breadth and complexity of
eighteenth-century accounts of infected women.138 Much like the light-hearted
dismissals of the disease that appear in libertine poetry or Restoration drama,
Madan’s emphasis on the victimized prostitute bears witness to the sometimes
substantial divide between the medical realities of venereal disease and its rep-
resentation in imaginative forms. At the same time, Thelyphthora serves as a
useful reminder of the extent to which fictive tropes could be used to mobilize
public health campaigns.
Perhaps needless to say, Madan’s arguments for legalized polygamy were
unsuccessful—but his sentimentalized portrait of the infected prostitute is
clearly a far cry from the grotesque figures of Swift’s Drury Lane or Gould’s
playhouse. To wit, historians have convincingly argued that the eighteenth
century witnessed a gradual shift in popular attitudes toward prostitution,
with the earlier denunciations of “vile harlots” and predatory man-hunters giv-
ing way to a sentimentalized “picture of abused womanhood.”139 As Tony
Henderson has pointed out, however, these two conceptions of the prostitute
were never mutually exclusive, and, as this chapter has attempted to demon-
strate, imaginative representations of infected prostitutes remained varied
throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century, regardless of when and
how real-life attitudes changed.140 Readers of Judith Walkowitz’s work will note
that many of the trends she locates in the Victorian discourse about prosti-
tutes—not just the desire to regulate and punish prostitutes in order to control
venereal disease, but also the equal and opposite attempts to condemn male
infidelity, to identify men rather than women as the chief propagators of the
disease, and to lament the many innocent wives who suffered as a result of
their husbands’ infidelities—were already well in place by the early eighteenth
century.141 Equally, texts like Swift’s “Beautiful Nymph” remind us that some
of the most familiar fictional prostitutes from this period were neither mali-
cious predators nor sentimentalized victims; rather, they existed somewhere in
between, or outside of, these two categories. With her unsettling combination
of loathsome appearance and private “Anguish,” Swift’s Corinna is suggestive
not only of the complexities of venereal disease discourse in this period, but
also of the extent to which eighteenth-century readers and writers may have
allowed themselves a more nuanced and discomfiting response to imaginary
infected prostitutes than to real ones.
chapter 3
oreigners
In the 1673 broadside The London Prodigal, the young hero has only just
begun to squander his newfound fortune on wine and women when illness
puts a sudden stop to his exploits:
But now i’th’ midst of his triumphant Reign,
His greatest Pleasure proves his greatest Pain;
He finds his Stock diminish, and beside
Percieves himself compleatly Frenchify’d.
Pity the poor London prodigal: though he has only been with British
whores, he has contracted the French disease. The Rouen ague. The French
gout. The Morbus Gallicus. He has suffered a blow from a French faggot-stick,
been hit by a French cowlstaff. In short, he has been “compleatly Frenchify’d.”1
As all of these terms for the prodigal’s condition suggest, perhaps the best-
known associations for venereal disease in eighteenth-century Britain were
with Frenchness. And as with all of the other associations discussed in this
book, there was some rational basis for the connection: almost all of those
who studied or wrote about the disease’s history believed it to have come to
Britain (and to many other European countries besides) from France. Yet
even if patterns of disease migration might implicate French travelers or
immigrants in the spread of the infection, no medical or historical evidence
could account for the vast proliferation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-
114
foreigners 115
century British literature and art that connected venereal disease with French
fashions, French wigs, French food, French manners—even the French lan-
guage. Even though these inanimate French “imports” posed no danger of
spreading the infection, like many other ideas and objects relating to France
but in no way connected with either sex or disease, they were tainted by
association.
Nor was it always French people and products at issue. Over the course of
the century, British writers and artists linked many different groups with the
spread of infection, including Scots, Native Americans, Spaniards, the Dutch,
and Italians. Historians have often identified the eighteenth century as a
period of extraordinary commercial and colonial expansion for Britain, and
that expansion—and the foreign encounters it generated—provided ample
fodder for xenophobic sentiment. Accordingly, just as the threat of infection
could be used to convey anxieties about Britain’s close cultural and economic
ties with France, it could also be used to express concerns about other
European rivals, to examine the tense relationships between Britain and its
colonies abroad, or to expose fears about the integrity of the newly created
United Kingdom.2
In this chapter, I ask what imaginative representations of venereal disease
might tell us about Restoration and eighteenth-century attitudes toward the
geographically, politically, or nationally “foreign.” More specifically, I suggest
that while Susan Sontag and others have argued for a link “between imagining
disease and imagining foreignness,” venereal disease in the eighteenth-century
imagination was ultimately associated less with the foreign other than with
what we might call the foreign self: attributed more often to allies or rivals than
to outright enemies, it provided a means of vilifying not those who remained
completely outside the nation, but those who influenced or infiltrated it—
those, in other words, who threatened to compromise the boundaries between
foreigner and native.3 As Jonathan Gil Harris has observed, metaphors of infec-
tious disease have often been used to express “fears about the vulnerability of
national markets within larger, global networks of commerce.”4 In an
eighteenth-century British context, the foreignness of venereal disease pro-
vided a means of reconsidering not just the nation’s economic competitiveness,
but also its cultural strengths and weaknesses, within an increasingly globalized
world. With its heterogeneous symptoms and covert “takeover” of the human
body, infection offered a ready metaphor for all those processes—political
union, immigration, international trade, colonial expansion—that threatened
to erode cultural difference.
116 foreigners
THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD
In a treatise from 1724, the surgeon Edward Dunn remarked on the many
names given to venereal disease. Dunn explained that every nation exposed to
the infection attempted to attribute it to some other country—an under-
standable reaction given the “dangerous” nature of the malady: “To speak the
Truth, there is no Nation, that does not disown it, and which does not reject
the Shame of having given Rise to such a Monster; from hence it is, that the
French have heretofore, given [it] the Name of the Spanish, or Neapolitan
Distemper; the Italians, Spaniards, and English, call it the French Disease;
and others, the American, Venereal, or Great Pox.”5 While Dunn’s remarks
were perceptive, they were far from original: many historians, physicians, and
commentators—writing from the 1600s onward—had identified a common
tendency to label venereal disease as the disease from elsewhere, the disease
brought into our country by “those people.” Indeed, early modern nations
maintained an almost globally consistent pattern in this regard: all across
western and eastern Europe, in Africa and Asia—even in some of the most
isolated areas of the planet—venereal disease was regarded as an import. In
the relatively self-contained world of Edo-period Japan, it was the “Portuguese
sickness.”6 In the islands of the South Pacific, it was defined by the native
Tahitians—much to Captain Cook’s chagrin—as the “British disease.”7
While the consistency of this pattern is striking in its own right, it is also
useful as an indicator of the kinds of concepts that clustered around venereal
infection from its first outbreak in the early modern world. For one thing, it
suggests that the initial unit of distinction between the diseased and the
healthy was geographic. Although the infection became a means of reconsid-
ering distinctions between genders, classes, political factions, religious com-
munities, and so forth, its “foreignness” seems to have been defined first and
foremost on the basis of municipal, provincial, national, or continental
boundaries. The threat of venereal infection was a threat born of travel, expan-
sion, colonization, trade; as such, it offered one means of interrogating or
policing spatial boundaries that seemed increasingly easy to cross.
Second, this pattern suggests that questions of origin were keenly impor-
tant to both medical and nonmedical conceptions of the disease throughout
the early modern period.8 By the eighteenth century, virtually all venereolo-
gists could dismiss early scientific theories that attributed the development of
venereal disease to some taboo practice like cannibalism or bestiality, but most
remained invested in the idea of a first cause—and an ultimate site of origin—
foreigners 117
for the disease.9 Among eighteenth-century British writers, the most compel-
ling theory on this score traced venereal infections back to the primitive
natives of the Antilles. According to Jean Astruc, whose treatise in 1736 popu-
larized the American theory, venereal disease developed spontaneously among
groups of natives as a result of combined environmental and cultural factors.
It became endemic in the native populations of Hispaniola and the neighbor-
ing islands, and was unwittingly introduced into Europe by Christopher
Columbus and his men when they returned from their expedition of 1492.10
Astruc’s account remained the most widely accepted explanation of the
disease’s origins for the duration of the eighteenth century, and it had a num-
ber of factors working in its favor.11 For one thing, Astruc’s theory could be
corroborated by historical evidence: the first recorded descriptions of an out-
break in Europe are from 1495, just after the return of the Spanish expedi-
tion.12 Second, Astruc’s account was able to identify a discrete source for the
disease that was comfortably remote, both in time and in space, from the
civilized European cultures of his day. As Kevin Siena has noted, Astruc used
contemporary scientific principles to support his claims, providing a seem-
ingly rigorous scientific “rationale” that also conveniently reinforced existing
cultural and racial biases.13
According to the Treatise, venereal disease was initially a product of envi-
ronmental and cultural evils that combined in places like Peru, New Spain,
Florida, and the “midland part of Africa under the line.”14 In these tropical
locales, Astruc contended, the combination of extreme heat and “bad food”
resulted in “a very sharp, and in a manner virulent discharge of the Menses” in
native females. These insalubrious conditions became dangerous when accom-
panied by a native culture that encouraged sexual promiscuity, since the “viru-
lent” menstrual blood began to “corrupt” when mixed with the semen of
multiple sexual partners.15 Astruc cited the natives of Haiti as one example:
[They] must have formerly been subject to many and grievous Diseases,
as none of them scrupled to converse with menstruous Women, as the
Men thro’ the violence of their lust lay like beasts with the first Woman
they met with, and as the Women thro’ an excess of incontinence pro-
miscuously admitted all that offer’d . . . Nay whilst their Menses were
upon ’em, they would impudently invite and press more to lye with ’em,
than at another time, their lust breaking out then, as in brutes, thro’ the
heat of the Womb with greater rage than at another time. No wonder,
then, that the different, acrid, and heteroge[ne]ous seed of several Men
118 foreigners
blended together, and mix’d with a sharp and virulent menstrual Blood,
and contain’d in the over-heated Wombs of very filthy Women, should
by time, heterogeneity, and the heat of its receptacle soon corrupt, and
constitute the first seeds of the Venereal Disease, which might afterwards
be propagated by Contagion amongst persons of a greater continence, if
any such there were among ’em.16
This loathsome affliction, then, was born of the unhygienic union between
“very filthy” women and men acting in “the violence of their lust.” While
Astruc’s analysis did identify the tropical climate as an important factor, his
descriptions of the disease’s origins consistently emphasized the “disposition
to impurity” and “propensity to a promiscuous copulation” that he believed
to exist in every tropical native population.17 By this logic, Astruc concluded
that there must have been “seed-plots of the Venereal Disease” throughout the
Americas, Asia, and Africa.18
In connecting the dreaded infection with primitive sexual behavior—and
more specifically, with the absence of Judeo-Christian prohibitions against
polygamy and sex during menstruation—Astruc implicitly championed the
superiority of European sexual practices and sexual hygiene.19 His account
scrupulously distinguished between a brutish native born into or predisposed
to the disease, and a civilized European who unwittingly caught it by infec-
tion. Such were the differences of constitution and climate that the disease
couldn’t possibly have originated in Europe, Astruc contended: there was sim-
ply “not the same acrimony in the Seed of the Men, nor the same virulence in
the menstruous Blood, nor the same heat in the Wombs of the Women” on
the colder European continent.20
Crucially, while Astruc emphasized the sexual nature of the disease as it had
developed in native communities, he highlighted the role of commerce, and not
sex, in spreading the infection to areas outside the Americas. The infection cir-
culated along trade routes like any other commodity, Astruc explained, borne
by potentially unwitting European carriers: “The Merchants and Seamen, who
brought goods daily from the Ports of Italy, France, and Spain to the Ports of
Africa and Asia, carr[ied] over also a very bad kind of Merchandize the Venereal
Disease, which by degrees moved farther upwards into the Countrey from the
Coasts bordering upon the Mediterranean.”21 Astruc’s conceptualization of the
disease as “Merchandize” tacitly acknowledged that those who had spread
the disease to Europe must have been white men—but it shrewdly sidestepped
the touchy issue of interracial sex, eliding the possibility that the European con-
quest of the New World might have been a sexual as well as a military one.
foreigners 119
Figuring venereal disease as a commodity not only enabled Astruc to attri-

bute the sexual element of the infection to primitive Americans; it also enabled
him to associate the eradication of the disease with white European domi-
nance. Astruc conjectured that it was ultimately very fortunate that the infec-
tion was imported rather than home-grown, for just as “foreign animals and
exotic plants” withered and failed outside their natural habitats, so “Distempers
imported into Europe”—venereal disease included—would eventually die
out.22 While Astruc conceded that the reintroduction of the disease remained
a possibility, he countered that Europeans had already denuded the dangerous
torrid zones of Africa and Asia of all that was worth taking—and even if future
trade with such places was desirable, superior European medicine had made
the disease treatable, and would likely soon eradicate it.23 Astruc’s progressivist
arguments reinforced the separation between the savage “seed-plots” of vene-
real infection and its civilized European victims, using the disease’s foreignness
as proof of its comparative weakness.24 Venereal disease might be rampant
now, but over time, as European civilization came to achieve global domi-
nance and primitive cultures died out, this barbaric affliction would die out
with them.
T H E S PA N I S H D I S E A S E : T H E A M E R I C A N
T H E O RY A N D C O LO N I A L E X P LO I TAT I O N
With the American theory maintaining a near hegemonic status in Britain

throughout the long eighteenth century, many passing references to venereal
disease in medical, historical, and political works either attributed the infec-
tion to Native Americans or linked it with Columbus’s expedition. Whereas
Astruc’s analysis was primarily concerned with the distinction between
European and non-European cultures, however, many of these narratives
used the American theory as a pretext for comparing British and Spanish
models of colonial rule, with venereal disease serving as a means of scrutiniz-
ing the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.25
For the more patriotic, the American theory provided seeming proof of
the superiority of British practices abroad, its narrative interpretable as a cri-
tique of Spanish cruelty and an illustration of poetic justice (never so attrac-
tive as when meted out on a rival colonial power). Indeed, while representations
of the 1492 conquest and its syphilitic aftermath routinely identified Native
Americans as a violent people, some suggested that the greater barbarians of
the tale were not the conquered Americans, but their Spanish oppressors. The
120 foreigners
much-maligned travel writer John Hawkesworth expressed a widely held view

when he referred to the European outbreak as a “dreadful curse which avenged
the inhumanities committed by the Spaniards in America”—a deliberate act
of retaliation perpetrated by one violent group upon another.26
Other representations of the conquest invoked the American theory as a
means of questioning both Spanish and British programs of colonization.
Thus, one political pamphlet reminded those seeking “to legislate for the
empire” that “the lues venerea is likely to be the most lasting memorial of the
conquest of South America”;27 another used the spread of disease to attack
William Pitt’s efforts to maintain continued control over Britain’s American
colonies: “It was the thirst of gold that propagated the disease; the Europeans
went continually to America, and always brought back a new leaven of it.
Immortal Pitt! how unsanctified is thy glorious scheme to lavish away the
treasure of your country, and the blood of your countrymen, to put us in pos-
session of a country that has introduced, and is still propagating such an ugly
and loathsome distemper.”28 In these texts, venereal disease provided a vehicle
for opposition political sentiment, an object lesson that could be used to
question colonial ambition and the “thirst of gold” that motivated it.
Imaginative accounts of the American theory were similarly divided. In
Abraham Cowley’s ode to the physician Sir Charles Scarburgh, for example,
venereal disease is connected with both “Indian . . . Lust” and Spanish cru-
elty: in establishing a “Tyranny” over Europe that is “as wide and cruel as the
Spaniard” in America, venereal infection exposes the equally foreign—and
equally barbaric—nature of the natives and their conquerors.29 Similarly, in
Nahum Tate’s dedication to Syphilis—a long poem by the Italian physician
Girolamo Fracastoro on the origins, spread, and treatment of venereal disease,
first published in 1530 and (rather freely) translated from Latin into English
by Tate in 1686—the “Indian Conqur’er” and the “invading Spaniard” are
aligned, with only English medicine capable of conquering this epidemic
“Invader” of the human body.30
Yet in a poetic imitation of Horace by Lord Gardenstone, the same narra-
tive of conquest is used to equate contemporary British imperialism with the
practices of earlier Spanish and Portuguese explorers. Lamenting the “wasted
empires” created by Christopher Columbus in America and Vasco da Gama in
India, Gardenstone condemns the “wonted crimes” that “have damn’d our con-
quests in the Western climes.”31 Venereal disease, in this context, becomes just
one more example of the many malign consequences—war, murder, sickness,
environmental damage—destined to blight all European colonial projects:
foreigners 121
But soon the hapless Indian saw repaid

The wrongs of those who chas’d him from his shade;
A new disease invades the fount of joy,
And scorching suns the tyrant race destroy.
With all the riches Potosi can boast,
How few return from that polluted coast?
The planter shrivels in the prime of life,
The injur’d negroe thrusts his deadly knife;
Here, while a [fever] desolates around,
And Pain’s last pangs, poor human pride confound,
Lo there contending elements conspire,
Each black cloud bursting in a sheet of fire;
And earth and ocean as dissolving rend,
While guilty cities down the gulf descend.32
Here, as in many other eighteenth-century British depictions of the con-
quest, venereal disease is an act of divine punishment—but it also foreshadows
fiercer punishments to come, when “heaven” will avenge the wrongs suffered by
Indian, American, and African natives by effecting a violent global redistribu-
tion of power. The stanza concludes with an apocalyptic vision of a future hero
who, with “the blood of ruffians reeking on his hands,” will incite “our slaves”
to rise up in a violent coup and “seize the land they labour as their own.”33
A few imaginative works even dared to suggest that British colonists might
be a source rather than an object of venereal infection abroad. In James Gillray’s
A Sale of English-Beauties, in the East-Indies (1786), for example, infected
English prostitutes are shown arriving in Calcutta for “sale” to Indian, as well
as British, “buyers.”34 Gillray’s satiric vision of the scene—complete with an
auctioneer taking bids at far left—recasts the arrival of the “Beauties” as a
racially reversed slave auction at which white women are sold to dark-skinned
men (fig. 3.1). Like the white men who carried off the treasures of the New
World, however, these women come with a freight of “bad merchandise”:
unloaded on the dock beside them are boxes of fetish items, pornographic
books, condoms (identifiable by the name of their only eighteenth-century
London retailer, “Mrs. Phillips,” on the crate), and materials for the treatment
of venereal disease, including seven barrels of “Leake’s Pills” and a box marked
“Surgeons Instruments.” These items too have been exported from Britain—
and they too seem to implicate the white British colonizers, not the Indian
natives, in the spread of the disease.35
122 foreigners
3.1. James Gillray, A Sale of English-Beauties, in the East-Indies, 1786

THE FRENCH DISEASE
Throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century, representations of

the American theory could be used either to question or to bolster the blurred
boundaries between self and other, with the position of the Spanish—as
either savage rivals of a milder British model of imperialism, or equally cul-
pable peers in a shameful pan-European program of exploitation—tipping
the balance between liberal and conservative accounts of colonialism. What
remained consistent throughout was the notion of Spain as a country at once
comparable to, and different from, Britain: while Spain could be condemned
for engaging in barbaric acts of foreign violence, it also remained geographi-
cally, culturally, politically, and economically close. Too close, perhaps, for
comfort.
foreigners 123
The relationship between Britain and France during the eighteenth

century was more intimate still—and thus the same preoccupation with sim-
ilarity and difference characterizes imaginative representations of the “French
disease” in British art and literature. Despite espousing different religious
and political ideologies and competing for economic and military domi-
nance, Britain and France were often forced into uneasy alliance; indeed, such
was their dependency on each other as trading partners that even during
periods of outright war, neither could afford to entirely discontinue the circu-
lation of “enemy” goods or travelers.36 If venereal infection was used to sym-
bolize not the utterly alien but the familiarly foreign, then no other nation
was as well suited to the metaphor as Britain’s chief peer and rival across the
channel.
And indeed, no other European group seems to have attracted anywhere
near as much pox-based opprobrium in British art and literature from this
period as the French.37 Not only was venereal disease routinely represented as
coming to Britain (as it may well have done) from France; it was also personi-
fied as stereotypically French in its attributes and character.38 Sly, insinuating,
lustful, and corrupt, the French disease was capable of exerting its influence
on even the most patriotic of Englishmen, transforming a lover of king and
country into a traitorous Francophile—and the accusation of infection could
be as much an attack on an individual’s political or religious views as on his or
her sexual ethics.
As Rose Hentschell has demonstrated, English literary works from the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries routinely linked the French disease with
French import goods, and many Restoration and eighteenth-century imagina-
tive works maintained this connection, typically with the corollary suggestion
that too great a love of French clothes, French food, French wine, or even
French wigs could endanger the consumer’s (and, by extension, the nation’s)
good health.39 Accusations of infection were also used to attack the many
other qualities that were, at various points throughout the long eighteenth
century, associated with Frenchness. These included not just effeminacy, lux-
ury, foppery, and devotion to fashion, but also slavish submission to political
or military despotism, arbitrary government, or “popery.”40 Indeed, some-
times the precise nature of the accusation of Frenchness must have been
unclear: a dictionary in 1768 listed the adjective “Frenchified” as meaning
“one admiring or esteeming the customs, manners, interests, and government
of the French nation”—but also one “clapt or pox’d by too familiar conversa-
tion with lewd women.”41
124 foreigners
Predictably, the most common literary references to the “French disease”

involved some simple play on the use of the modifier “French” to define both the
disease and some other aspect of Gallic life. This joke was already in use in the
1590s, when John Donne’s “Satire I” noted the “Perfect French” of both the pol-
ished traveler and his pox—and versions of the same play on words continued to
appear throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.42 Thus, Ben Jonson’s
“On English Monsieur” identifies the disease with an affected aristocratic culture
that attempts to mimic French fashions and French manners.43 Here, as in
Donne’s poem, the central target is a man who would be thought French despite
his English ancestry: Jonson’s speaker marvels that an “untravell’d” Englishman
“should be french so much, / As french-men in his companie, should seem
dutch.”44 Samuel Butler similarly lamented the “Epidemic” of Francophilia in the
Restoration court, condemning Englishmen who sought to affect French man-
ners, “Poxes,” and “Vices,” and even “T’Adorn their English with French scraps,
/ And give their very Language Claps.”45 In these examples, it is English affecta-
tion as much as French culture that is at issue, with venereal disease identified as
yet another means by which the French might infiltrate and control the nation.
The same blurring of self and other underpins many well-worn eighteenth-
century jokes about British sufferers from French poxes. William Winstanley’s
Poor Robin almanac for 1706, for example, relates the story of a man who, on
“being told by his Surgeon that he had got the French Pox,” replies: “It is the
English Pox . . . for I am sure I got it of an English Whore.”46 Similarly, a
biography of the fraudster Joe Haynes reports the following exchange between
Haynes and “his Captain, who was a Frenchman”:
Joe. Have you got a Horse for me, Sir?
Capt. Far vat do you vant one Horse?
Joe. To ride upon, Sir.
Capt. Begar you must go on Foot; you be one Foot-Soldier.
Joe. Indeed I cannot, for I have got the French-Pox upon me.
Capt. De French-Pox Sirrah! vere did you get it?
Joe. In Dog and Bitch Yard, Sir.
Capt. In Dog and Bitch Yard, vere is dat Place?
Joe. In that Part of Great-Britain call’d England.
Capt. Begar den you be one lying Dog, for dat be one
English-Pox.47
Here the accusation of “English-Pox” works to distinguish the parodically
accented insults of the crass (or perhaps just literal-minded) Frenchman from
foreigners 125
the po-faced responses of his English officer; at the same time, the exchange
calls into question the insistent desire to categorize as foreign what by 1714
had long been an English as well as a French affliction.
While these simple puns on the “Frenchness” of pox continued to appear
in comic writing throughout the eighteenth century, other literary and artistic
works offered a more complex response to the issue of Francophilia. Texts
using the disease to critique the desire to be French—to mimic French man-
ners, learn the French language, or imitate French culture—were consistently
accompanied by texts attacking the desire to buy French—to purchase
imported wigs, fabrics, wines, and other luxury goods. Works in this latter
category sometimes facetiously attributed an infection to the consumption of
French merchandise—or, like Samuel Butler’s Hudibras, described the infec-
tions themselves as “imported . . . French goods.”48 In these works, as in many
accounts of the American theory, critiques of global commerce became inter-
twined with fears about the global spread of venereal disease as writers and
artists explored the formula on which all successful consumer culture rests:
that you are what you buy.
French food, wine, and clothing were often particularly targeted as suspi-
cious goods. The poet Robert Gould, for example, complained that “French
Wines” were “grown as dang’rous as the French Disease.”49 Similarly, a writer
in The Town Spy warned that “English Ladies with French Scarffs, French
Aprons, French Night-Rails” might thereafter contract “the French Disease.”50
And George Colman’s witty periodical the Connoisseur wryly proposed the
publication of a “Bill of Suicide” to advertise the number of persons who
had succumbed to “French Claret, French Lace, French Cooks, and French
Disease” each year.51 As these examples suggest, French pox was routinely fea-
tured in satiric lists of imported consumables: like claret or “fricassee,” the
infection entered the body with a share of sensual pleasure, but its consump-
tion, like that of too much wine, injured the unsuspecting victim from
within.52
Wigs were another popular target, perhaps in part because of their asso-
ciation with barbers or barber-surgeons, the conventional ministers to vene-
real disease.53 A prominent French import throughout the Restoration and
eighteenth century, wigs were a necessity for some of those who suffered
from venereal infections, since they provided a means of disguising the
patchy hair loss that could result from secondary syphilis. Christopher
Smart’s “The Bag-Wig and the Tobacco-Pipe”—first published in 1752 but
reprinted repeatedly over the course of the century—was one of several texts
126 foreigners
to question English dependence on French imports by linking venereal dis-

ease with imported French wigs.54 In Smart’s poem—a dialogue between the
two titular objects in a “spendthrift’s dressing room”—the wig is cast as the
weak and effeminate “Monsieur” to the tobacco pipe’s hearty Englishman.55
When the wig complains about the stench of tobacco, the pipe denounces the
fashion for Gallic “finery and foppery” and contends that those who wear
French wigs must have “something”—perhaps venereal disease—“to dis-
guise.”56 In an invocation of the political analogy between the body politic
and the body natural, the pipe insists that the introduction of French imports
has compromised the health of the entire nation, and not just that of the
individual wearer:
’Twas better [for] the English nation
Before such scoundrels came in fashion,
When none sought hair in realms unknown,
But every blockhead bore his own.57
As the representative of Englishness, the pipe promotes both corporeal
health and colonial prosperity, encouraging the use of tobacco to “help our
plantations and our trade.”58 The wig, by contrast, facilitates the disguise, and
thus the spread, of the dangerous “French disease.”
A rather more controversial Gallic import is targeted in Samuel Butler’s
mock-epic Dildoides (1706). Although it remained unpublished until the early
eighteenth century, Butler’s burlesque was occasioned (or so its epigraph pro-
claims) “by the Burning a Hogshead of those Commodities at Stocks-Market,
in the Year 1672.”59 The poem had as its political backdrop the parliamentary
backlash against the relatively cozy Anglo-French trade relations established
by Charles II and Louis XIV.60 Like Smart’s tobacco pipe and bag-wig, the
inanimate dildos are anthropomorphized—but whereas Smart’s poem adopts
a straightforwardly anti-French attitude, Butler’s inverts the nationalism char-
acteristic of epic poetry, lauding the foreign dildos as the martyred “Heroes”
of the tale. For the poem’s speaker, and for several of the counselors who
debate the fate of the seized goods, French dildos have their uses: not only are
they the “Preservers” of Cuckolds and the aides to “aged Lechers of the Court,”
they also provide a means of preventing or ameliorating a still more dangerous
French import, venereal disease.61
The poem’s first speaker imagines a scenario in which an Englishman fears
his lover may have contracted an infection: in this situation, he proclaims, the
French dildo offers a risk-free substitute for the penis:
foreigners 127
Dildoe has [no] Nose, and cannot smell,

No Stink can his great Courage quell;
At sight of Plaister he’d ne’er fail,
Nor faintly ask, What do you ail?62
Thus the dildo, like the sufferer of advanced venereal disease, has no
nose—but where the syphilitic’s nasal deformity is a source of shame, the
dildo’s “noselessness” makes it both the perfect icon of the “Frenchified” and
the best prophylactic against the pox.
Another of the counselors reaffirms the link between dildos and disease,
observing that such imports aren’t just useful in avoiding the infection in the
first place, but also in compensating Englishmen already afflicted with this
foreign condition:
For Soldiers maim’d by Chance of War,
We artificial Limbs prepare:
Why then should we bear such a Spite
To Lechers hurt in amorous Fight?
And what the French send for Relief,
We thus condemn like Witch or Thief.
Dildoe, that Monsieur sure intends
For his French-Pox to make amends,
For such, without the least Disgrace,
Might fill the lusty Fore-man’s Place,
And make our elder Girls ne’er care for’t,
Tho’ ’twere their Fortune to dance bare-foot.
Lechers, whom Clap or Drink disable,
Might here have Dildoes to their Navel.
And with false Heat and Member too,
Rich Widow for Convenience wooe.63
Here, as in the first counselor’s endorsement, the dildos are as much the
instruments of male sexual and social power as of female pleasure: they enable
the once-potent English libertine to resume the “amorous Fight” between the
sexes. Considered in relation to the two countries’ history of military and
economic rivalry, the dildos are also instruments of peace, helping the French
“make amends”—as though venereal disease had been deliberately introduced
into England in an act of biological warfare.
With these counselors arguing quite persuasively to import the dildos,
it falls to the poem’s final speaker—a more suspicious and reactionary
128 foreigners
figure—to justify their destruction. For this counselor (whose perspective

seems to reflect general public opinion), the dildos are a “fantastick new
French fashion” capable of causing trouble on a national, and not just an
individual, scale.64 Identified as instruments of ideology rather than of plea-
sure, they pose a threat to national security, providing an incentive for English
women to assume French habits of lewdness, idolatry, and conspicuous
consumption. For this reason, he concludes, they must be expelled “out
o’th’Nation.”65
F R E N C H C O O K S , F R E N C H Q U A C K S , F R E N C H S E R VA N T S
While some writers—like Butler’s reactionary counselor—called for the

expulsion of French goods, other voices in Restoration and eighteenth-century
literature demanded increased control over the movement of French migrants.
Itinerant French workers were targeted with at least as much hostility as
French wigs or fashions, and many artists and writers used the connection
with venereal disease to police the boundary between “true-born Englishmen”
and recent or naturalized immigrants—a boundary that could sometimes be
difficult, even impossible, to perceive.
French servants were frequently portrayed as disease-carrying foreign
agents attempting to infiltrate the British body politic, or as infected parasites
living off the wealth of their Francophile employers. In Samuel Johnson’s
London (1738), for example, the speaker denounces the increasingly “French
metropolis” not only for its mimicry of French fashions, but also for its hos-
pitality to French workers who “sing . . . dance, clean shoes, or cure a clap.”66
The writer of a prologue attacking French comedians similarly derides his
countrymen for employing “French Valets,” describing—in the stereotypical
mock-French accent—the use of “Lacquies trimm’d vid Itch, de Pox, and
Swords.”67 In many such examples, the importation of French workers leads
directly to the spread of venereal infection, with the “itch” and the “pox”
identified as the near-certain accompaniments of the desperate and impover-
ished servant. Like the French disease, the French worker is routinely depicted
as a mimic, shape-shifter, or jack-of-all-trades, willing to practice any profes-
sion, assume any identity, in order to survive.
French medical professionals—whether long-term immigrants or itiner-
ant quacks—were another oft-maligned group, with the stereotype of the
French quack (often a venereologist or surgeon) routinely appearing in satiric
poetry, drama, or visual art. While there is no reason to believe that French
foreigners 129
physicians and surgeons were any more likely to specialize in treating venereal
conditions than their British counterparts, those French medics who were
known for treating venereal infections retained a particular notoriety across
the channel, and their fame was almost certainly enhanced by the continuing
association of venereal disease with Frenchness.
Foremost among the venereologists to be thus satirized was Jean Misaubin,
a figure sufficiently well known to feature in plate 5 of Hogarth’s popular
series A Harlot’s Progress.68 In Hogarth’s illustration, Misaubin is pictured in
dispute with a fellow “quack”—an Englishman, Richard Rock—as their
dying patient lies behind them, the telltale signs of mercury treatment sur-
rounding her shrouded body. Misaubin is even more clearly condemned for
his venereological interests in the anonymous 1736 satire “On Quacks.” Here
he appears as both the purveyor of, and the minister to, his dishonorable area
of specialization:
Next rose that meagre Charlatan,
That moving Skeleton of Man,
Death’s horrid Semblance, Misaubin,
Who fed on Man’s polluting Sin.
A Clap? he cries, then opes his Box,
And sends ’em going—with a Pox.
’Twas thus, paid ten-fold English Fees,
The French Quack cur’d the French Disease.
His native Garlic so, by Proof,
Takes less rank Taste of Onion off.69
In these lines, Misaubin is implicated in both the disease and its cure, as the
ethical conflict underlying all for-profit medicine—the need for continued ill-
ness—is given a xenophobic edge via the link between French immigrants and
French disease. The use of “meagre” (connected with the soupe-maigre rou-
tinely identified as a staple of the French diet), as well as the references to
Misaubin’s “native” garlic and onion, further connect the quack’s morally dubi-
ous professional practices with his Frenchness.
As these two portraits perhaps suggest, Misaubin’s physical appearance
made him a particularly easy target for anti-French sentiment, since satirists
could emphasize his (again, allegedly typically French) pony-tailed wig and
scrawny physique. Misaubin’s thinness, a key identifying feature in both textual
and visual satires, conveniently reinforced his connection with venereal disease:
not only did his appearance as a “moving Skeleton of Man” link him with the
130 foreigners
stereotype of the starving French migrant (compare Johnson’s complaint in

London that “all sciences a fasting Monsieur knows”); it also aligned him with
the many syphilitic patients who were placed on starvation diets as part of their
treatment, or who suffered from wasting as their disease progressed.70
Misaubin’s physical features are clearly identified with terminal disease in
the 1739 print Prenez des Pilules, for example (fig. 3.2). In this satiric portrait—
engraved by Arthur Pond from a lost sketch by Jean-Antoine Watteau, com-
pleted during the latter’s visit to London in 1719–20—the enterprising French
venereologist is shown standing in a cemetery amidst skulls and graves.71 The
skulls draw attention to Misaubin’s skeletal build, and the setting highlights
the deadly consequences of infection and its treatment with the doctor’s
much-advertised “antivenereal pills.” Pond’s reproduction of the sketch with-
out any other labeling than the French instruction “prenez des pilules” (“take
pills”) offers some indication of Misaubin’s notoriety among the British public
at this time; it also, of course, connects Misaubin’s hazardous patent medicine,
along with the condition it was designed to treat, with his Frenchness.72
T H O M A S S H A D W E L L’ S T H E H U M O R I S T S ( 1 6 7 0 )
Within the world of Restoration comedy, the foppish Frenchman—some-

times infected himself, sometimes more obliquely linked with venereal
disease—was a popular stock character. When he was not being openly
accused of spreading infection among good British citizens, the stereotypical
“monsieur” (his dialogue almost invariably rendered in a crude mock accent)
was being dismissed with curses of “Pox on you” or “Pox on the French.”
Many Restoration comedies joked about the “French disease” in passing, but
one work in particular—Thomas Shadwell’s The Humorists (1670)—made
unusually extensive use of the associations between venereal disease, quack-
ery, and Frenchness. As Richard Perkin has noted, the play was produced
during a period of tense Anglo-French alliance; in consequence, much of its
discussion of the French disease seeks to capitalize on popular anxieties about
the allegedly increasing influence of French culture and people on English
(national and individual) bodies.73
In Shadwell’s play—which approaches venereal infection with the frank-
ness characteristic of much Restoration libertine literature—it is the hero
himself who suffers from the French disease, and he hires a French physician
(a quack, in fact) to minister to his ailment.74 As Perkin’s edition of the text
demonstrates, the manuscript differs markedly from the published play, in
foreigners 131
3.2. from Jean-Antoine Watteau, Prenez des Pilules, 1739

(Reproduced courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery)
132 foreigners
part because Shadwell obscured or excised many of the work’s more explicit
references to the protagonist’s condition—perhaps to avoid offending certain
notoriously pox-ridden members of the audience on opening night.75 The
most marked of these revisions was the renaming of the play’s central charac-
ter, initially “Mr. Oldpox,” as “Mr. Crazy.” This alteration nominally recasts
Oldpox as the generic hero of a comedy of humors, but Shadwell made no
attempt to efface the play’s many other references to the French disease, nor
did he disguise the nature of the hero’s affliction: it is still obvious that “Crazy”
suffers from an advanced venereal infection, and much of the play’s physical
comedy springs from the exposure and exacerbation of his loathsome and
painful disease symptoms.
The play’s romance plot follows three unappealing suitors—the diseased
Oldpox, the pretentious Drybob, and the foppish Brisk—as they compete for
the affections of Theodosia, a wealthy and beautiful young woman who ulti-
mately meets her match in a more desirable (even if conventional) courtier
named Raymund. All three unsuccessful suitors are presented as objects of
ridicule; and all three are made ridiculous in part through their associations
with Frenchness. Brisk is characterized by his Francophile attention to fash-
ion: he dines at the French eatery Chatolins, flaunts his expensive imported
clothing and periwig, and prides himself on his ability to pose his body art-
fully. Drybob—a model of both social and intellectual ambition—presents
Theodosia with an expensive lapdog, and then reveals his own Francophilia
by boasting of the animal’s distinguished French ancestry.76 It is Oldpox,
however, who suffers from the most dangerous form of Frenchification: long
before the play’s action begins, he has contracted a severe case of venereal
disease, and his central aim as a romantic hero is to cure, or at least mask, his
advanced infection sufficiently to present himself as a desirable suitor.
The play opens with Oldpox in a state of acute agony, and while the cause
of his pains is never concealed, an early conversation between him and his
servant (Curteous) removes all doubt by making the conventional link
between venereal disease and Frenchness. Having engaged a French surgeon
whose treatments have thus far proved ineffective, Oldpox proceeds to rail
against this figure, Monsieur Pullin, as one of the “Corporation of Rascalls”—
yet Pullin’s nationality, Curteous counters, stands highly in his favor:
Curteous. Ay, but Sir hee is a Frenchman and who soe fitt
to cure the French disease as A Frenchman.
Oldpox. Yes as one poison expells another, but if this
Rogue should cure me he can cure me of noething but what
foreigners 133
hee has given me himselfe, twas noething when I put myselfe

into his hands, he has brought it to what it is.77
Here, as in the attacks on Jean Misaubin, the cultural association of vene-

real disease with Frenchness slides effortlessly into a paranoid conjecture that
French medical workers might be spreading the infection deliberately. Indeed,
as the men’s conversation proceeds, Oldpox’s complaints about his symptoms
are subsumed within a tide of broader Francophobe sentiment, and Pullin is
reframed as only one of many malign foreign agents attempting to infiltrate
England:
Oldpox. A Curse on these french Cheates, they begin to

bee as Rife amongst us as their Countrey disease and doe
almost as much mischeife too, noe Corner without French
Taylors, Weavers, Milliners, Strongwater-men, Perfumers
and Surgeons.78
By the time Pullin finally arrives, Oldpox’s xenophobic rage has increased
to such an extent that he feels justified in denouncing the surgeon openly,
calling him a “damned Eternall Son of a whore Quack.”79
Pullin, his burlesque accent rendering the word “quack” as “Cacque,”
immediately recognizes that Oldpox’s insults are national rather than personal
in character He responds by insisting that “Cacque is noe french vard, it is
for de dam Syrigin [surgeon] English.”80 And when Raymund joins the dis-
pute, the terms of his own attack on Pullin likewise invoke broader anti-
French sentiment. Raymund’s account of the surgeon’s early pseudomedical
exploits degenerates into an effigy of the stereotypical jack-of-all-trades French
immigrant:
Raymund. why you Impudent villaine did not you when

you came first into England Ride upon a milch Asse and did
not you mantaine yourselfe by selling her milke to People in
Consumptions till you sett up for an abominable Barber,
that for the Damnd Roughness of your hands and the filthy
Noysomeness of your breath could get noe Customers and
then were faine to sett up with six penyworth of Diacolum
and a Collection of Rotten Pippins and pretended only the
cure of broken heads. . . .
Was not the next thing you arived att the inestimable
Secret of Brimston and Butter for the Cure of the Itch.81
134 foreigners
Here, Pullin’s cunning and heterogeneous medical enterprises connect

him with the (equally cunning, equally heterogeneous) infection he now
claims to treat. (Not only were consumptions and headaches believed to be
among the symptoms of venereal disease, but Pullin’s early endeavors also
include the treatment of genital scabies, or “the itch.”) Like the “supple”
Frenchmen of Johnson’s London, Pullin is a shape-shifter, capable of assum-
ing a range of different professional identities before lighting on venereology
as the starving immigrant’s holy grail.
As Oldpox and Raymund continue their assault on Pullin’s character,
both also continue to rely on anti-French stereotypes, using the conventional
association of Frenchmen with sexual promiscuity to pad out Pullin’s personal
history:
Oldpox. I remember when you first sett up for the Cure
of this disease you pretend to, with only two pound of
Turpentine, a little China, a few hermodactyles, a pound or
two of Salia-perilla and guiacum, two Glyster-baggs and one
Seringe. Could all thy wealth arrive att more matterialls
then these.
Raymund. I must confesse, since you have learnt some little
Experience by Marrying an unsound English Strumpett that
was Peppred by some of your Embassadors foot-men. She
by the many courses she hath run through has taught you
something.82
Here venereal disease is entwined with issues of class as well as national
identity, Oldpox’s ironic reference to Pullin’s “wealth” prompting Raymund
to offer a false compliment that simultaneously insults Pullin, his “unsound”
Francophile wife, and the French ambassador’s “peppered” (infected)
footmen.
As the argument becomes still more heated, Raymund and Oldpox effec-
tually accuse Pullin of deliberately importing the pox into England: had he
been a qualified medical practitioner in the first place, Raymund contends,
Pullin would have found “diseases enough in [his] owne Country to main-
taine [him] without comeing to us with A pox to [him].”83 Oldpox takes up
this accusation with regards to his own infection, insisting not only that
Pullin’s remedies have “not wholey Cured” him, but also that the surgeon has
deliberately used his “damnd french tricks” to transform a relatively benign
case of the clap into a dangerous full-blown pox.84
foreigners 135
Even when the play characterizes venereal disease as an enemy only to the
body natural—as a foreign, but not specifically French, agent—Pullin is impli-
cated by his nationality as well as by his immigrant status and professional
history: Raymund responds to Oldpox’s complaints of worsening symptoms
by accusing Pullin of having “driven Pox out of the open feild where hee might
have been easily conquered, into his strong holds and Garrisons.”85 Here—as
in Oldpox’s subsequent description of the disease as “driven . . . into his winter
Quarters where hee domineers as much as Ever”—the infection is figured in
military terms, but this time it is described as a foreign soldier or military
leader rather than as a biological weapon.86 In this formulation too, then,
Pullin is implicated in the spread rather than the treatment of the disease: he
operates either as an ineffectual ally of the English, or as a well-integrated but
secretly treacherous foreign agent.
While Oldpox never finds a cure for his condition, the encounter with
Pullin culminates in a cathartic explosion of xenophobic violence, as Oldpox—
rather implausibly, given the advanced state of his infection—proves strong
enough to attack and drive off the enraged surgeon. Pullin’s subsequent vow
to make recourse to the law offers still further proof of his inferiority in its
illustration of the (again, stereotypically French) characteristics of cowardice
and physical weakness. When bailiffs subsequently arrive and attempt to seize
Oldpox at Pullin’s request, that same stout English courage is once again at the
ready, and Oldpox and Raymund drive the bailiffs away. In these comic tus-
sles, military and medical victory become one and the same, with the clumsy
machinations of Pullin and his bailiffs substituted for the more obscure
maneuvers of venereal infection within the body. Although the play sees
Oldpox ultimately disappointed in his romantic ambitions, the propagandis-
tic wish fulfillment of Pullin’s expulsion is clear. If only the French disease
were as easily discovered and routed as the conniving French mountebank.
THE FRENCH POX IN GOVERNMENT
While texts like The Humorists used venereal disease to question the circu-
lation of French goods and French labor, other works used the threat of infec-
tion to convey British anxieties over more covert forms of foreign influence.
In these texts and images, the insidious nature of the French disease offered a
convenient analogue for the insidious spread of French political or religious
ideology. Venereal infections in this context could be identified not just as a
corollary to the employment of French servants or the imitation of French
136 foreigners
manners, but also as the first step toward a program of institutionalized

Catholicism and arbitrary government. Even lighter satires sometimes sug-
gested that French fashions might ultimately prove to be the “liveries” identi-
fying Britons as the servants of their Gallic neighbours.87
Not surprisingly, British Francophilia was more suspect in periods when the
two nations were engaged in direct military conflict. Although it was not until
the final decades of the century that the French and English were fighting
on home turf, conflicts overseas contributed to long-standing feelings of
unease about ongoing Anglo-French trade and immigration. One essayist writ-
ing during the War of the Spanish Succession, for example, argued that the
continuing influence of French culture threatened to undermine Britain’s con-
stitutional government: “ ’Tis very much to the Discredit of the English
Constitution that we should fall so much into the Humours of Foreign Nations,
and not admire only, but daily imitate, the Fopperies of France . . . even to the
French pox.”88 Here, as in many other such tracts, venereal disease is presented
less as an actual threat to public health than as a reminder of Britain’s continu-
ing economic and cultural intimacy with France “at a time when we are pro-
fessed Enemies to [the] French, and are engag’d against ’em in a long [and]
expensive War.”89
Similarly, in 1679, Lord Chief Justice William Scroggs described the
English publication of seditious pamphlets as the first step toward the “French
disease in Government”—a condition in which “Papists” could “with any
safety Write and Print whatever they please.”90 Scroggs’s analogy linked
Catholic proselytizing with venereal infection on the grounds that both were
the products of surreptitious immoral activity: just as the French disease was
spread through clandestine sexual liaisons, so French political and religious
ideology could be disseminated through the publication of anonymous pam-
phlets. This underhand way of proceeding was inherently foreign, Scroggs
declared, because it clashed with “English mens honesty [and] Courage”: cra-
ven French Papists might hide behind the guise of anonymity, but Englishmen
“were wont, to scorn to say what they durst not own.”91
A contributor to the midcentury periodical The Monitor: Or, British
Freeholder (1755–56) similarly cautioned against a “French pox” of the body
politic: writing in the time of the Seven Years’ War, he warned that the large
British standing army had lured the nation into a false sense of security, “giv-
ing the enemy time to . . . strengthen himself ” and allowing “the body politic
[to] be cankered with corruption” as though “infected by that scandalous
disease, the French pox.”92 Indeed, some writers figured French military
foreigners 137
aggression as itself a kind of disease, advancing across Europe just as venereal

infections had done some two centuries before. One writer, campaigning for
the English to enter the Franco-Dutch War in 1677, described the invasion of
the Netherlands as a “French Disease, that cometh now to the Noble parts
of the Body of the Seventeen Provinces, making them rotten, and fall off by
pieces”; only “the application of English Mercury,” he contended, could
“make the Enemies salivate and evacuate what they have with so great greedi-
ness swallowed in.”93 Here, as in Butler’s or Jonson’s satires on Restoration
Francophilia, it is as much the receptiveness of the host as the slyness of the
invading foreigner that is at issue.
The same use of venereal disease imagery to attack French military aggres-
sion recurs, unsurprisingly, in anti–French Revolution propaganda from the
1790s.94 James Gillray’s Het Committè De Santè (1796), for example, attacks the
French occupation of the Netherlands by presenting the newly created Batavian
Republic (a puppet state of revolutionary France) as a diseased prostitute (fig.
3.3).95 Referring to both the French conquest of the Netherlands and the
recently established “Comité de Salubrité” (or “Comité de Santé”)—a French
governmental body that attempted to curb the spread of venereal disease by
monitoring the sexual health of French prostitutes—the print depicts an
elderly Dutch prostitute whose infection is being treated by two French doc-
tors. The woman’s trade is indicated by her bared breasts, her symbolic signifi-
cance by a cap inscribed “Rep: Bat” (Batavian Republic). Both the nature and
the source of the woman’s medical complaint are unambiguous. A prescription
for mercury lies at her feet, and two leering French soldiers watch from the
sidelines, presumably waiting for the moment when her treatment is complete
and she can return to work. The ministrations of the two-man “Comité” are
further undermined by the presence of a Jack-Pudden (a clown sidekick of the
sort sometimes hired by itinerant quacks to attract attention), who capers in
the background. The print’s political message is clear: French penetration of
the Netherlands has given the Dutch republic a bad case of the “French dis-
ease.” Now relegated to the role of a puppet state, the Netherlands has become
a mere prostitute to French interests, servicing the needs of French soldiers and
the French government.96
Three years later, Gillray used the same metaphor to ridicule the defeats
suffered by the French revolutionary army in Egypt and elsewhere. In The
French Generals Retiring on Account of Their Health (1799), the “French dis-
ease” of military ambition is figured as an ailment shared by all the leaders of
unsuccessful French military campaigns in Asia and Africa (fig. 3.4).97 Set in
138 foreigners
3.3. James Gillray, Het Committè De Santè 1796 (Reproduced

the interior of a quack’s shop, the print depicts the revolutionary leader Louis-
Marie de La Revellière-Lépeaux as a rickety doctor, anxiously dispensing
medicine to a queue of suffering French generals. A crocodile and several
mummified bodies—stereotypical trappings of an eighteenth-century quack
doctor’s shop—are positioned prominently on the walls: here they serve not
3.4. James Gillray, French Generals Retiring, on Account of their Health, 1799 (Reproduced courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
140 foreigners
only as emblems of La Revellière-Lépeaux’s “quackery,” but also as reminders

of the recently failed Egyptian campaign.98
Similar double meanings are encoded in many of the other items on dis-
play: sitting atop La Revellière-Lépeaux’s desk, for example, is a bottle of “Lake’s
pills,” their label invoking both the popular eighteenth-century nostrum for
venereal disease (Leake’s pills) and the name of the military leader widely cred-
ited with defeating the Irish Rebellion in 1798 (Gerard Lake). Just as Leake’s
pills treat the French disease in the body, so Lake’s troops cured the “French
disease” in Catholic Ireland. Next to the bottle is a book labeled “Mal de Naples
sive Morbus Galicus” (Malady of Naples, or the French disease), its title simul-
taneously referencing two terms for venereal infection and two recent French
military frustrations: the British blockade of French-occupied Naples, and the
subsequent uprising of the Neapolitans against the French forces. (The title’s
mixture of French and Latin also, of course, serves as yet another reminder of
the perennial “foreignness” of venereal disease: it is the “Neapolitan sickness” in
France, and the “French sickness” in Italy.) Other papers scattered on the shop
floor reinforce the well-worn link between military and sexual conquest, with
accounts of the “Regime de Terreur” and “French Conquêtes” appearing along-
side “A Catalogue of new French Diseases.” Each new attempt at military con-
quest, Gillray’s print suggests, breeds a new kind of “French Disease.”
S COTC H I TC H A N D S COTC H P OX
Just as the metaphor of infection was used throughout this period to

express British anxieties about potential political, military, or cultural invasion
by the French, so that same symbolism was mobilized to target populations in
the United Kingdom that seemed particularly vulnerable to the “French dis-
ease in government.” Historically, Scotland had always enjoyed a compara-
tively comfortable relationship with France, and Franco-Scottish trade often
continued unabated even in periods of Anglo-French war.99 For some English
writers, this “Auld Alliance” between Scotland and France made the former a
potential threat to national security—and that threat became all the more seri-
ous, of course, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688: with the Catholic James
II forced to surrender his claims to the monarchy and take shelter in France,
the Protestant English were left at odds with those of their Scottish neighbors
who still supported the French-backed Stuart claims to the throne. Although
the extent of the ideological links between France and Scotland remained
opaque for even the most well-informed politicos, the violent Jacobite upris-
foreigners 141
ings of 1689, 1715, and 1745 kept the links between “Pox, the Pretender, and
[the] Pope” fresh in the collective imagination, and a number of English writ-
ers and artists used the metaphor of venereal disease to attack the Jacobite
movement.100 For satirists such as Robert Gould, Scotch Jacobitism was “the
other French Disease / And more Malignant if we let it seize.”101
Indeed, if the threat of invasion was greater coming from a rival or ally than
an outright enemy, then the “Scotch pox” really did have the potential to prove
more “malignant” than its French counterpart, since the Act of Union in 1707
made the Scottish and the English into citizens of the same United Kingdom.
And just as the use of venereal disease imagery in an anti-French context often
reflected anxieties about the intimacy, rather than the animosity, that existed
between Britain and France, so references to the threat of infection from
Scotland often highlighted the ease with which Scottish people, values, and
beliefs might infiltrate and transform English communities.
Fears about mass migration from the North, Jacobite unrest, and other
specifically Scottish problems were often represented through the metaphor of
“Scotch itch” (probably genital scabies). Although the mites that cause scabies
can affect many different parts of the body, the itch (or “Scotch fiddle,” as it
was also known)102 was identified by some physicians as an “impure Disease,”
and many eighteenth-century venereological treatises discussed it in passing,
either in relation to the pox or in the context of the controversy surrounding
mercury treatment for venereal infection.103 In literary and visual representa-
tions, too, the itch could be identified as a venereal condition, and the itchy
Scot became almost as popular a stock satiric character as the poxed Frenchman
at some points during the century. “Itch-land” was used as slang for “Scotland,”
just as “Frenchified” meant “infected with the pox.”104 Fiddles and scratching
posts became emblems of the unwholesome Scottish immigrant, just as peri-
wigs and French fashions provoked thoughts of the “French disease.” One
English satirist even claimed that the itch was “a Disease peculiar to the . . .
Lairds of Scotland,” just as “a Clap [was] to the Marshals of France.”105
As this latter example suggests, a number of works made the link between
the Scottish and the French diseases explicit, using the shared metaphor of
venereal infection to connect the seemingly milder threat posed by Scottish
Jacobitism with the more obvious dangers represented by French Catholics.
The anti-Jacobite pamphlet The Scotch Portmanteau Opened at York, for exam-
ple, warned in 1761 that the suitcase of a Caledonian traveler might be “fraught
with th’Itch, Pop’ry, the Pretender, and French Pox.”106 Whenever the two
conditions were mentioned together, references to the itch invariably preceded
142 foreigners
those to the pox, inviting the reader to draw conclusions about the close rela-
tionship between the two infections, or about their relative severity: just as
Scotland could provide a gateway for French goods, French popery, and
French government, so the “Scotch itch” of Jacobite discontent had the poten-
tial to develop into the full-blown “French disease” of a Catholic monarchy.
While it was sometimes used to link Scotland with France, “the itch” also
offered a convenient means by which prejudiced English writers and artists
might assert the socioeconomic or cultural inferiority of Scotland. As one
beleaguered “North Briton” complained, “even disease has been made a subject
of reproach against the poor Scots,” with both medical and nonmedical texts
contending that the Scotch itch was endemic, and the French pox more preva-
lent, in Scotland.107 While different texts offered different possible explanations
for this phenomenon, the allegedly higher incidence of venereal complaints
in Scotland was both attributed to, and productive of, a conception of Scottish
life as harsh and uncivilized. In much the same way that Jean Astruc’s account
of “dirty” Haitians simultaneously explained the emergence of a new disease
and reinforced long-standing assumptions about European cultural superiority,
medical explanations of the Scotch itch and the Scotch pox often asserted or
policed alleged distinctions between the ease and cleanliness of life in the South
and the brutality or squalor of northern Britain.
The journalist Edward Topham, reporting from Edinburgh in the mid-
1770s, for example, argued that the harsher Scottish climate made venereal
disease there more virulent and difficult to treat.108 Not only were Scottish
victims of the pox more likely to retain (and thus spread) an infection,
Topham claimed, but they were also uniquely at risk of contracting “sibbens,”
an especially loathsome localized form of the disease:
They have in Scotland, a disorder which they call the “Sibbens,” and
which is a compound of the Scotch and venereal disease that has hith-
erto baffled all the aids of medicine. Its consequences are the most bane-
ful that can be conceived, as it gradually destroys every part of the human
frame, before it puts an end to life; and, if what I am told is true, it is still
more dreadful—as it is to be caught by merely touching an infected
person, and not in the manner of the common venereal disorder.109
While Topham notes that sibbens is passed through social rather than
sexual contact, his definition of this morbid “compound” of Scottishness and
venereal infection reinforces a prejudiced conception of life in Scotland as
nasty, brutish, and short.110
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The physician Robert James ascribed the greater incidence of the itch in
Scotland to native ignorance, explaining in his treatise on gout and rheuma-
tism that “amongst the Vulgar in some Parts of Scotland, ’tis received as a
certain Truth, that the Itch is a Preservative against all Distempers, insomuch
that it is esteemed little less than Madness to submit to be cured; and some
even carry the Farce so far as to catch it designedly, with a View of curing their
Diseases.”111 While James acknowledged a potential prophylactic value to any
condition that incapacitated or isolated its victims, he questioned the hygiene
as well as the good sense of the Scots in preferring the “Filthiness and Trouble”
of the itch to the inconvenience of those diseases against which it was falsely
believed to guard.112
As this emphasis on northern “filthiness” suggests, the conception of Scots
as a dirty people, either obliged by poverty or compelled by perverse inclina-
tion to live in squalid conditions, was one of the most common means of
explaining—and perpetuating—the link between Scottishness and disease.113
In the words of one satirist, Scotland was “fam’d for Poverty and Itch,” and its
filthy slums were identified as a breeding ground for parasites and infections.114
Here, for example, is one satirist’s account of the downtrodden port area of a
Scottish seaside town:
It’s but a meer Dunghill, where is to be had,
Fleas, Lice, Pox, and Itch, and all that is bad.
In short, to define it, and so to have done,
It is the meer Fag-end, and A——e of the Town.115
Here an insalubrious slum is figured as the “Arse” of a municipal body poli-
tic. The waterside locale presumably makes this area contaminating as well as
contaminated, its “Fleas, Lice, Pox, and Itch” not only tormenting the impover-
ished locals, but also posing a threat to incoming merchants and travelers.
A similarly damning portrait appears in a satire penned by the actor and
poet laureate Colley Cibber. In “A Character of Scotland, taken from a Pane
of Glass in an Inn in the Northern Road,” Cibber depicts the northern half
of the kingdom as a hostile, dirty, and unforgiving wasteland:
Whoe’er he is desires to see
A barren Land, without a Tree,
The rankest Beggary and Pride,
As close as Nits and Lice ally’d,
Be poison’d when he eats and drinks,
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Or flavour’d with all Kinds of Stinks;

Whoe’er would bite, or would be bit,
Would get the Itch, or be beshit,
Let him to Scotland but repair,
He’ll find all these Perfections there.116
Here Cibber invites a comparison between the filth of Scotland—
evidenced not only in the endemic “Nits and Lice” but also in the risks of
being infected with the itch, poisoned by the food, or “beshit” with animal
feces—and the presumably more sanitary conditions of England. The speak-
er’s vantage point from a window at an inn enables him to “look down” on
Scotland in literal as well as figurative terms, surveying the barren landscape
in a satiric distortion of the philosophical prospect poem.
Cibber’s description also highlights one of the principal distinctions
between eighteenth-century imaginative conceptions of an itch-ridden
Scotland and xenophobic attacks on a pox-ridden France. While the stereo-
type of the filthy, lice-ridden Scot, much like the stereotype of the “starving
Frenchman,” could be used to champion England’s superior economic pros-
perity, anti-French art and literature also routinely linked the “French disease”
with expensive luxury products like wigs, lace, and wine, whereas anti-Scottish
rhetoric only ever associated infections with poverty. To put this in slightly
different terms, while references to the “French disease” were sometimes used
to express concerns over Britain’s increased appetite for imported luxury goods
and services, references to the “Scotch itch” explored fears about mass migra-
tion, with its attendant dangers of overcrowding and depleted resources. Both
concerns were at heart socioeconomic, but while English Francophilia threat-
ened to enrich a rival nation by bringing in French goods and workers, Scottish
immigration threatened to weaken the economy by replacing skilled English
laborers with uncouth, vulgar Scots.
It is this comparison between English and Scottish workers that under-
pins an attack on the Critical Review by the English novelist John Shebbeare.
Writing in response to an unfavorable account of his work in the Edinburgh-
based periodical, Shebbeare uses the story of an itch-plagued pig to strike
back at his Scottish critics, threatening them with dire consequences should
they venture again onto English literary territory:
There was a certain Pig in Scotland which had gotten the Itch, by lying
in the same Bed with his Master’s Family. This Animal, not liking his
scabby Condition, and having heard it said by some People of the
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Country, that Scotchmen were cured of this opprobrious Malady by

travelling into England, entered upon a Resolution of performing a
like Journey. He s[e]t out soon after, and at length arrived, all covered
with the Itch, on the Banks of the Thames. The Object which struck
him most was the Whiteness of the Swans, which Phaenomenon he
concluded was owing to their swimming in that Water; wherefore,
without considering that Nature had not adapted Swine for swim-
ming, he rushed into the River. Now such is the Consequence of a Pig’s
swimming, that, by his Aukwardness in that Exercise, he continually
rubs his fore Feet against his Throat, till having taken off the S[k]in,
and divided the Jugular Veins, he expires, by bleeding to Death in the
Water. In this Manner it happened to this Hog of Scotland; he was
drowned, with all his Itch upon him; a true Warning to all the Animals
of his Country, whose Arrogance may tempt them to talk of their Abil-
ities to undertake that, for which by Nature they are not adapted.117
While the specific context of Shebbeare’s attack here is literary rather than
economic, his fable ties in with other English satires that use the itch as a
means of condemning Scottish ambition. By depicting the aspiring immigrant
as a pig, Shebbeare reminds us that the Scot’s defining characteristic is filth; by
adding that the pig shares a bed with its master’s family, he identifies the
Scottish homestead as a pigsty. The ignorance of the newly arrived Scottish
immigrant—another popular theme in anti-Scottish literature—is encapsu-
lated here in the pig’s foolish assumption that swans are not naturally white,
but rather would be as dirty as he were it not for their more hygienic environ-
ment. The contrast between pig and swan is stark enough in enforcing the
distinction between filthy, vulgar Scotsman and pristine, civilized Englishman—
but Shebbeare’s attack is further sharpened by the dark comedy of his fable’s
plotline: the pig is not simply shamed, but also condemned to a painful and
ignoble death for attempting, Icarus-like, to reach beyond his station—to
aspire to an inherent English refinement and purity that he “by Nature” does
not possess.118
T H E S C OT C H I T C H I N G O V E R N M E N T:
S AT I R E S O N LO R D B U T E , 1 7 6 0 – 1 7 6 3
While similar anxieties about Scottish economic and intellectual ambition

were reflected in a number of other satires on specific immigrant groups, some
of the clearest examples of the “Scotch itch” metaphor appeared during the
146 foreigners
ministry of John Stuart, the third Earl of Bute. During his brief period as
prime minister in 1762–63, Bute was subject to a fierce campaign of anti-
Scottish propaganda, with much of the criticism focusing on his attempts to
end Britain’s involvement in the Seven Years’ War by negotiating a peace settle-
ment with France. While Bute was ultimately successful in his political aims,
negotiating agreements with France and Spain and bringing an end to the con-
flict in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris, his actions met with intense disapproval
from his political enemies and from an increasingly hostile English public.
Bute was ridiculed for his Scottish ancestry, his alleged Francophilia, his
suspiciously cozy relationship with George III (for whom he had acted as a
tutor), and his long-standing friendship with the king’s mother, Augusta,
Princess of Wales—and many of the attacks on his governance use metaphors
of venereal disease.119 That Bute was singled out as the target for such an
intense campaign of hate propaganda—the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography suggests that he was lampooned in over four hundred prints and
broadsheets during his short stint as prime minister—is itself some indication
of the level of anti-Scottish sentiment in England at this time; but even taking
into account the disproportionate number of attacks leveled at Bute person-
ally, it is striking how many of these lampoons highlighted his Scottish ances-
try by linking it with the “Scotch itch,” the “Scotch fiddle,” or the “French
disease.”
The satiric print The Scotch Hurdy Gurdy or the Musical Boot (1762), for
example, attacks Bute’s close relationship with the Princess of Wales by imply-
ing that their relationship is both sexual and sexually diseased (fig. 3.5).120 Like
many other such caricatures, this print suggests that the love affair between
Bute and Augusta has generated a bad case of “Scotch fiddle”—not just for
the princess, who must suffer the consequences of her attachment, but also
for the British people, who have been thus played—or “fiddled with”—by
their prime minister. In this image, Bute and the princess appear on either
side of a gigantic jackboot (an emblem combining the prime minister’s first
name, John [”Jack”] with his title, Bute [“Boot”]); the boot has been strung
like a violin.121 Wielding a bow between them, they play the instrument’s
strings, labeled “England,” “Ireland,” “Scotland,” and “France.” Their com-
ments reinforce the sexual innuendo as the princess enthusiastically instructs
Bute: “Keep on shoving laddie, for Im resolv’d to wear the Strings of my
Fiddle out before I tire.” Bute replies with equally coarse assurance, “In truth
ye shall find Il shove as long as ye, & weel make the south Gentry dance a
Butenata to our musical hurdy Gurdy, or else they shall all *************.”
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3.5. George Townshend, The Scotch Hurdy Gurdy or the Musical Boot, 1762
As Bute’s reply suggests, popular representations of the prime minister

frequently implied that his policies were deliberately targeted against the
English aristocracy (“the south Gentry”). Indeed, although The Scotch Hurdy
Gurdy identifies one of the strings on the fiddle as “Scotland,” Bute was sus-
pected of favoring Scots from the moment he was first sworn into the Privy
Council in 1760, mere days after his former pupil ascended the throne as
George III. While there is no historical evidence that Bute showed such favor-
itism, his status as a Scotsman turned Londoner—he moved to the capital
shortly after the Jacobite uprising of 1745, and in 1761 inherited the immense
wealth of the English Wortley Montagu family, into which he had married—
made him an obvious target for those who remained suspicious of upstart
Scottish immigrants. (Ironically, Bute’s own paternal grandfather, who had
been a member of Queen Anne’s Privy Council, had strongly opposed the Act
of Union in 1706.)
Many of the cartoons that greeted Bute’s early days in office presented him as
a loyal Scot who had infiltrated the English elite, determined to spread the “itch”
of Scottish influence by securing powerful positions in church, government, and
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the civil service for his northern countrymen. In George Townshend’s Sawney
Discover’d, or the Scotch Intruders (1760), for example, Bute is pictured leading a
group of Scotsmen toward a large folding screen patterned with thistles and
emblazoned with the motto Nemo Me Impune Lacessit, translated as “No One
Touches Me But Gets the Itch” (fig. 3.6).122 Holding in his hand a paper that
identifies these men as “Scots Gents to fill up any Vacancy,” Bute instructs the
immigrants to move forward, saying, “Come Lads Ill tak ye behind the Screen
& ye shall shew all yere parts to yere Lady.”
The suggestion of illicit sex in Bute’s offer to show the men’s “parts” to a
lady is confirmed when the print is held up to the light: the patterned screen
conceals an underimage of Bute and the Princess of Wales, who are—to bor-
row the coy phrase used by Frederick Stephens in his catalogue of prints in
the British Museum—“indecently engaged.”123 Here, then, venereal disease
offers a direct means of linking sexual and political forms of prostitution,
with the itch presented not only as the unfortunate physiological consequence
of sexual misbehavior but also as the hazard of Augusta’s alleged fondness for
Scotsmen, a perverse inclination that compels her to fill every anatomical and
3.6. George Townshend, Sawney Discover’d, or the Scotch Intruders, 1760

foreigners 149
political “Vacancy” with Scots. Bute, as the man whose touch gives everyone
the itch, has evidently also infected the princess, who now shares and spreads
his desire to advance vulgar northerners.124
Townshend’s We are all a comeing or Scotch Coal for ever (1761) similarly
uses the symbolism and language of venereal disease to express fears of a hos-
tile Scottish takeover, showing carts and carriages loaded with would-be
Scottish immigrants traveling along a road marked “From Edinbr to Londo”
(fig. 3.7).125 Like Sawney Discovered, this print links Scottish political ambi-
tion with the spread of the itch, since the travelers boast of the positions they
hope to be granted by the newly powerful Bute—“Il be a Bishop”; “Il be an
Admiral”; “I for the treasury”; “I for the Exchequer”—or reference the need
to scratch their “itch”: “I wish I was rubbing my back at the posts at St
James’s”; “I mus gang away fast for fear of losing our scrubbing time.” While
this print does not identify the “itch” as a venereal complaint, it does make a
rather coarse comparison between Scottish immigrants and sheep (known to
scratch themselves on fences). The reference to scratching posts also, of
3.7. George Townshend, We are all a comeing or Scotch Coal for ever, 1761
150 foreigners
course, alludes to “posts” in office and calls to mind the saying “you scratch
my back, I’ll scratch yours.”126
Another print in the same vein—this one a letter composed using rebuses
or visual symbols—imagines the physician Richard Rock writing to Bute to
commend the latter’s cure for the “itch.” Rock, the practitioner featured
alongside Jean Misaubin in A Harlot’s Progress and widely known for his treat-
ment of venereal disease, praises Bute’s skills in curing the “Itch” and suggests
that “every S[cot]s man that shall be a candidate for any post or place in . . .
Publick offices, shall be obliged to perform a Quarentine of 40 days” under
Rock’s care.127 Here the imagined correspondence between Rock and Bute
(misspelled in the title as “Butt”) not only links the prime minister with the
propagation and treatment of venereal disease, but also invokes long-standing
satiric comparisons between medical and political forms of “quackery.”128
Indeed, as a politician suspected of “doctoring” the government, church,
and civil service in order to advance his countrymen, Bute was often depicted as
a quack or accused—much like Misaubin—of spreading the venereal disease he
ostensibly claimed to treat. To cite just one example, the 1762 print The
Mountebank (also issued as The —— Quack and The Scotch Mountebank)
depicts Bute as a quack doctor addressing a crowd of eager Scotsmen (fig. 3.8).129
As in Sawney Discovered, his dialogue is rendered in exaggerated dialect, a satiric
device akin to the use of parodic French accents in Restoration comedy and a
prominent feature in many prints from the 1762–63 anti-Bute campaign. Bute
tells the assembled audience about his cure for “the Gowden Itch,” promising
profit to his fellow Scots if they will only move south to England. Here, greed is
figured as an infectious condition, a “Golden Itch” that plagues the miserly
Scotsman.
Bute offers his own life story as a testimonial, swearing: “I my sel; was
ne’er free, fra this muckle Itch, while I liv’d in te North, but having a gued
Staff to depend upon, I resolv’d to travel into ye South, to seek a Cure.” He
claims to have found the solution to his problem in the form of “Gowden
Lozenges”—English wealth that he has consumed in order to cure his own
“itch,” and that he now promises to seize and distribute among his fellow
Scots: “I wull gie every mon o’ ye, twa or three thousand, of these Lozenges,
once a year, to mak ye hauld up yr heads, & turn out muckle men.” Here the
recognizable link between poverty and itch is complicated by allusions to
Bute’s own vast personal wealth: while the problem that afflicts Bute’s Scottish
audience might indeed be the “itch” of a squalid life spent in the slums, the
prime minister’s own “Gowden Itch” can spring only from avarice.
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3.8. The Mountebank, 1762 (Reproduced courtesy of the

Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
Bute’s enthusiasm for financial exchange is further compromised by the

implicit association of the “Golden Itch” with sexual contact. As in Sawney
Discovered, the Scotch itch is identified as a sexually transmitted condition:
behind the grandstanding quack, a woman wearing a Welsh hat—presumably
Augusta, the Princess of Wales—can be seen peeping out from behind the
curtain. Her position suggests that she may be lying on a bed; certainly, her
enthusiasm for the proceedings implies that her relationship with Bute is per-
sonal as well as financial. Once again, Bute is identified as both a beneficiary
and a practitioner of favoritism: just as he prostituted himself to earn Augusta’s
favor (and, through her, the favor of George III), so he plans to prostitute the
nation’s offices and interests to advance his fellow Scotsmen. And Bute’s ambi-
tion, like his itch, is clearly contagious. Not only do his listeners eagerly hold
out their hands to receive the promised “Gowden Lozenges,” but his remarks
are also complemented by the antics of a greedy sidekick: beside Bute on the
stage stands the novelist Tobias Smollett, a fellow Scot and a staunch sup-
porter of the prime minister. Clad in the hat and suit of a jester, Smollett is
cast as the quack’s idiot Jack-Pudden, his role as government propagandist
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signaled by the copy of The Briton (Smollett’s pro-Bute periodical) tucked

under his arm.
Similar accusations of political “quackery” are also behind the more
obscurely titled An Antidote by Carr for C[a]l[e]d[onia]n Impurities (1762).130
While Bute is not presented as a medical practitioner in this image, the com-
position is similar to that of The Mountebank: once again the prime minister
stands on a raised platform before an eager audience; and once again he col-
lects English gold as the “antidote” to Scottish corruption (fig. 3.9). The
theme of favoritism appears in the print’s title, which links the prime minister
with Robert Carr, the seventeenth-century politician and royal favorite who
was saved from execution for murder by the intervention of King James I. As
in The Mountebank, there is no ambiguity here about Bute’s mercenary
motives: he holds up a jackboot—emblazoned with the motto “never
enough”—into which gold coins fall from the sky. Two Scotsmen stand
expectantly before the boot, on a path labeled as “the Way to [Pre]——
ferment.” Like the upstart immigrants in We are all a comeing and the clamor-
ing crowd in The Mountebank, they are afflicted with their nation’s
characteristic disease. One of them holds a paper advertising “Rocks cure for
the Itch,” and watching the shower of coins, he swears an oath on his own
greed—figured, once again, as the desire to “scratch”:
[M]ay I never Scratch my . . . A[rs]e again
if it Looks not like a Golden rain
Sawney; its Ours, theres none dares Meddle
For if they do the’ll gett the Fiddle.
Here, two separate metaphorical meanings of the itch are in play. As in
many other prints, “Scotch itch” is used to symbolize Scottish greed. At the
same time, however, the speaker’s remarks identify Scotch “fiddle” as a poten-
tial weapon to be used against those who dare to “meddle” with the Scottish
takeover of public offices. Like Pullin’s French pox in Shadwell’s The
Humorists, the “fiddle” is in this context a contagious illness to be deliberately
inflicted on the English by sly, insinuating foreigners—only now, those for-
eigners are legal citizens.
The oath-swearing man’s companion replies in similar terms, insisting
(once again in parodied Scottish dialect) that “the leek before we ne’er were
watching / Sin first we learn’d the Art of Scr——tch——ng.” The reference to
an “art of scratching” links Scottishness with poverty, identifying the two men
as penurious immigrants skilled at “scratching” a living by whatever means
foreigners 153
3.9. An Antidote by Carr for C[a]l[e]d[onia]n Impurities, 1762 (Reproduced

necessary. Verses below the print provide the “Antidote” promised in the title
as the spirit of Robert Carr warns Bute to “take Again/ thy N——ve Itch &
quit the gain.” While it is Carr, and not Bute, who offers the titular “Antidote”
in this scenario, the same associations between immigration, poverty, and
venereal disease that were evident in the other prints are clearly still in play.
As these and other satires on Bute’s preferments suggest, allegations of
favoritism dogged the prime minister throughout his political career, and even
after his retirement, he retained an undeserved reputation as the patron saint
of upstart Scots. The trope of Bute as quack doctor also remained popular in
opposition caricature, appearing not only in prints condemning the prime
minister’s alleged bias in favor of Scottish workers, but also in images attack-
ing his 1762–63 peace negotiations with France and Spain.131 While Bute’s
negotiations effected a welcome end to Britain’s involvement in the Seven
Years’ War, they also culminated in a peace treaty that was fiercely attacked by
Bute’s opponents for its allegedly pro-French terms. Bute’s willingness to cede
154 foreigners
a number of valuable colonial territories to France was seen as further evidence

of his attempts to privilege Scottish over British interests—this time, by sup-
porting the “auld alliance” between France and Scotland at the expense of
Britain’s colonial interests. Predictably, given the attacks on Bute’s “doctoring”
of the government, many of the prints condemning Bute’s alleged enthusiasm
for a French takeover referenced both quackery and venereal disease.
In The Evacuations, Or an Emetic for Old England, by a Scot (1762), for
example, Bute is shown forcing the French “emetic” of the peace on a suffer-
ing Britannia (fig. 3.10).132 While it is Bute’s ally, the medically trained
Smollett, who appears to be the prescribing physician here, Bute and Fox
enthusiastically carry out his instructions: Bute—clad in the inevitable
Scottish plaids, and depicted with the head of an ass—holds a blindfold over
Britannia’s eyes and compels her to vomit up the territories ceded to the
French—Cuba, St. Lucia, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and so forth. Fox stands
in waiting with a clyster pipe and a “prescription” from Smollett for an enema
of “Soupe Maigre Caledon,” or Scottish soupe maigre.
The reference to Franco-Scottish alliance is complemented by the pres-
ence of a smiling Frenchman who watches the proceedings from the balcony
of a nearby shop. The shop’s sign reveals this man’s identity while also attack-
ing the treaty’s apparent concession of valuable sugar- and tobacco-growing
colonies to the French, advertising “Fine teas Sugar Tobacco and Havannah
Snuff by Velasque Never Nose & Co From over ye way.” The French observer,
then, is the Duc de Nivernais, or “Never Nose”—identified here by what
became the standard satiric pun on his name, a reference to the grotesque
nasal deformity sometimes caused by venereal disease. Portrayed as a “nose-
less” syphilitic, Nivernais—the French ambassador and one of the chief nego-
tiators of the 1763 treaty—functions as a representative of his nation’s military
ambitions. His position as relaxed overseer rather than agent suggests that he
has already infected the Scottish prime minister with the “French disease in
government” and now stands back to watch the effects. (There may also be a
more oblique reference to venereal disease in the verses printed below the
image. These lines identify Bute, rather than Smollett, as the “Quack,” and
describe “Old England” as “Sick, Sick, at heart, Since she took a Scotch
Pill”—that is, an ineffective quack remedy.)133
Other depictions of Bute’s political “quackery” during the treaty negotia-
tions were even more severe in their condemnation of the French ambassador,
and almost every caricature on the subject connects Nivernais with venereal
disease. In some prints, he appears with the disfigured nose of a syphilitic; in
3.10. The Evacuation, or an Emetic for Old England, by a Scot, 1762 (Reproduced courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
156 foreigners
others, he is depicted as a flat-faced ape (another symbol for the venereally dis-
eased—discussed further in the next chapter). Whenever he is presented as
having normal facial features, Nivernais is identified as “Nevernose” or “Never
a nose,” the connection with French pox effected by text rather than image.134
In all of these caricatures, Nivernais is cast as the sly, insinuating Frenchman, his
name invoking the standard comparisons between covertly transmitted disease
and covertly manipulative foreigner. By extension, whenever “Nevernose” is
pictured alongside the prime minister, the same series of associations works to
cast doubt on Bute’s political purity.
In The Trophys Exchang’d (1762), for example, Bute is depicted welcoming
a Spaniard (presumably the Spanish ambassador, Velasquez) and a noseless
Frenchman (Nivernais) into the king’s bedchamber (fig. 3.11).135 This time it is
3.11. The Trophys Exchang’d, 1762 (Reproduced courtesy

of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
foreigners 157
the king, rather than Britannia, who has been dosed with unpleasant foreign
medicine: he languishes atop a bed that is labeled “of the Thistle Down” and
decorated with French fleurs-de-lis. It is resolutely clear what ails the king: his
bedstead bears the phrase “Stay me with Scratching Tickle me with Thistles
for I am sick of W——r.” Here, then, conventional references to the French
disease are complemented by references to its Scottish equivalent, as the king’s
weariness of war can—like the itch—be soothed only “with Scratching.”
Approached by Bute and Nivernais, the bedridden king is surrounded by
symbols of Franco-Scottish alliance: the Princess of Wales sits beside him with
a bowl of “Crowdy a Paris” (French porridge); a Scottish bagpiper stands by
to play “the Blessings of Peace” and “John Anderson my Jo to a new French
Tune.” The noseless French ambassador waxes enthusiastic about the “Antient
friendship” between France and Scotland: “My lor the sweete savour of your
Bonte I can smella widouta de Nose, alla France, now vite honour de Thistle
dis is Antient friendship de Scotland and France Encore Encore Encore.”
Here the reference to scent serves as both a joke at the “noseless” ambassador’s
expense, and a reminder of his (moral and physical) corruption: many
eighteenth-century texts remarked on the foul smell of venereal disease suffer-
ers, particularly those undergoing mercury treatment or enduring the horrific
final stages of tertiary syphilis. (The artist here was neither the first nor the
last to crack the joke that a man with no nose can still smell awful.)
While Bute was by no means the only Scotsman to be associated with the
“itch”—the physician Thomas Thompson and the politician John Sinclair are
notable prior and subsequent examples—the furor surrounding his term as
prime minister was remarkable for its extensive use of “Scotch itch” and
“Scotch pox” rhetoric.136 More broadly, it is worth considering the Bute cari-
catures in relation to other satires that attributed venereal disease to powerful
political or military leaders. (The attack on the revolutionary leader Louis-
Marie de La Revellière-Lépeaux in Gillray’s The French Generals Retiring on
Account of their Health, discussed above, would be one example.) Although
the “Scotch itch” and the “French disease” were conditions differing in sever-
ity as well as in symptoms, the similarities in their use within Restoration and
eighteenth-century satire reminds us that the foreignness of venereal disease
was, much like the disease itself, very malleable. Indeed, the nineteenth cen-
tury saw a whole new set of associations forming around other foreign groups:
in the early 1800s, caricaturists attacked Princess Charlotte’s penniless German
fiancé, Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, by linking his Germanness with
venereal disease. In S. W. Fores’s A German Present (1816), Leopold is shown
158 foreigners
offering his new bride the gift of a “sausage” that is “curry’d and spiced” with
infection; similarly, in George Cruikshank’s A Brighton Hot Bath (1816), the
Prince of Wales and Charlotte bathe Leopold in boiling water in an attempt
to rid him of his Germanic venereal taint.137 As these examples suggest, the
accusation of disease could be used to target different groups in different
contexts, but it clearly retained its signifying power as a tool for scrutinizing
the intrusion of the foreign into the familiar—whether by marriage, political
union, importation, or immigration—throughout the eighteenth century
and beyond.
chapter 4
Chapter of Noses
The hero of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) begins one

of many learned disquisitions on the subject of noses by issuing this crucial
proviso:
I define a nose, as follows, intreating only beforehand, and beseeching
my readers, both male and female, of what age, complexion, and con-
dition soever, for the love of God and their own souls, to guard against
the temptations and suggestions of the devil and suffer him by no art
or wile to put any other ideas into their minds, than what I put into
my definition.—For by the word Nose, throughout all this long
chapter of noses, and in every other part of my work, where the word
Nose occurs,—I declare, by that word I mean a Nose, and nothing
more, or less.1
Even without such dogged insistence to the contrary, no reader of
Sterne’s wildly popular novel could be in doubt that, to misquote Freud,
sometimes a nose is not just a nose. Elsewhere in the account of his “life and
opinions,” Tristram invokes the classical association between the length of a
man’s nose and the size of his wit, but here we get the impression that it is a
rather less dignified association—between the size of a man’s nose and the
size of his penis—that he has in mind.2 Tristram’s subsequent warning to
a female reader—“Now don’t let Satan, my dear girl, in this chapter,
159
160 a chapter of noses
take advantage of any one spot of rising-ground to get astride of your

imagination”—further undermines any alleged claims to solemnity, its sexu-
alized terms echoing early modern jests about women’s ostensible preference
for men with large noses.3 “A long nose is a lady’s liking,” joke books and
tavern songs proclaimed—and so it would presumably have been a tempta-
tion for many a “dear girl” to let fantasies of a long nose “get astride of [her]
imagination.”4
In the end, of course, it is Tristram who seems to let his imagination get
the better of him, particularly given the weighty significance he assigns to his
own nose, a feature that is crushed flat with a pair of forceps during the pro-
cess of his birth, and that subsequently comes to define his existence. If any-
thing, Tristram’s eccentric life story seems designed to convince its readers
that the word “nose” always signifies more than its literal meaning. With its
flat-nosed protagonist, its crackpot theories about nose shape and size, and its
interpolated tale of a long-nosed stranger (a tale ostensibly penned by an
expert on noses), Sterne’s novel identifies itself as part of a longer tradition of
catchphrases and comic anecdotes that rely on the nose-penis analogy for a
punch line. But the obsession with noses in Tristram Shandy also encodes a
darker meaning: it refers to a literary and visual culture that used the nose as
a gauge of sexual health, and that equated a damaged or disfigured nose with
the threat of venereal infection.
In this chapter, I consider the persistent association between nasal defor-
mity and venereal disease. I argue that this one symptom—and, more broadly,
this one body part—came to assume a powerful metonymic significance,
standing in for both the disease and the wider social dangers it could repre-
sent. Put simply, the deformed nose allowed the boundary between diseased
and healthy to run parallel to the boundaries between classes, races, and
species—boundaries that seemed to some, much like a syphilitic’s nose, in
imminent danger of collapse. By comparing the flattened noses of those with
venereal disease to the “deformed” noses of animals and certain ethnic groups,
Restoration and eighteenth-century writers and artists were able to explore
broader cultural anxieties about the biological integrity of the white race and
the human species. While we now associate these kinds of concerns with
nineteenth- and twentieth-century programs of eugenics, representations of
nasal deformity in the Restoration and the eighteenth century were already
helping create the disturbing alliances between blackness, Jewishness, and
morbidity that, as Sander Gilman has shown, went on to influence later
European racial politics.5
a chapter of noses 161
T H E N O S E K N OW S
Like most of the other associations in this book, the link between venereal
infection and nasal deformity had its basis in material reality: of all the symp-
toms of the pox—a list that could include chancres on the genitals, swelling
of the lymph glands, severe skin rashes, bone pain, spinal deformity, benign
tumors, and dementia—none was more obvious, more undeniable, more
exposed to public scrutiny and condemnation, than the collapse of the bridge
of the nose. Afflicted with this particular complication, the infected man
found that his face increasingly resembled a skull, providing a graphic and
obtrusive warning that the wages of sin is death.
Yet while the metonym had a medical origin, the link between venereal
disease and nasal disfiguration was not necessarily an inevitable one: in many
syphilitics, the disease never enters the tertiary phase, and among those who
did suffer from tertiary syphilis, only a portion would have experienced the
destruction of nasal cartilage. Even given the shocking presence of real-life
“noseless” men and women on the streets of London, the realities of the vene-
real disease epidemic seem inadequate to explain the extraordinary proliferation
of “no-nose” jokes in Restoration and eighteenth-century art and literature.
From the mid-seventeenth century onward, this one facial feature developed a
cultural life of its own, providing the punch line for novels, satires, and joke
books, serving as the focal point for social and political cartoons, and providing
the inspiration for whimsical literary set pieces with titles such as Rinology
(1736) and A Critical Dissertation on Noses (1767). By the middle of the century,
so definitive was the connection between noses and venereal infection that the
merest mention of the feature was enough to set readers tittering—as Tristram’s
comments demonstrate.
One reason for the sudden popularity of “no-nose” jokes may have been
the wealth of meaning that had already accrued around the nose as a distin-
guishing feature. For centuries before the venereal disease epidemic, the nose
was used as a marker of social identity, ostensibly facilitating distinctions of
class, race, and religion. In figurative use, the nose was often mentioned in
catchphrases dealing with the formation of social groups or the policing of
social boundaries. Consider, for example, phrases such as “looking down
one’s nose,” “holding one’s nose in the air,” and “turning one’s nose up”—all
of which use the nose to indicate forms of class-based discrimination.
The association between elite status and a high-bridged or aquiline nose—
the kind of nose that could presumably be “turned up” or “looked down”
most easily—was also of long standing. Emerging from iconic depictions of
Augustus Caesar and other Roman emperors, this aesthetic, Alfred David has
argued, continued to exercise an influence on royal portraiture throughout
the medieval and early modern periods.6 Examples of the high-bridged patri-
cian profile in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature and art are not
hard to find: in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688), for example, the black hero’s
elevated status is signaled in part by the consideration that “his Nose was ris-
ing and Roman, instead of African and flat.”7 Similarly, some of the best-
known portraits from the period—including many by Joshua Reynolds,
founder and first president of the Royal Academy—feature aristocratic
subjects whose elongated noses connect them with the Roman gods and
goddesses they impersonate.8
In addition to distinctions of class, the nose served to identify differences
between rival religious groups. Christians had spent centuries distinguishing
their own “straight” noses from the “hooked” noses of Jews, and eighteenth-
century caricatures made the hooked nose as prominent a feature of Jewishness
as the stereotypical character traits of avarice and vengefulness. Seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century Anglicans distanced themselves from Protestant dis-
senters in part by ridiculing the latter’s tendency to intone hymns and prayers
through the nose. Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704), for example, identifies the
original dissenter, brother Jack, by his ability to twist his tongue “up into his
Nose, and deliver a strange Kind of Speech from thence.”9 Once again, word
use and idiomatic expressions are evocative here: the Oxford English Dictionary
lists a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century use of the verb “to nose” as mean-
ing “to utter and sing nasally”: all the cited examples (including one from
Richardson’s Clarissa) use the term to attack religious dissenters.10
Perhaps most important of all, the features of the nose played a central
role in new and developing attempts to distinguish between different races.
While the coexistence of multiple ethnic groups had long been a feature of
British life (and especially of London life), midcentury scientific thought gave
racial discrimination a new credibility as naturalists began to formulate theo-
ries of race based on the examination of human skulls from different regions.
Influential treatises by, among others, the novelist and natural historian
Oliver Goldsmith, the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, le comte de
Buffon, and the Swiss modernizer of physiognomy Johann Lavater, referred
to the shape and the size of the nose as two of many cross-correlating features
that distinguished men from different racial backgrounds. The hooked nose,
considered alongside features like dark hair and a “swarthy complexion,”
offered potential evidence of Jewish racial difference.11 Asians and Africans
were identifiable not only by their darker coloring, but also by their
“deformed” noses and the associated psychological qualities of stupidity and
moral weakness.12 Indeed, according to Lavater, an African’s “weakness of
mind” and his flattened nose could both be traced back to the same “defects”
in skeletal structure: “The bone of the nose is too short, and the sockets of the
teeth advance too much; hence that little flat nose, and thick lips, which are
natural to all the nations of Africa.”13 For Lavater, the flat nose served not only
to distinguish the African from the European, but also to signal the “character
of stupidity” that justified the African’s subordinate position in European
society.14
A related analogy could be applied to distinctions between species: the nose
was useful in distinguishing man from his nearest relative in the animal king-
dom, the ape or monkey.15 Just as the African’s flat nose ostensibly identified
him as the member of an inferior race, so the primate’s flat nose could be seen
as indicating an inferior species. And since monkeys were often associated with
Africa in the eighteenth-century imagination, it was easy enough to assume
some degree of correspondence between flat-nosed humans and flat-nosed ani-
mals.16 Jews, too, were often represented as apes or monkeys: seen as the ambi-
tious, upwardly mobile mimics of their social and biological superiors, Jews
were identified as capable of “aping,” but never genuinely possessing, white
British values.17 In this pseudoscientific context, the deformed nose functioned
not only as the hallmark of an inferior being, then, but also as the means of
linking disparate groups characterized by nasal “disfigurement”: black Africans,
Jews, primates, and sufferers from advanced venereal infections.
In keeping with its long-standing use as a marker of group identity, the
nose became an important symbol for conveying the precariousness of social
boundaries—familial, racial, religious, socioeconomic—within the culture of
eighteenth-century Britain. Even in medical discourse, syphilitic nasal defor-
mity was routinely described in terms that underlined the social, or rather
anthropological, “meanings” of infection. In Jean Astruc’s influential 1737
treatise (the same text that traced venereal disease back to primitive Native
American cultures), the collapse of the nasal structure was described as reduc-
ing the sufferer to a quasi-bestial condition: “The whole Chamber of the
Nose being destroy’d, and the Bridge of it falling in, those who had before an
elate Nose like an eagle, become flat-fac’d like an ape.” Nor were the conse-
quences solely visual, Astruc explained, for the deterioration of the bones of
the nose meant that “the Tone of the Voice [would] be alter’d . . .; hence
Speaking through the Nose, Hoarseness of the Voice, Loss of Speech, &c.”18
As Astruc’s remarks suggest, the flattened nose provided a rationale by

which the infected man might be dehumanized, reduced—even if he had
once borne the noble features of the “eagle”—to the humbling status of the
flat-faced “ape.” Similar implications arose from Astruc’s discussion of the
voice. Language served as yet another potential marker not just of social iden-
tity (through accent, dialect, and the like) but also of species identity, as the
feature that ostensibly elevated humans above the rest of the animal kingdom.
At best, the victim of nasal deformity might speak in a snuffling tone that
made him sound like a foreigner; at worst, he might be rendered a dumb
animal, incapable of any spoken language at all.
Many imaginative representations of venereal disease built on this funda-
mental link between nasal structure and social identity. Time and again in the
comic literature of the period, the deformed nose functions as the means by
which a diseased man can be stripped of his claims to cultural, racial, or socio-
economic privilege. Consider, for example, the following anecdote about poet
and playwright William Davenant, quoted here from the 1728 anthology Polly
Peachum’s Jests, but reprinted in joke books throughout the century: “Sir
William Davenant, the Poet, had no Nose, who going along the Meuse one
Day, a Beggar-Woman followed him, crying, ah! God preserve your Eye-Sight,
Sir, the Lord preserve your Eye-Sight. Why, good Woman, said he, what makes
you pray for my Eye-Sight; Ah! dear Sir, said the Woman, if it should please
God that you grow dim-sighted, you have no Place to hang your Spectacles
upon.”19 In this popular joke, Davenant’s fallen nose is not just the comic
evidence of his sexual misconduct but also the means of undermining his
elevated social status. The same one-liner might be used on any person who
“had no Nose”—but here the diseased man is pointedly identified as “Sir
William Davenant, the Poet”: a titled gentleman and a favorite of the court.
The joke sees Davenant demoted from master of wit to object of ridicule. His
disease-ravaged features allow his claims to superior status—his aristocratic
title, his gender, his successful career as a court wit and writer—to be over-
turned by a woman whose lowly place on the social hierarchy would otherwise
classify her as his inferior.
The same comedy of social exclusion characterizes Tobias Smollett’s
treatment of a nasally damaged doctor in Humphry Clinker (1771). In contrast
with the detailed and extensive discussions of infection in Roderick Random,
Smollett’s final novel makes only one brief reference to venereal disease, dra-
matizing a satiric exchange between the protagonist, a grouchy Welsh land-
owner named Matthew Bramble, and a gauche spa physician, Dr. L——n
(probably the well-known German doctor Diederich Wessel Linden).20 When

L——n boasts of his ability to cure venereal disease and suggests that Bramble
might have an infection, Bramble quickly puts an end to their conversation—
and a highly undesirable social connection—by drawing attention to the
doctor’s own distorted features:
[Bramble] told him there was a wart upon his nose, that looked a little
suspicious. ‘I don’t pretend to be a judge of those matters (said he) but
I understand that warts are often produced by the distemper; and that
one upon your nose seems to have taken possession of the very key-
stone of the bridge, which I hope is in no danger of falling.’ L——n
seemed a little confounded at this remark, and assured him it was
nothing but a common excrescence of the cuticula, but that the bones
were all sound below; for the truth of this assertion he appealed to the
touch, desiring he would feel the part. [Bramble] said it was a matter
of such delicacy to meddle with a gentleman’s nose, that he declined
the office.21
Mortified by Bramble’s insinuations, L——n hastily withdraws from
company to remove the offending blemish—and is subsequently ostracized
when his attempts to treat the wart cause it to “spread in such a manner as to
produce a considerable inflammation, attended with an enormous swelling; so
that when he next appeared, his whole face was overshadowed by this tremen-
dous nozzle.”22
Here, as in the exchange between the beggar woman and Sir William
Davenant, the deformed nose provides a means of examining shifting social
boundaries. The doctor’s claims to medical knowledge are cast into doubt,
and his pretensions to superior status overturned, by Bramble’s insinuations
of venereal infection. Although from the perspective of class politics this
scene appears to dramatize the opposite process to the jest about Davenant—
the beggar woman’s ridicule of a titled aristocrat overturns the existing social
hierarchy, while Bramble’s ridicule of an ambitious quack reaffirms it—both
scenes depict the same process of social exclusion, a process whereby the
deformed individual is denied the status to which he would otherwise (legiti-
mately or illegitimately) lay claim. Both scenes, in other words, use the nasal
“proof ” of venereal disease as a means of examining—either to police or to
question—class boundaries.
The scene between Bramble and Dr. L——n is also broadly indicative of
the extent to which any abnormality of the nose could be interpreted as a sign
of venereal infection. In the eighteenth-century imagination, warty noses,

broken noses, mutilated noses, fallen noses, and missing noses were all one—
and all could serve as the basis for mockery and condemnation. A satire by
the amateur poet Mary Latter, “To Capt. —— of Ld. A——’s Dragoons”
(1759), is a case in point: although the poem’s addressee has ostensibly broken
his nose by “falling from his Horse,” Latter describes him as having “no nose
at all,” and her words of commiseration deliberately blur the distinction
between injury and disease. Furthering these hints about venereal infection,
Latter claims to have sent a “Nose of Clay”—presumably similar to the false
noses sometimes worn by deformed syphilitics—to accompany her verses.
With the use of this prosthetic, Latter’s speaker cruelly observes, the captain
might yet manage to attract female admirers:
For, tho’ a Man may meet his Foes

In Battle, when h’ has lost his Nose;
Yet, Ladies often take Aversion,
And think, NO NOSE a great Aspersion:
But any Fool, you know, will pass,
If he has got a Nose in’s Face.
Stick This on then, when with your Love,
’Twill stick as close as Hand and Glove;
And I’ll defy both Great and Small,
To say, you’ve got no NOSE at all!23
Latter’s ridicule in these lines predictably highlights the link between a

damaged nose and a dysfunctional penis, implying—none too subtly—that
the captain’s injury has damaged his prowess. Although he may be fit for the
company of men in battle, the captain is no longer “equipped” to serve female
society—at least, not without the prosthetic that can stand in for an erect
penis, enabling him to please “both Great and Small.” Here the captain’s
damaged nose, much like William Davenant’s, becomes a means of overturn-
ing a powerful man’s claims to elevated status, placing him at the mercy of his
social inferior.
It is also worth considering, particularly in relation to works like Tristram
Shandy, that Latter identifies the captain’s flattened nose as a reminder of his
mortality. Latter’s speaker emphasizes the nose’s position at the front of the
body—the same anatomical consideration at work in phrases like “won by a
nose”—in order to suggest that the captain himself will soon be no more:
In Scripture, Sir, ’tis said, we must,

As Dust we are, return to Dust.
Then, Why should you your Nose bemoan?
Since ’tis but just before you gone:
And surely, every Booby knows,
That whersoe’er a Person goes,
He can but follow his own Nose!24
Here Latter’s poem highlights another of the distinctions made in part
through recourse to the nose: just as it ostensibly separated the white from the
black man, the Christian from the Jew, and the patrician from the plebeian,
so the nose also distinguished the face from the skull, the living man from the
(soon-to-be) dead one.
THE AMELIA DEBACLE (1752)
While nasal disfigurement may not have foreshadowed a speedy death for
all those who found themselves in the position of Latter’s captain, a mis-
shapen nose did prove to be the undoing of Henry Fielding’s heroine in his
final novel, Amelia (1752). Fielding’s semibiographical account of the adven-
tures of an idealized young woman and her erring husband enjoyed a remark-
ably brief shelf life, thanks in part to a small coterie of critics—including
Smollett, as well as the sometime satirist John Hill and the journalist Bonnell
Thornton—who suggested that the heroine’s claims to sexual virtue were
compromised by her crooked nose.25 In the novel, Amelia’s nose is injured in
a coach accident, but so determined was the connection between disfigured
noses and venereal infection that Fielding’s critics could not resist what
seemed such an obvious target. Even an otherwise-positive reviewer could
predict the novel’s misfortunes, shrewdly observing that Fielding ought to
have written a scene in which Amelia’s nose was repaired “by the help of some
eminent surgeon” (although surgeons were the proper ministers not just to
accident and injury, but also to venereal infection).26
To make matters worse, the author had provided some of the raw material
for his critics by describing the disease-ravaged face of an old prostitute earlier
in the same novel. “Blear-eyed Moll,” one of the underworld creatures
encountered by the novel’s hero, Captain Booth, during a stint in Newgate
prison, is described in terms so grotesque that she seems subhuman: “Nose
she had none; for Venus, envious perhaps at her former Charms, had carried
off the gristly Part; and some earthly Damsel, perhaps, from the same Envy,
had levelled the Bone with the rest of her Face: Indeed it was far beneath the
Bones of her Cheeks, which rose proportionally higher than is usual.”27 Here,
as in many other eighteenth-century satires on prostitutes, venereal disease is
presumably meant to function as both a source of coarse humor and a means
of condemning corruption. Yet the emphasis on Moll’s flattened nose, as
Peter Sabor and Terry Castle have noted, ultimately had the unfortunate
effect of creating an association in readers’ minds between the ostensibly
chaste Amelia and a grotesque, diseased prostitute.28
That association may well have been strengthened, at least for some readers,
by the extraordinary prominence accorded to venereal infection in the novel’s
plotline of persecuted virtue. An anonymous lord who seeks to seduce Amelia
ultimately dies of an infection “by which he was at last become so rotten, that
he stunk above Ground.”29 Perhaps more significantly, Amelia’s friend Mrs.
Atkinson—a figure who serves as the heroine’s double, not just in having suc-
cumbed to the seduction plot that Amelia narrowly avoids, but also in later pos-
ing as Amelia at a masquerade—contracts the disease herself, after having been
drugged and raped by the same lord.30 This subplot of infection by rape, while
not calling into question Amelia’s chastity, nonetheless brings Fielding’s heroine
more clearly into proximity with the dangers and realities of venereal disease.
Indeed, the structure of Fielding’s novel allowed plenty of space for the
cynical reader to imagine alternative explanations for Amelia’s disfigurement.
Not only do we learn of the alleged injury second hand, but the cause of that
injury is also related to us by the very person from whom Amelia would theo-
retically have had the greatest incentive to conceal any past sexual indiscre-
tions: her husband. Much like the grotesque description of Blear-eyed Moll,
the retrospective summary of Amelia’s coach accident seems almost designed
to raise subtle suspicions in the reader’s mind. As a character, Booth might
not know the truth of his wife’s history—but even if he did, he might well
choose not to reveal information that would reflect very poorly on his own
character as well as that of his bride.
Perversely, the novel further highlights its heroine’s ambiguous status by
having Booth identify and attack some of the same prejudices that prove
responsible for Amelia’s—and Amelia’s—downfall. For society inside as well
as outside the novel, the merest mention of an injured or misshapen nose is
enough to justify ridicule and social exclusion: when Amelia attempts to reen-
ter public life after her coach accident, she quickly finds that she is no longer
an object of desire among her former aristocratic suitors. She is also snubbed
by other women, as Booth recalls:
I was one Day in Company with several young Ladies, or rather young
Devils, where poor Amelia’s Accident was the Subject of much Mirth
and Pleasantry. One of these said, She hoped Miss would not hold her
Head so high for the future. Another answered, I don’t know, Madam,
what she may do with her Head, but I am convinced she will never more
turn up her Nose at her Betters. Another cry’d, What a very proper
Match might now be made between Amelia and a certain Captain, who
had unfortunately received an Injury in the same Part, though from
no shameful Cause.31
Here, Amelia’s devaluation on the marriage market is paralleled by her
denouncement in the salon, with both episodes confirming Booth’s own tacit
understanding of the connection between nasal damage and venereal disease.
Like his hero within the text, Fielding chose to insist on the literal truth of
Amelia’s injury—and like Tristram Shandy (whose remarks on noses are
almost certainly in part a wink at Fielding), he sealed his final novel’s fate
through his own stubborn literal-mindedness.
Indeed, Amelia the novel was ridiculed by Fielding’s critics in much the
same way that Amelia the heroine is ridiculed by the young ladies of her
acquaintance. In many of the satiric responses to the work, Amelia appears as a
vulgar upstart, and her damaged nose serves not only as a demonstration of her
moral ambiguity, but also as a means of exposing her “true” lower-class status.
In Smollett’s A Faithful Narrative of the Base and Inhuman Arts That were lately
practised upon the Brain of Habbakkuk Hilding (1752), for example, Amelia is
equated with Blear-eyed Moll when a delusional man named Habbukuk
Hilding—a thinly disguised stand-in for Fielding—proves unable to tell the
difference between unfortunate injury and advanced venereal infection: “Riding
up to a draggle-tailed Bunter, who had lost her Nose in the Exercise of her
Occupation, he addressed himself to her by the Appellation of the adorable
Amelia, swore by all the Gods she was the Pattern of all earthly Beauty and
Perfection; and that he had exhausted his whole Fancy in celebrating her
Name—To this Compliment she answered in a snuffling Tone, ‘Justice, you’re
a comical Bitch; I wish you would treat me with a Dram this cold Morning.’ ”32
The prostitute’s words to Hilding here echo those of Blear-eyed Moll to Booth
when they meet in prison in Fielding’s novel. In Smollett’s parody, however, the
hero doesn’t simply perceive the similarity between Amelia’s situation and that
of the “draggle-tailed Bunter”; he is confused by it. Ironically, the mad Hilding
is able to recognize what neither Fielding nor his hero seems willing to face: that
even if Amelia is not really a prostitute, her damaged nose means that, from the
perspective of all good society, she might as well be.
Bonnell Thornton similarly emphasizes the social implications of Amelia’s
nasal “accident” in Have At You All: or, the Drury-Lane Journal (1752). Proposing
“A New Chapter in Amelia,” Thornton dramatizes an episode in which Captain
Booth staggers home hopelessly drunk, his own patrician profile irreparably
damaged:
She found his high-arch’d Roman Nose, that heretofore resembled the
bridge of a fiddle, had been beat all to pieces! As herself had before lost
the handle to her face, she now truly sympathis’d with him in their
mutual want of snout.
But it was more than she could bear, when she came to search his
breeches, and found nothing in them: for she had put a crooked shil-
ling (the only one they had in the world, and which had been long
kept for luck’s sake) into his pocket, before he went out, that he might
appear like a gentleman.33
In this brilliant parody, Thornton aligns the shame of venereal disease
with the sin of social climbing, and attributes both to Fielding’s heroine.
Having sent her Roman-nosed husband out with their last shilling so that he
“might appear like a gentleman,” Amelia is horrified when he returns without
either the nose or the pocket money that would facilitate her own pretensions
to higher status. Already implicitly accused of venery and hypocrisy, Amelia
here proves guilty of the same “affectation” that Fielding himself attempted to
ridicule in Shamela and Joseph Andrews.
Further, because Thornton’s new chapter dramatizes a man’s, rather than
a woman’s, facial injury, it invites the conventional analogy between the nose
and the penis. Understood in this way, Amelia’s lament over their poverty is
also a lewd suggestion that the captain might have lost more than just his nose
in the encounter: “It was more than she could bear, when she came to search
his breeches, and found nothing in them.” Given that Booth is described in
the novel as having “a Nose like the Proboscis of an elephant”—and given
that many readers identified Fielding’s long-nosed hero as a self-portrait—it
seems likely that Thornton’s words were intended not just as a jibe at Amelia’s
hero, but also as an attack on Fielding’s own sexual prowess.34
Thornton’s parody becomes more complex when the maimed Booth is
examined by Mrs. Atkinson, characterized here as a woman whose irritating
pretensions to knowledge complement Amelia’s pretensions to elevated social
status. Having “spy’d the queer figure Booth cut with his flatten’d proboscis,”
Mrs. Atkinson pronounces “the following scraps from Virgil and Horace”:
‘Monstr’ horrend’ inform’ ingens, cui lumen ademptum!
‘Hoc magis esse velim, quam pravo vivere naso
Spectandum nigris oculis, nigroque capillo.35
Mrs. Atkinson’s garbled Latin here combines the Aeneid’s description of
“a monster awful, hideous, huge, and eyeless” with Horace’s insistence, in the
Ars Poetica, that he would not want to be an untalented artist any more than
he would wish “to live with my nose turned askew, though admired for my
black eyes and black hair.”36 This seemingly nonsensical pairing cleverly reit-
erates the central themes of Thornton’s parody: the unenviable position of the
untalented artist (in this case, presumably, Fielding) and the perilously thin
line between the human and the monstrous, the glamorous heroine and the
deformed syphilitic.
Amelia’s angry response to this pompous Latinity—“Ha’ done with
your Nasos, and your Negroes . . . and don’t ye laugh at other people’s haps”—
further links the Latin word for nose, nasos, with the word for black, nigris.37
In other words, Amelia’s ignorant attempts to dismiss Mrs. Atkinson’s remarks
effectually equate her husband’s ruined nose with blackness. Booth is now in
the unenviable position of a flat-faced “negro,” his “flatten’d proboscis” mak-
ing him seem more simian than human. Ultimately, Thornton’s parody con-
demns both Amelia and her husband for their aspirational values, suggesting
that despite their attempts to “ape” the manners of their superiors, their flat-
tened noses will eventually expose them for the low-life creatures that they are.
HOGARTH’S NOSES
However obscure today, Thornton’s “New Chapter in Amelia” was only

one of many eighteenth-century imaginative works to connect “Nasos” and
“Negroes” by comparing the deformed nose of the disease sufferer with the
flat nose of the African. In addition to verse and prose satires, many of the
popular engravings produced by William Hogarth strengthened these same
connections between venereal disease and blackness. Hogarth’s many por-
traits of “noseless” men and women are worth considering as a separate
corpus—not just because they offer a further testament to the prominence of
the deformed nose as an imaginative symbol, but also because they provide an
evocative cultural counterpoint to the aquiline features often favored in “high
art” portraits by Gainsborough and Reynolds. Like Mary Latter’s satiric verses
or Smollett’s account of Dr. L——n, Hogarth’s prints often use venereal dis-
ease as a means of exploring the unstable boundaries between high life and
low life, diseased and healthy, whiteness and blackness.
On the most basic level, Hogarth’s engravings use the disfigured nose to signal
a relationship between bodily and moral corruption.38 In plate 9 of Industry and
Idleness (1747), for example, the Idle ’Prentice is apprehended by the magistrate
in a night cellar, a hiding place for criminals: in this scene, the ’prentice’s moral
depravity, and that of the company he keeps, is signified not only by the unem-
barrassed manner in which he and his accomplice divide the spoils of their labors,
but also by the presence, in the background, of a serving maid wearing a leather
patch over her rotted nose (fig. 4.1). Similarly, in plate 3 of An Election (1755), the
flattened nose of a servant who assists with a rigged polling process is used to cre-
ate a link between physiological and political corruption (fig. 4.2). The servant’s
skull-like face heralds his proximity to the dying man whose vote he exploits; at
the same time, it links him with the reprehensible politician whose moral failing
is matched by the servant’s physical deterioration. In both of these examples,
however, the noseless character is peripheral to the action, serving only as a sym-
bol of wider moral or social decline.
4.1. Detail from William Hogarth, Industry and Idleness, plate 9, first published, 1747
4.2. Detail from William Hogarth, An Election, plate 3, first published, 1755
In A Harlot’s Progress, the disfiguring symptoms caused by venereal infection

are given a far more extensive and nuanced treatment. This popular set of
engravings, which we have already seen in chapter 2, belongs to Hogarth’s
“Modern Moral Subjects” series. Its six scenes dramatize the fortunes of Moll
Hackabout, an ignorant young woman who is lured into prostitution, and who
meets either a tragic or a fitting end, depending on whether the viewer regards
her as a victim or a perpetuator of society’s moral failings.39 While Moll is spared
the horrors of a collapsed nasal bridge, she does contract and die from a venereal
infection, and she gives birth to a child whose looks and behavior, according to
N. H. Lowe, suggest that he has inherited his mother’s condition.40 More
broadly, Moll’s disease marks her as a déclassée, and her isolation is prefigured in
her association with a series of other figures—Jewish, African, syphilitic, and
simian—all of whom are identified as marginal in part by their misshapen noses.
The series as a whole thus establishes a set of parallels, suggesting not only the
interchangeability of different forms of alterity, but also the perilous ease with
which one might move between the positions of insider and outsider, healthy
citizen and diseased outcast.
The most obvious of these unsettling parallels is between Moll and her
serving maid, a figure who first appears in plate 3, after Moll has lost her posi-
tion as a kept mistress and has descended into common prostitution. In this
image the maid’s sunken nose and grotesque features contrast with Moll’s
handsome face, in a kind of before-and-after pairing—but the servant and
Moll also serve as character foils in the other plates, and in a number of dif-
ferent ways: for one thing, the maid ironically occupies the “honest” servant-
class position that Moll might have enjoyed had she not been inducted into
prostitution. (Plate 1 suggests that Moll traveled to London to find work as a
seamstress.) Second, Moll and her maid trade places midway through the
series: where plate 3 depicts the bunter at work while Moll smiles over a dubi-
ously acquired gold watch, plate 4 shows Moll laboring in prison while the
noseless maid smiles over the theft of her mistress’s fine garments. By plate 5,
the maid has taken charge of Moll’s household, and is attempting to eject two
squabbling doctors (Jean Misaubin and Richard Rock) from the room. Both
women, by this point, have become the disfigured victims of disease, with
Moll having lost her teeth (visible on a table at the far right) to mercury treat-
ment. The interchangeability of the two women signals to the viewer the ease
with which one might move between the categories of sexual desirability and
sexual disease.
Several other figures in A Harlot’s Progress also serve as parallels to Moll, and
their presence seems to connect the threat posed by venereal disease with the
markers of Jewishness and blackness. In plate 2, Moll still occupies the rela-
tively prosperous position of a kept mistress, but she has already begun to slip
beyond the boundaries of polite white society: her keeper is a Jewish merchant,
and her adopted household includes a black servant boy and a monkey.41 The
alterity of all three figures—the Jew, the African, and the animal—is signaled
by their distorted facial features. The merchant, while possessing a pale com-
plexion, has dark eyebrows and a hooked nose; more obliquely, he is labeled as
Jewish by his taste in art (there are Old Testament scenes on the wall behind
him) and by his choice of pet: the monkey is invoked here, as in other anti-
Semitic images, as a symbol of the Jew’s attempts to “ape” the manners of his
superiors. In keeping with the commonplace stereotype, the Jew is portrayed
as an ambitious social climber, and the sumptuous contents of his household,
while on one level exposing his foreignness, on another reveal his success in
passing as British by adopting a fashionable lifestyle.42 Like Moll and her maid,
the merchant demonstrates the permeability of social boundaries—in this case
perhaps boundaries of race as well as class.
The boy and the monkey, while more obviously identifiable as foreign, are
also potentially more disturbing as symbols of venereal contagion. Their pres-
ence not only confirms Moll’s position as déclassé, but also gestures toward the
connections between flat-faced Africans, flat-faced monkeys, and deformed
victims of venereal disease. Although Moll herself still appears fresh-faced and
frolicsome (with the exception of one or two suspicious-looking beauty spots),
her proximity to these flat-faced creatures prefigures the darker episodes to fol-
low.43 Her movement down the social ladder is subsequently reflected in her
connections with the noseless bunter in plate 3, the prisoners of Bridewell
(including the noseless maid and an African woman) in plate 4, and her fellow
prostitutes, several of whom also exhibit signs of venereal disease, in plate 6.44
There may be further evidence of Moll’s alterity, as Rose Zimbardo has sug-
gested, in the matzo nailed to her bedroom wall in plate 5.45 While matzos
smeared with honey may have been used as flycatchers in the eighteenth cen-
tury, this marker of Jewishness also seems to signal Moll’s outsider status in the
absence of either Semitic or simian facial features, a hooked or a flattened nose.
By the same token, Moll might be identified as “Jewish by association,” since
she adopts the merchant’s tastes in art: plate 3 shows a print of Abraham’s sacri-
fice of Isaac—another Old Testament scene—hanging on the wall in her rooms.
While the links between these different marginal figures might initially
suggest a disturbing equation of racial or species difference with sexual mis-
behavior, the tale’s final plate reiterates the theme of movement between dif-
ferent social categories. Just as Moll moves down the social ladder, tainted
first by her association with Jewishness and blackness and then by infectious
disease, so her fellow prostitutes seem determined to ascend from diseased
poverty into the middling ranks: by plate 6, Moll’s short life has reached its
conclusion, but her colleagues continue to ply their trade at her funeral, one
of them apparently masturbating a clergyman beneath his surplice. At the
conclusion of the series, then, Hogarth doesn’t so much emphasize the inter-
changeability of different states of marginality as expose the degree to which
seemingly opposite categories of being—virtue and vice, health and disease,
whiteness and blackness, insider and outsider—might bleed into each other.
In considering these images’ broader correlation of venereal disease with
blackness, we might also turn to Hogarth’s Four Times of the Day (1736). In this
series, too, the metonym of the disfigured nose is used to link infection with
marginal or outcast status. In an irony that Hogarth would have appreciated,

there is even some confusion among present-day art historians over whether the
flat nose of the beggar woman depicted in Morning, the first plate in the series,
identifies her as African or as syphilitic (fig. 4.3).46 More provocatively, while
4.3. William Hogarth, The Four Times of the Day: Morning, first published, 1736
the beggar woman’s flattened profile and shadowy features have the effect of
aligning racial alterity with venereal infection, they also link her with the pale,
fashionably dressed lady who appears at the center of the print, and whose
“beauty spots”—framed against the backdrop of an advertisement for Dr.
Rock’s venereal disease medication—similarly invoke the possibility, though
not the certainty, of infection.47 Here once again, then, venereal disease threat-
ens to dissolve the boundaries between the marginal and the central, revealing
not just the precariousness of moral judgment (the fashionable lady is on her
way to church) but also the instability of social and racial markers: the only
thing that keeps the dark-faced beggar on the margins of society, and the white
lady at its center, is the possibility for concealment—a possibility that is itself
dependent on the virtuous lady’s prominently featured aquiline nose.
In Noon, the second plate in the series, hereditary venereal disease is once
again associated with blackness (fig. 4.4). This engraving features a rough-
looking young boy who has just dropped the pie he was holding, and whose
porcine nose potentially indicates an inherited venereal infection. Behind this
boy—featured on the “low life” side of a panorama that initially seems to rein-
force class boundaries—is a young woman whose breasts are being fondled by a
black man, and who is also holding, and about to drop, a pie. Like Moll and her
disfigured servant, the woman and the boy seem to invite some comparison,
with the child’s condition prefiguring that of the young woman who allows
herself to be groped by her lover. Here too, then, the flat nose of the disease suf-
ferer is unnervingly aligned with the flat nose of the African—and here too that
alignment exposes the porousness, rather than the solidity, of the divisions
between races, classes, and cultures.48
T H E N O S E R U N S I N T H E FA M I LY:
S A D D L E N O S E A N D H E R E D I TA RY S Y P H I L I S
As the snub-nosed face of the boy in Hogarth’s Noon perhaps suggests, the
nose was increasingly identified over the course of the century as a sign of
inherited as well as “adventitious” (or sexually contracted) venereal infec-
tions—and once again, the symbolic connection took its cue from physiolog-
ical phenomena: just as those with sexually transmitted syphilis could suffer
the breakdown of the bridge of the nose, so those who were born with the
disease could exhibit a facial deformity in which the nose was concave, or flat-
tened at the bridge and turned up at the bottom. (This deformity, in which
the nose appears to have a saddle-shaped dip, was known in the nineteenth
4.4. William Hogarth, The Four Times of the Day: Noon (Reproduced
century as saddlenose.) While saddlenose didn’t usually develop until after the
age of five, infected infants and children often presented with other nasal
symptoms, including a chronically blocked or runny nose.49
As hereditary infection became a source of growing public concern, the
deformed nose became emblematic not just of a fragile social order, but also
of a fragile patrilineal structure—the structure upon which dynastic law, with

its goal of consolidating power and wealth among a few privileged families,
was based. In much the same way that the nose had been used to make dis-
tinctions between classes and races long before the venereal disease epidemic
hit early modern Europe, it had also long been used as a familial marker, a
sign of resemblance between father and son. In this context, the nasal disfigu-
ration associated with hereditary infection took part of its symbolic signifi-
cance from the long-standing conception of the nose as a paternally inherited
feature. In fact, the expression “to put a nose on a child’s face” was common-
place slang for “to father a child.”
Among the many jokes that play on this idea of the nose as passed down
patrilineally is this anecdote, taken from the polemical pamphlet London’s
Medicinal-Informer (1710):
There goes a Story, that a Parson meeting a pretty young Woman big
with Child, pretended to be much concern’d for her hard Fortune. Pray,
Sir, in what? says she. Why, says the Parson, you are almost just ready to
Lie in, and your Husband (as I see by your Looks) has not yet put a Nose on
the Child’s Face! Oh! dear Sir! dear Sir! what shall I do, (says the affrighten’d
Woman) I would not for the World have my Child born without a Nose on
its Face! The Parson, mov’d, says the Story, with Christian Compassion
at the poor Woman’s Misfortune and Complaint, generously perform’d
that Task which her Husband ought to have done! and the Child was
born in its due Time, with as handsome a Nose on its Face, as any In-
fant in the Parish had!50
Here the distinction between literal and metaphorical meanings becomes
the centerpiece for a joke about sexual infidelity, but the mother’s fright at the
idea of delivering a “noseless” child also gestures toward a broader cultural
anxiety about the spread of hereditary venereal infections.51 Similar anecdotes
about children having (or not having) their father’s noses—often with sugges-
tions of adultery on the mother’s part—appeared throughout the century, as
did noncomedic references to children’s inheriting the “family nose.”52
Because venereal disease was often assumed to pass along the paternal line,
the disfigured nose became a means of reconsidering not just markers of class
and race, but also systems of financial and biological inheritance. In this con-
text, nasal deformity could come to symbolize all those things—debts to health
as well as to creditors—that a father might pass on to his children. Indeed, given
the allegedly increasing incidence of saddlenose among aristocratic families, it
must have seemed possible that the day would come when the collapsed rather
than the Roman nose would signify patrician status.
Certainly, the French writer Voltaire—popular throughout the eighteenth
century in Britain as well as in his native France—seems to have recognized
this possibility. In one episode from his satiric novel Candide, Candide’s former
tutor, Pangloss, waxes enthusiastic about his own infection, complete with
“corroded nose,” on the grounds that he inherited the condition from a long
line of distinguished sexual predecessors. The woman who gave him the dis-
ease, Pangloss explains, “received [it] of a learned Cordelier, who had traced it
to . . . an old countess, who had it of a captain of horse, who had it of a mar-
chioness, who had it of a page, who had it of a Jesuit, who in his novitiate had
it in a direct line from one of the companions of Christopher Columbus.”53
Here sexual and congenital transmission become effectually one and the same,
as Pangloss boasts of the “ancestry” of his disfigured nose in much the same
way that an aristocrat might trace his family name within the peerage.
While Candide pokes fun at the notion of the pedigreed “noseless” face, nasal
deformity at its most extreme could symbolize the dangers of venereal disease not
just for the aristocracy, but also for the entire human species.54 A strangely shaped
nose could be a sign of foreignness—but it could also be a sign of debility, of
inherited constitutional weakness. In much the same way that outsiders like
Hogarth’s hook-nosed Jew threatened to infiltrate mainstream British society,
hereditary venereal disease threatened to infiltrate the most illustrious families in
the nation, and thereby weaken Britain’s biological stock. Further, if, as the work
of naturalists like Buffon and Lavater suggests, the white race were the most
advanced of all humanity, then the flattening of the high-bridged aquiline nose—
the feature that distinguished man from ape as well as white from black—might
well represent increasing degeneracy within the species.55 While the discourse of
eugenics—or “the art of getting beautiful children,” to use one contemporary
treatise’s phrasing—was only in its infancy, the figure of the saddlenosed child was
already connected in the eighteenth-century imagination with the obscure threats
seemingly posed by venereal disease to whiteness and to civilized humanity.56
THREE STUDIES OF NOSES
“The Aethiopian Fashion of Flat-Faces”: Ned Ward’s No-Nose Club (1709)

While many literary and artistic works from this period made reference
to the links between nasal deformity and hereditary infection, a few eccentric
texts are worth considering at greater length for their more detailed engagement
with the “no nose” conceit. Among these, perhaps the most accessible to readers
today is Ned Ward’s satiric account of the literary and political clubs of
eighteenth-century London. Variously titled The Secret History of Clubs (1709),
The London Clubs (1709), and Satyrical Reflections on Clubs (1719), Ward’s
work was reprinted throughout the century, and appeared in a number of dif-
ferent editions.57 Its chapters—some focusing on real, and some on imagined,
societies—reflect a thriving club culture that provided new opportunities for
social exchange and pleasure, but also worked to mark out and police a number
of social boundaries.
Roy Porter has described eighteenth-century England as a sociable place
where there were societies to suit every station in life, from “august bodies
such as the Whig Kit-Kat Club and Dr Johnson’s Literary Club” to “the tip-
pling clubs of ordinary men.” But however inclusive in the aggregate, clubs in
the individual were—as Ward’s text suggests—almost invariably cemented by
narrow affiliations of race, religion, class, taste, politics, and the like.58 Some,
like White’s and Almack’s, overtly championed their exclusivity, attracting a
wealthy, aristocratic membership with the promise of private high-stakes
gambling. Others remained, in theory, open to all, but new members were
usually self-selecting. What dyed-in the-wool Whig would seek membership
in the Tory October Club? Why would a vegetarian apply to the Sublime
Society of Beef Steaks? The fashion for clubs, in other words, served not only
to spread the new spirit of sociability, as Porter suggests, but also to reinforce
long-standing practices of social exclusion.
In Ward’s satiric “history,” each club is considered separately, with an eye-
witness narrative explaining the (sometimes highly questionable) basis on
which each club was formed, and members recruited or refused. In its fullest
version, the work included segments on a number of well-documented
London societies. It also, however, gave satiric accounts of clubs designed for
those who, for one reason or another, faced censure or ostracism from society
at large, and united under the principle of a shared stigma. These included
“The Sodomites, or Mollies Club,” “The Quacks Club,” “The Farting Club,”
and the “No-Nose Club.”
Ward’s account describes the No-Nose Club as the brainchild of “a well-
bred Gentleman” whose initial motives appear to be nothing more honorable
than class condescension and random cruelty.59 This anonymous founder,
while indulging in his fondness for a stroll through the less reputable areas of
London, considers how many unfortunates have adopted “the Aethiopian
Fashion of Flat-Faces,” and concludes that it would “prove a comical sight for
so many maim’d Leachers; snuffling old Stallions; young unfortunate

Whoremasters; poor scarify’d Bawds; and salivated Whetstones, to shew their
scandalous Vizards in one Nose-less Society.”60 Approaching these “stigmatiz’d
Strumpets and Fornicators” one by one, he asks the potential members of
his “Snuffling Community” to meet at a Drury Lane tavern, making vague
promises of pecuniary advantage.61
When the guests begin to assemble at the tavern, they quickly conclude
that they are the objects of a private joke—and their suspicions seem con-
firmed when they ask for wine and are told that their host has agreed to pay,
provided that it “be the forfeiture of a Quart, if any one should presume to
put their Nose in the Glass.”62 In making this statement, the host refers to a
long tradition of tavern jokes in which a large-nosed drinker takes more than
his fair share from the communal pot by thrusting his nose, as well as his
mouth, into the glass. Invoked in this context, however, the old joke takes on
a new irony, made possible by the community’s shared outsider status: if the
man who drinks through his nose is chastised for breaking the rules of socially
acceptable behavior, then the man with no nose would seem to be the ideal
drinking companion—and yet his very noselessness paradoxically brands him
a social outcast.
While the guests of the No-Nose Club are initially offended by their
host’s mockery, they begin to reflect, as they await his arrival, on the defor-
mity that unites them and sets them apart from other men and women.
One asks, “How long might we all fight before we should have bloody
Noses?”; another observes that they might with impunity punish the host for
his insults by pulling him “by the nose” if he doesn’t “trea[t] us handsomely.”63
As this clever pun suggests, the “no-nosers” cement their newfound social ties
by asserting their club’s exclusivity: their hostile response to the host drama-
tizes a scenario in which they get to cast out, in turn, the man who seems to
have denigrated them as outcasts. These aspirations to exclusivity are under-
lined by the text’s ironic references to them as “Snuffletonians”: the elite sta-
tus of this society, Ward’s play on words suggests, will rival that of the
“Etonians” who dominate the other end of the social spectrum.
When the host does at last arrive and—rather unexpectedly—petitions to
join the club, a spokesman for the group challenges him over his false prom-
ises of financial reward, jesting that “we came in such haste . . . that we left
our Noses behind us.”64 He continues in a more assertive, though no less
punning, vein: “[We] must flatly tell you, That we expect to be Respected,
since Soldiers full of Scars, and old Abby Monuments, defac’d by Antiquity,
are always most Venerable. Therefore, if you any way Affront us, we shall toss
up our Snouts, and, perhaps, bring yours upon a level with the rest of the
Company’s; or if you have any design to draw us into Expence, you will find
your self deceiv’d, for we are not persons to be led by the Nose into such an
Inconveniency.”65 Here the spokesman cleverly inverts the social hierarchy on
which elite clubs are based, championing the poor and diseased over a wealthy
and well-connected gentleman who is apparently about to be refused mem-
bership. Using figurative terms that buttress his group’s claims to elevated
status, the spokesman equates the grisly effects of venereal disease with hon-
orable scars earned in battle, his metaphor echoing the love-as-war trope used
in poems like Rochester’s “Disabled Debauchee.” At the same time, his refer-
ence to “Monuments defac’d by Antiquity” conflates the noseless faces of
prostitutes and pimps with the noseless Greek and Roman busts so often
admired by aristocratic connoisseurs.66 The speaker’s vow that he and his
peers will “toss up their Snouts” at any effrontery from their would-be patron
effects another clever reversal of the ostracizing of the diseased: even the nose-
less, he insists, can look down their noses at somebody.
Rather surprisingly, given the satirical tone of his earlier message, the
wealthy gentleman turns out to want nothing quite so much as to belong to
a club that won’t have someone like him for a member. Having ordered “a
plentiful Dinner” for his guests and instructed the tavern’s vintner to treat
them respectfully, he responds to the spokesman’s challenge by revealing, in
equally comic terms, his own right to belong:
By way of Reply to this notable Speech, the Gentleman told them,
That tho’ his meagre Jaws were unhappily disgrac’d with such an Eli-
phants Trunk, yet his Father, and his Grandfather made nothing of
theirs, but kiss’d them away before they came to be Thirty, yet Liv’d so
long afterwards, that they follow’d their Noses out of this World into
the next at Forty Years distance . . . .; and tho’ it so happen’d, that his
unnecessary Gristle was still standing, yet he had run fair hazards of
making his Countenance even with them; and therefore beg’d Pardon,
That he should thrust his Nose into such a Noseless-Society, being
truly sensible, That nothing was more ridiculous in publick Company,
than for a Gentleman to be Singular.67
The host’s petition, complete with a mock-deferential apology for his
“Eliphants Trunk,” reveals surprisingly strong membership credentials: not
only can he let off a series of puns as malodorous as those of the group’s
spokesman, but he can boast of a corrupt paternal inheritance through his

noseless father and grandfather. Although he doesn’t yet suffer from nasal
deformity, he seems just as likely to succumb to venereal disease as any of his
noseless compatriots, and his—ultimately successful—petition to join the
club highlights a shared mortality in their expectation of “follow[ing] their
Noses out of this World.”
Yet with the host’s application accepted, the No-Nose Club becomes an
illustration not just of the human need to form and maintain cliques, but also
of the impossibility of maintaining consistent or absolute boundaries between
those who are inside the group and those who are out. While the club’s
membership criteria initially seem perfectly clear, the inclusion of a man
with neither the facial deformity nor the marginal status attributed to the
other members undercuts the No-Nosers’ claims to exclusivity. Understood
in this light, the host’s involvement draws attention to the impossibility of
reliably identifying the diseased and segregating them from the healthy in
the absence of a symptom as graphic and unequivocal as a collapsed nasal
bridge.
Ward’s account concludes with the disbanding of the club when the host
dies, “within less than a Year,” from mercury poisoning.68 In their final meet-
ing at the host’s funeral, the club’s members, like heirs to a patriarch’s fortune,
are presented with rings in memory “of their Generous Benefactor.”69 They
offer, in return, a verse elegy that defines the fallen nose not only as a reminder
of human mortality, but also as a symbol of their host’s gracious descent from
patrician to plebeian status:
Mourn for the loss of such a gen’rous Friend,
Whose Lofty Nose no Humble Snout Disdain’d,
But tho’ of Roman Height, would stoop so Low,
As to Sooth those who ne’er a Nose could show.
Praising the host’s “lofty” status, the No-Nosers celebrate the inherent
contradiction between their founder’s “Roman” nose and his humble fellow
feeling with diseased outcasts. Like Moll Hackabout in Hogarth’s Harlot’s
Progress, the host, while not alien in appearance himself, has become an out-
sider by association. And like the later scenes in Hogarth’s series, the final
lines of the No-Nosers’ elegy gesture obscurely toward the connections
between hierarchies of race, gender, and species, since the host’s kindness to
the club members is compared with the love of a noble lady for a humble
actor:
So a Kind Beautious Dutches, once Admir’d

By all that saw her, and by all Desir’d,
To shew the Gen’rous Humour of her Grace,
Maintain’d a Player with a Pan-cake Face,
As if she had a strong desire to Kiss
The Monkey, till her Nose was Flat as his.70
In these lines, the “beautious Dutches”—blessed, like the host, with seem-
ing good health, as well as money and power, condescends to love a flat-nosed
“player,” a man whose face and occupation (he spends his time “aping” others)
identify him as a “monkey.”71 Here, once again, venereal disease is linked with
the primitive, the subhuman—and, insofar as the monkey was also a symbol of
African culture, with blackness. In ridiculing the relationship between an actor
and a duchess, these lines reemphasize the problematic nature of social bound-
aries, demonstrating the ease with which the marginal—whether marked by
infection, poverty, or visible racial difference—can infiltrate the center. At the
same time, the figure of the monkey leads us back to the host’s initial reference
to the “Aethiopian Fashion of Flat-Faces,” with its unsettling equation of syph-
ilitic and African features. Here it is the “beautious Dutches” who is tainted by
association, since her creaturely love has prompted her to cross boundaries
not merely of race but of species. Evidently, subhuman status, like venereal
infection, is contagious.
Timothy Bridgeabout’s Rinology (1736)

The Secret History of Clubs was not unique in its pun-heavy, gallows-
humor approach to nasal deformity. Several decades later, a pamphlet entitled
Rinology: Or a Description of the Nose, And particularly, that part of it, call’d,
the Bridge (1736) had taken nasal deformity as its central focus.72 Like Ward’s
chapter on the No-Nose Club, Rinology draws much of its humor from catch-
phrases, and like Ward’s text, it seems to have been designed at least in part to
allow for an extended series of puns at the expense of venereal disease suffer-
ers. Where Ward’s account is a “history,” however, Rinology—amusingly cred-
ited to a “Timothy Bridgeabout”—is essentially pastiche: it brings together a
series of comic anecdotes, each of which explores one or more of the implied
cultural meanings that have accrued around this prominent facial feature.
Rather like the concluding lines of the No-Nose Club’s elegy, Rinology’s
anecdotes often work to question the underlying assumptions—about racial
identity, class status, sexual prowess, lineage, moral behavior—made on the
basis of nose size and shape. Thus one story, for example, plays on the same joke
exploited by the No-Nose Club’s patron, in which a greedy drinker imbibes
“both with Mouth and Nose.” Although the man in Bridgeabout’s anecdote
insists that his nose is the “rule” by which he measures, and so limits, how much
he consumes, his companions (“all Lawyers, Sollicitors, or Attornies,” we are
told) see only his “long Bill,” and although “they generally make as Long Bills
themselves as any Men,” they accuse him of cheating.73 Whether innocent or
guilty, the long-nosed man is forced to pay twice his reckoning, and leaves “as
sheepishly as if he had lost his Nose, tho’ he might have spar’d half on’t to any
one that wanted.”74 Here, then, the link between male power and a long nose is
reduced to a trivial play on words, the “bill” on a man’s face being unfairly lik-
ened to the “bill” of sale from a law office. Just as the average-sized noses of the
“Lawyers, Sollicitors, [and] Attornies” don’t provide any justification for the
“Long Bills” they give to their clients, so the long nose of the drinker seems a
weak premise on which to convict him of greed.
Another anecdote ridicules the conventional association of the nose with
the penis, suggesting that just as a long nose may not symbolize extraordinary
prowess, a nose lost through venereal infection may not be indicative of impo-
tence. In this story, “a Man who had no Nose” is suspected of having an affair
with his Landlord’s Wife.75 The wife falls pregnant, and, when the child appears,
local gossips speculate that the diseased man “put a Nose to’t”; one even admits
to spying on the couple, avowing that he has seen “the Fellow’s Pendant, naseal
Leather, dangle over her . . . like the Digit of a fingerless Glove.”76 Yet the cer-
tainty of the noseless man’s guilt, Bridgeabout wryly observes, is compromised
here by stereotypical assumptions about his disease-ravaged features: “Now the
Cream of the Jest is, whether a Man who has no Nose, that’s better than a Piece
of Shammey, shou’d be a Nose to any thing? How shou’d he do it[?]. As impos-
sible, certainly, as to fly up to the Moon in Eclipse, without having a Lanthorn
to shew the Way down.”77 Just as the “very long Nose” of the drinker is pre-
sented as a questionable badge of his greed, so the deformed nose of the
adulterer—and the corresponding association of nasal deformity with disease-
related impotence—is proffered as a highly dubious proof of his innocence. In
both cases, the “truth” of what the nose signifies is asserted strongly enough to
imply that this feature is actually a very unreliable gauge of moral rectitude.
Perhaps the most prominent form of “nose reading” interrogated by
Bridgeabout is the use of the nose as a marker of class status. Described on its
title page as “Humbly inscrib’d to the Family of Great Noses,” Rinology initially
purports to respond to a letter by a “Mr. Fog” that “treated largely of NOSES;
shewed how the Long Ones led the Short Ones, and the Short Ones followed
the Long Ones, with a great Variety of Noseal-Pomp.”78 Bridgeabout suggests,
in response, that nose size is dictated by more than just tradition: “There is
nothing . . . more essential to a good Nose, than a firm Bridge: The stronger
the latter is, the more solid the former; because ’tis the prime Basis, or princi-
pal Support.”79
Here once again Bridgeabout’s claims seem initially to reiterate tired ste-
reotypes, validating the conventional association between high-bridged noses
and elevated social status. Referring to phrases that link a “soft” or low-bridged
nose with gullibility or ignorance—phrases such as “having a nose of wax” or
being “led by the nose”—Bridgeabout contends that those without a strong
nasal bridge are in danger of having their noses twisted by the wind, and thus,
of appearing “contemptible” or even “deform’d and odious.”80 Bridgeabout’s
account, in other words, seems to link the flat nose not only with disease and
deformity, but also with moral or political weakness.
Yet there is “a Paradox,” Bridgeabout continues, in the advantage accorded
to those with “High Noses,” for the larger the nose, the easier it is to grasp:
thus “Persons of the first Class are more easily led, forasmuch as one may get
the better Hold of them.”81 This wry observation undercuts Bridgeabout’s ini-
tial praise of high-bridged patrician noses, tacitly suggesting that this conven-
tional badge of aristocratic lineage may be no very good gauge of either power
or agency.
Like many medical writers and commentators of the period, Bridgeabout
cautions those on the marriage market against taking suitors at face value—
or, as the contemporary physician Sir John Floyer put it, choosing “a husband
by the length of ’s nose.”82 A lover’s facial features, Rinology warns, offer no
reliable clues to his health: “When your tip-top Beaux meet with your Belles
Dames, they Mouth consumedly, Tongue damnably, and Bill as heartily.
There is no knowing, for some-time, what they would be at, nor kenning,
indeed, what Nose is uppermost, or which of their Bridges bears the
Ascendant, until, at last, they come to join Giblets [i.e., to marry]; and then,
I own, the Superiority is discernable, and they are frequently tir’d, almost, to
Death.”83 Here Bridgeabout plays on the conventional link between the
shape of the nose and the nature of its owner’s sexual appetites and abilities.
While the description of a young couple “tir’d, almost, to Death” is on one
level a teasing allusion to the sexual discoveries of the wedding night, it can
also be understood as a reference to the potential dangers—financial as well
as physiological—of “joining Giblets” with another person. However much
we might want to believe what appearances tell us, Bridgeabout suggests,

neither looks nor conversation can be trusted as a means of assessing a poten-
tial partner’s financial and sexual health.
As the story of the diseased adulterer demonstrates, Rinology is ultimately
suspicious not only of the analogy between the nose and the penis, but also of
the corresponding tendency to identify the nose as a paternally inherited fea-
ture. Bridgeabout’s skepticism on this point leads him to claim that when a
woman becomes pregnant from an extramarital affair, other women will pro-
tect her by identifying the nose of the infant as that of her husband, even when
the child bears no resemblance to his alleged “father.” By this means, he argues,
an insistence on paternal likeness works to dupe a poor cuckold into support-
ing a child that some other man has “put a nose to.” Bridgeabout explains:
The Husband will be call’d the Father of the Child; yet every one, who
has heard of the other Fellow’s dabbling, will be apt to say, He put a
Nose to’t. True, your Midwives, and Wives, and Widows, in a Neigh-
bourhood, always say, at a Lying-in, that the Child is its Father’s Pic-
ture, tho’ God knows, ’tis often as unlike the Good-man, as a Square
is to a Circle. . . . Like it’s Father it may be, and that’s all their Mean-
ing; which they express ambiguously, to palliate their own Tricks, in
order to deceive you by a double Entendre. Who ever questions a
Thing of this Sort, unless when the Mother makes away with the
Child? None ever did; none ever can.84
Here the child’s unfamiliar nose would seem to be an unambiguous sign
of female adultery—yet even here, the signal can be deliberately misinter-
preted: indeed, it is used to claim the very opposite of its “real” meaning.
Bridgeabout rounds off this discussion with some lines of doggerel verse
in which the suggestive female admiration of an infant who has “his father’s
nose” degenerates into a disconcertingly sexualized appreciation of the boy’s
“clever Cock”—and, by extension, the “Cock” of his mother’s lover.85 In this
unsettling scene, all the women who compliment the newborn bastard take
on the sexual rapacity of his adulterous mother: fixating on the association
between the father’s and the son’s nose, the father’s and the son’s penis, they
ascribe adult sexual characteristics to a baby still in the cradle.
Just as the nose proves to be an unstable marker of class status and paternal
identity, so it also proves to be a questionable indicator of national identity.
Declaring that the French “speak all thro’ their Noses, and can’t speak without
them,” Bridgeabout wryly observes that an English man therefore cannot
“learn to speak French, unless he snuffs damnably, or keeps a French Mistress”—

the implication being that a French mistress will not only be able to tutor her
lover, but may also be more likely to give him the French pox, and thus the
means of snuffling—and speaking good French—by default.86 Playing here
on the long-standing identification of venereal disease with Frenchness,
Bridgeabout suggests that the primary complication of losing one’s nose to the
infection—a tendency to snuffle—would make the speaking of French easier.
Yet his claim that the French “speak all thro’ their Noses, and can’t speak with-
out them” would seem to indicate just the opposite: that the man deprived of
his nose would, in linguistic terms at least, no longer be identifiable as a
Frenchman.
To wit, a subsequent anecdote describes a “noseless Fellow” who “happen’d
to be a French-man, as well as to want a Nose: And, therefore, could speak nor
French nor English intelligibly.”87 This man enters a barber’s shop and asks to
have his wig altered; but when the barber puts his wig onto a mannequin that
“wanted a nose,” the “Frenchman [takes] this desperately ill,” and the rest of the
anecdote parodies his incoherent tirade against the barber’s behavior.88 Here, as
in his account of the long-nosed drinker, Bridgeabout adopts the naive stance
of a Gulliver figure, appearing simply to report on events as they are presented
to him. His phonetic spelling renders the diseased man’s speech so convoluted,
however, as to eliminate any clear linguistic markers of Frenchness.
Perhaps the darkest anecdote of all appears near the end of Bridgeabout’s
text, in an episode that seems to question stereotypical judgments about the
moral character of venereal disease sufferers. Bridgeabout tells the story of a
man whose nose is “loose” from an infection when he sets out on a fateful
walk along the Thames:
[H]aving Occasion to discharge his Naseal Member, he took out his
Handkerchief and blow’d heartily, and then shak’d it over the brink of
the River. But, behold, as he again design’d to wipe his Nose, to better
purpose, he found it was gone; and that he had not dealt tenderly
enough with it. Besides, he intended to have seen his Mistress, who
then liv’d on Southwark Side. But, upon missing his Nose, he grow’d so
angry, that he immediately jumped in and drowned himself, uttering
these Words before he took his Leap, I always lov’d to follow my Nose.89
Here the punch line makes a jest of the disfigured syphilitic’s fate, and the
anecdote as a whole constitutes a brilliant play on the concept of “losing face.”
Considered more skeptically, however, the story’s dark humor pinpoints two
common assumptions about the moral lives of venereal disease sufferers. The
first is an assumption about behavior: the man who loses his life to venereal
infection does so, the joke implies, because he “always lov[es] to follow his
nose”—that is, he chooses to follow his own instinct for pleasure rather than
society’s standards for appropriate sexual conduct. (Fittingly, the man’s suicide
occurs when he is en route to visit his mistress.) The second assumption is that
rotting noses go with rotting corpses—and thus, that the nasally deformed
are already “dead” from the point of view of respectable society. The noseless
man makes a jest of his own suicide, in other words, because death—first
metaphorical-social and then literal-physical—is the inevitable consequence
of his nose-blowing accident. Suicide thus provides the perfect comic resolu-
tion, by establishing death as a superior means of removing the threat of con-
tamination that his infection represents.
Understood in this way, this strange tale would again seem to confirm the
conventional prophylactic moralizing about the wages of sin being death. Yet
paradoxically, even after his suicide, the nasally disfigured man remains a part
of “high-bridged” London society: “They tell us, that it was believed by many
Inhabitants of this City, that London Bridge, as ’tis call’d, grew out of the
Bridge of this Man’s Nose; and that the Descendants from the Family of Great
Noses were the first who built Houses upon the Bridge: For which Reason, say
they, they made them all Prominent, as the Houses are at this Day, which
stand upon it.”90 Bridgeabout’s explanation here borrows the metamorphosis
trope of classical myth, transforming a story about one victim of venereal
disease into a fanciful narrative of dynastic inheritance. Instead of effecting
his removal from London society, suicide places the diseased man at the
very center of the modern metropolis: it links him not only with commercial
enterprise—the infectious circulation of goods, services, and money—but
also with an illustrious posterity in “the Family of Great Noses.” With this
conclusion, Bridgeabout’s collection of tall tales winds its way back to its
beginnings, invoking the initial dedication of Rinology to “the Family of Great
Noses.” Even the most elevated of houses, this bizarre anecdote suggests,
might be built on shaky foundations.
James Solas Dodd’s A Critical Dissertation on Noses (1767)

Similar in style and substance to Bridgeabout’s Rinology is James Solas
Dodd’s Critical Dissertation on Noses. Dodd’s dissertation, a mock oration
delivered and published alongside his Satyrical Lecture on Hearts (1767), was
written in imitation of George Stevens’s Lecture on Heads—itself a parody of

the eccentric speeches delivered by the clergyman and public speaker John
“Orator” Henley. In his original performance of the lecture on heads, Stevens
advanced a series of absurd claims about the relationships between psycho-
logical, racial, or cultural characteristics and head shape or size, using papier-
mâché busts, wigs, and other props to illustrate “a two-hour satirical monologue
on such varied characters as a Cherokee chief, Alexander the Great, a London
blood, a Billingsgate fishwife, a jockey, a conjuror, a Frenchman, a Spaniard, a
Dutchman, and a Methodist parson.”91 Stevens’s lecture was an immediate
sensation, and its popularity resulted in a number of adaptations and imita-
tions, among them Dodd’s ramblings on hearts and noses.
While Dodd’s contribution to the tradition of satiric lectures was neither
influential nor particularly unique, the Critical Dissertation takes on a new
resonance when considered alongside works such as The Secret History of Clubs
and Rinology. Like Bridgeabout’s tales of the long-nosed drinker, the nasally
disfigured father, and the man who follows his nose into the Thames, Dodd’s
dissertation implicitly exposes the absurdity of some of the long-standing
assumptions about nose shape and size in eighteenth-century imaginative cul-
ture. Whereas Ward and Bridgeabout consider nose lore in general, however,
Dodd seems particularly interested in challenging physiognomical theories
that connected facial profiles with psychological attributes. Unsurprisingly,
flat noses—whether deformed from birth because of inherited disease or con-
tracted later in life as a consequence of direct venereal infection—form an
important part of his discourse.
Dodd introduces his chosen topic with terms that seem deliberately remi-
niscent of the warnings issued by Bridgeabout and others to naive young cou-
ples about to “join Giblets” in marriage: “Lovers may treat on the eyes and
lips, but I, as a student in the geography of man, will confine myself to the
nose.”92 Here Dodd, while seeming to apologize for the prosaic nature of his
enquiry, in effect suggests its importance: by focusing on “the eyes and lips,”
lovers are prompted to enter into relationships without much sense of either
their partner’s anatomy (if the nose is interpreted as analogous to the penis) or
health (if the nose shows signs of venereal disease). Declaring himself “a stu-
dent in the geography of man,” Dodd likens the nose to a foreign region
“beheld from afar,” contending, “From the longitude and latitude of that
Headland, we may give a shrewd guess at the temperament of the climate it
belongs to, and the disposition of the wearer.”93 Dodd’s geographic metaphor
here identifies the nose as central not only to personality or character, but also
to familial inheritance: like a landed estate, the nasal “Headland” is passed

down from one generation to the next, and also like a landed estate, it seems
to promise—but perhaps not always to deliver—some degree of financial and
corporeal health.
As in the “No-Nose Club” and Rinology, much of the humor in the
Dissertation lies in Dodd’s ability to repurpose old jokes about noses and
noselessness and to integrate these into his ostensibly “scholarly” analysis.
Dodd solemnly observes, for example, that a nose, “where it has not been
unfortunately undermined,” not only “supplies the defects of the eyes” in
enabling a man to smell what he cannot see, but also “serves as a support for
those necessary aids to dimness and gravity, a pair of spectacles.”94
Transforming the old joke about William Davenant’s eyesight into a pseudo-
intellectual observation, Dodd implicitly questions the scholarly study of
facial features even while claiming to be scrupulously following “the rules of
physiognomy.”
As a case in point, Dodd’s “scholarly” catalogue of noses swiftly degenerates
into a parade of stereotypes as he declares the “roman” or “aquiline nose” to be
“an emblem of fortitude,” the “hook nose” to “denote superstition and gossip-
ing,” and the “turning-up nose” to indicate “envy, spleen, and ill-nature.”95 For
each “type,” Dodd provides a specific case study, and his illustrations, like the
taxonomic principles of his text, parody the attempts at systemization within
“scientific” physiognomical writings. Just as Lavater’s research linked the
African’s “character of stupidity” with his flat nose, so Dodd connects the
turned-up nose of a literary critic with his snobbish resentment of other
writers.
At the same time that Dodd’s analysis implicitly questions the labeling of
different nasal “types,” it offers some insight into the general anxieties sur-
rounding both adventitious and hereditary venereal infection. Not only does
Dodd—who was also a practicing surgeon—connect one man’s upturned nose
with a perpetually runny nose in childhood, but he also plays on the idea of the
nose as an inherited feature, passed along from one generation to the next, and
potentially marred by congenital infection: “Noses are of great antiquity. Adam
and Eve each wore one, and any of their descendants cuts so very ridiculous [a]
figure without that ornament, that Tagliacotius, a learned Italian physician,
gained immortal honour in finding out a way to supply them where they were
wanting.”96 Here Dodd refers to Gaspare Tagliacozzi, the Italian surgeon
widely credited with inventing a primitive skin graft procedure used to recon-
struct the deformed noses of syphilitics. Like Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, which
also finds a source of humor in the “learned Tagliacotius,” the Dissertation

insists that “the nose is the most exalted part of the face,” and its parodic analy-
sis identifies this feature as an important area for intellectual inquiry, complete
with its own classical pedigree: “In antient times men of rank derived not only
part of their eminence, but of their names, from the qualities of the handles of
their faces. Ovid the poet, obtained the surname of Naso, from the length of his
snout and Mark Tully, the great orator, was called Cicero from the wart on the
tip of his.”97 Here, once again, Dodd’s text connects with other “no nose” jokes
and anecdotes from the period, repeating the gag about Ovid’s large nasos and
describing the nose as the handle of the face (a metaphor also used in Tristram
Shandy).
Another aspect of Dodd’s Critical Dissertation is also of particular interest
in relation to Sterne’s novel: in describing the aquiline, or “King William’s,”
nose, Dodd uses the case study of a wounded soldier, “Ben Blunderbuss,”
who had at one time “run his sword in every enemy he came near, and run his
nose against every female he saw.”98 The text then provides an account of
Blunderbuss’s past military exploits—an account in which Blunderbuss claims
not only to have fought and “routed” the French, but also to have “broke open
a convent at Namur, and got nine nuns and the old lady abbess with child.”99
These recollections obviously parallel the nostalgic reminiscences of Tristram’s
uncle, Toby Shady—a military veteran whose “modesty” seems to be linked to
an unspecified groin injury that he received during the siege of Namur.
Perhaps needless to say, both texts generate comic innuendo from the long-
standing association of military troops with venereal infection and gesture
toward the link between military and sexual prowess.
While the Critical Dissertation on Noses clearly borrows from Sterne’s
novel (its publication date coincides with that of Tristram Shandy’s final vol-
umes), its similarity to Bridgeabout’s and Ward’s works also attaches it to a
longer tradition of no-nose jokes and anecdotes. Indeed, the 1780s saw the
Critical Dissertation’s ideas about noses set to music, with the jocular ballad “I
sing of your Noses” providing not only descriptors of Spanish, Scotch, French,
English, Dutch, Welsh, Irish, and diseased noses, but also a warning for men
like Uncle Toby:
The buxom young widow will make smutty speeches,
About your long nose and point to your breeches,
But mercy defend us how loud she will brawl,
Shou’d you come to attack and have no nose at all.100
“BY THE DEPRESSION OF THY NOSE”: TRISTRAM

SHANDY (1759–1767)
Seen in relation to works like Rinology, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy—a

meandering comic novel focused on the paternal family history, birth, and
lifelong misfortunes of a man with a disfigured nose—might reasonably be
considered not just the story of “a cock and a bull,” to quote the work’s famous
concluding sentence, but also the superlative contribution to an eccentric
eighteenth-century tradition of “no nose” jokes.101 While Sterne’s protagonist,
like Fielding’s in Amelia, has a nose deformed by accident rather than by infec-
tion, Tristram Shandy perpetually circles around the issue of venereal disease,
playing cleverly on the widespread understanding of the deformed nose as
an emblem of both sexually contracted and hereditary forms of venereal
infection.
Whereas Fielding seeks to contain or proscribe meaning, however, Sterne
exploits the ambiguities of his hero’s situation.102 Not only does Tristram’s
pedantic insistence on the primary meaning of “the word Nose” draw our
attention to all the other things that a nose might signify, but all the major
events in the novel—the mirrored accidents by which first Tristram’s nose and
then his penis are injured; the attempts by Tristram’s father, Walter Shandy, to
make a scholarly study of noses; the adventures of a mysterious long-nosed
stranger named Diego in a tale by the fictitious nose expert Slawkenbergius;
and even the ambiguous groin wound suffered by Tristram’s Uncle Toby dur-
ing his days in the military—bring us back to the original catastrophe that,
according to Tristram, has defined his life and sealed his fate: the crushing of
his nose, during the birthing process, by a catastrophic misapplication of the
forceps.
On a formal level, Tristram Shandy seems to reflect the thought processes
of a man who “follows his own nose” in recording his life story, ricocheting
from anecdote to anecdote in an associative rather than a chronological pat-
tern. But on a thematic level as well, Tristram’s disfigured nose seems always
to precede him, coloring his experiences and defining his existence before he
has even had a chance to begin it. “I was doom’d, by marriage articles, to have
my nose squeez’d as flat to my face, as if the destinies had actually spun me
without one,” he laments at the outset of the work: “How this event came
about,—and what a train of vexatious disappointments, in one stage or other
of my life, have pursued me from the mere loss, or rather compression, of this
one single member,—shall be laid before the reader all in due time.”103 Like
his attempts to define the nose as a nose, Tristram’s remarks here (including
his reference to the nose as a “member”) remind us that it is not so much the
nature of the injury that matters, but rather the social significance of that
injury: the association of the flat nose with the isolation and shame of vene-
real infection.
Accordingly, while his life and opinions seem to veer off in all directions,
Tristram’s narrative returns again and again to the impact of this one defining
event in his history. Having rued the day in volume 1, he rues it again, for
example, in volume 3:
Sport of small accidents, Tristram Shandy! that thou art, and ever will
be! had that trial [of birth without forceps] been made for thee, and it
was fifty to one but it had,—thy affairs had not been so depress’d—(at
least by the depression of thy nose) as they have been; nor had the
fortunes of thy house and the occasions of making them, which have
so often presented themselves in the course of thy life, to thee, been so
often, so vexatiously, so tamely, so irrecoverably abandoned—as thou
hast been forced to leave them!104
Here, as in his introductory lament, Tristram connects physical, psycho-

logical, and social well-being, insisting—as did many eighteenth-century med-
ical writers on hereditary venereal disease—that a child born with a deformed
nose was doomed to have his “affairs” as “depressed” as his facial features.
As these complaints suggest, Tristram’s damaged nose consistently serves
not just as a pretence for ribald humor—though Sterne was by no means one
to shy away from a good penis joke when he saw the opportunity—but also as
a vehicle for reflecting on, and satirizing, the stereotypes and assumptions that
ostensibly destined Tristram to unhappiness. These include the belief that a
flattened nose signifies a diseased body and a dysfunctional penis; the associa-
tion of the low-bridged nose with lower social status and minority racial or
species identity; and the identification of an upturned, flat-bridged nose with
degeneracy and inherited weakness. In other words, Tristram Shandy uses the
unfortunate associations around its hero’s explicitly non-venereal disfigure-
ment to satirize some of the most prominent eighteenth-century stereotypes
about flattened noses and their relation to venereal infection.
Sterne’s novel can be understood as a story of both familial and ethnic
origins—and the text’s first oblique references to venereal disease surface
through its hero’s obsessive search for causes.105 Like many eighteenth-century
medical discussions of hereditary infection, Tristram’s account of his life places
great importance on tracing his problems back to their source, and, like many
medical texts, it consistently privileges the role of the father—or, more broadly,
the paternal line—in accounting for his misfortunes.106 It is this emphasis on
paternal responsibility that prompts Tristram, in the opening pages of his nar-
rative, to locate his microscopic, pre-conception self, his “homunculus,”
within his father’s sperm. As Louis Landa has demonstrated, Sterne took
the idea of the pre-fetal “homunculus” from scientific theories of “pre-
formation.”107 But whereas eighteenth-century scientists were debating the
placement of the homunculus—was it located in the sperm or in the egg?—
Tristram seems to be in no doubt that his own “little gentleman” came fully
formed (or rather, fully deformed) from the paternal Shandy line.108
Indeed, Tristram explicitly argues that “nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or
his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world,” are determined by
the “animal spirits” that are “transfused from father to son.” And his own “ani-
mal spirits,” he contends, were “disorder’d” right from the start: “My little
gentleman had got to his journey’s end miserably spent;—his muscular strength
and virility worn down to a thread;—his own animal spirits ruffled beyond
description,—and that in this sad disorder’d state of nerves, he had laid down
a prey to sudden starts, or a series of melancholy dreams and fancies for nine
long, long months together.”109 Tristram’s account of the homunculus not only
identifies its “disorder’d state” as a masculine affliction (complete with failings
in “muscular strength and virility”), but also characterizes it in the same terms
often used to describe syphilitic children. Like the “tender and weak” infants
identified by the Swedish pediatrician Nils Rosén von Rosenstein or the
“always unhealthy” children lamented by the British surgeon Charles Peter,
Tristram has been destined, since before his birth, to suffer the same physical
and sexual impotence that afflicts inheritors of venereal disease.110
Interestingly, while Walter never explicitly blames himself for his son’s
misfortunes, he does clearly identify Tristram’s afflictions as inherited, rather
than inflicted by the forceps accident. Recognizing early in Tristram’s child-
hood that his son will not have the physical capabilities of a healthy child,
Walter laments the circumstances of the boy’s conception, remarking, “My
Tristram’s misfortunes began nine months before ever he came into the world.”
Mrs. Shandy remains mystified by this statement, but we are told that Walter’s
brother Toby—presumably born of the same debilitated Shandy stock—
“understood him very well.”111
Even when Tristram’s narrative moves past the issue of conception to con-
sider the complicating factors in his birth and infancy, its analysis still places the
principal blame for his condition on male rather than female misbehavior.
Thus, in discussing his parents’ marriage contract, for example, Tristram pits
his mother’s sensible stipulation that she be permitted to deliver her children in
London (where she might be assured of receiving the highest-quality obstetrical
care) against his father’s stubborn insistence that she be obliged to forfeit that
right if she ever demands such travel on the pretence of a false pregnancy.112
Tristram also notes that it was Walter who insisted on hiring the incompetent
Dr. Slop to oversee the birthing process; Mrs. Shandy preferred the services of
the local midwife.
The botched delivery itself, while Walter’s “fault” only in a very
indirect sense, is nonetheless also presented as a blunder prompted by male
prerogative—a demonstration of why, as Uncle Toby so eloquently puts it,
Mrs. Shandy may “not choose to let a man come so near her ****.”113 As
described by Susannah to Trim, the birthing operation sees Mrs. Shandy’s
preferences subordinated to those of her husband, and the midwife’s seasoned
authority subordinated to the inept command of the local physician, Dr.
Slop: “In bringing him into the world with his vile instruments, he has crush’d
his nose, Susannah says, as flat as a pancake to his face, and he is making a
false bridge with a piece of cotton and a thin piece of whalebone out of
Susannah’s stays, to raise it up.”114 Here the comic description of Slop, keen to
use his “vile instruments” and careless of their potential consequences, aligns
his mishandling of the birth with Walter’s misguided moment of ejaculation.
(It was his distraction from the task at hand, Tristram claims, that damaged
the homunculus.) Like the infected father who unwittingly “docks the Entail
of his own Blood” by passing on his infection, Slop makes one rash misuse of
his “instrument” and finds, to his and Susannah’s horror, that he has imprinted
his mistake on the face of an innocent child.
Even without such parallels, Sterne’s readers would undoubtedly have recog-
nized in Tristram’s flattened nose the best-known and most feared symptom of
venereal infection. And just in case its symbolic meaning might be in any doubt,
the forceps accident is paralleled, some five years later, by the crushing of Tristram’s
penis by a falling window sash. Tristram’s second injury—retrospectively inter-
preted by Walter as a kind of accidental circumcision—reminds us of the cultural
significance of the first. As a reenactment of Tristram’s traumatic birth, it high-
lights not only the connections between the deformed nose and the deformed
penis (both parts could be disfigured by venereal infection), but also the link
between the signifiers of venereal disease and the signifiers of foreignness or out-
cast status: like Moll Hackabout in Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress, the newly circum-
cised Tristram becomes Jewish by association.
Like his crushed nose, Tristram’s crushed penis brings issues of causation to
the fore. This time the fault appears to lie with Susannah, since it is she who,
entreating Tristram to “**** *** ** *** ******” (piss out of the window), fails to
notice that the sash weights are missing.115 Once again, however, the attempt to
isolate a discrete source for Tristram’s afflictions proves problematic—and once
again, the resulting clash of wills between Susannah and Slop sees them trading
insults that link young Tristram’s injury with the sexual misbehavior of adults.
Thus, when Slop attempts to dress the wound and Susannah balks at assisting
him, the former becomes enraged by what he perceives to be the latter’s false
“scruple of decorum,” and, “casting a glance of undue freedom in Susannah’s
face,” he proceeds to make thinly veiled insinuations about her sexual history.
Susannah’s retort cleverly reflects these suggestions of misbehavior back onto
the doctor: “I never was the destruction of any body’s nose . . . which is more
than you can say.”116
By returning the focus to Tristram’s initial injury, Susannah simultane-
ously connects the two accidents and reinforces the causal relation between
male misbehavior and “the destruction of [some] body’s nose.” When Slop
informs Walter, some time later, that the accident “will end in a phimosis,”
his diagnosis is once again suggestive of infection, since phimosis—a condi-
tion in which the foreskin does not retract properly—was sometimes identi-
fied by eighteenth-century medical writers as a complication of venereal
disease.117 Indeed, circumcision was occasionally (and ineffectually) practiced
as a preventive measure against infection.118
Slop’s insults to Susannah notwithstanding, Tristram’s second disfigure-
ment, like the first, is defined as both an injury and an inheritance. Uncle
Toby—whose hobby of building model fortifications prompted the removal
of the window’s sash weights in the first place—is identified as having “as
much of the blood-shed to answer for” as Susannah.119 Tristram’s own account
describes his deformed penis as a Shandy family characteristic: “Susannah did
not consider that nothing was well hung in our family,—so slap came the sash
down like lightening upon us.”120 By defining the Shandy males as “ill hung,”
Tristram redefines the window-sash debacle as the traumatic rite of passage by
which his own penis becomes as disfigured and impotent as that of his father
and uncle.
In the aftermath of the accident, Walter makes scholarly inquiries into the
nature and significance of the injury that similarly identify Tristram’s penis as
a marker of his familial identity—and, by extension, of inherited characteris-
tics like saddlenose. Reading the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides
alongside a seventeenth-century book on Jewish ritual, Walter concludes that

his son has not been maimed, but circumcised.121 By reframing the accident
in this way, Walter creates an implicit analogy between the penis and the
nose, two features identified with paternal inheritance and used as markers of
familial, racial, or religious identity. Although this interpretation of the acci-
dent sets Walter’s mind at ease, it also implicitly brands Tristram as déclassé;
after all, circumcision, as Robert Darby observes, was still “understood as a
defining characteristic of such alien people as Jews and Turks [and] was
regarded as a mutilation that left the victims aesthetically disfigured and par-
tially emasculated.”122 If Tristram’s flattened nose allows for his identification
as a victim of venereal infection, then his circumcised penis allows him to be
marked as an “emasculated” Jew.
Tristram’s misfortune at birth—prefigured in the damage to the homun-
culus, and then echoed in the crushing of his penis (in volume 5 of the original
edition)—is revisited once again in volume 7, with the revelation that he suf-
fers from impotence and consumption, both conditions sometimes attributed
to venereal disease.123 While Tristram makes no overt declaration of his impo-
tence, his account presents sexual dysfunction in the context of some unspec-
ified encounter apparently similar in its traumatic effects to his nose and penis
injuries. In an anguished apostrophe to “Jenny,” Tristram refers obliquely to a
failed attempt at intercourse, describing himself as suffering under “the most
oppressive” disaster that “could befall me as a man, proud, as he ought to be,
of his manhood.” Tristram subsequently vows to “go into Wales for six weeks,
and drink goat’s-whey”—a regime often prescribed to enhance male sexual
potency.124 By reflecting upon “what had not pass’d” between himself and
Jenny, Tristram presents this unsuccessful encounter as another self-defining
catastrophe. His erectile weakness, flattened nose, and deformed penis are
thus parallel examples of the same physical problem—a problem that always
refers back to inherited venereal infection.
Volume 7 also reveals that Tristram, like his father, suffers from consump-
tion. (Walter, we are told earlier, is “a little phthisicial.”)125 Although Tristram’s
flight from Death famously mirrors Sterne’s own attempts to escape the symp-
toms of an increasingly debilitating tubercular infection (an infection that some
of his contemporaries attributed to venereal disease), this eccentric episode sees
Tristram saddled with another condition linked with, but never directly traced
back to, venereal disease.126 Like his flat nose, Tristram’s consumption correlates
with both medical and popular conceptions of late-stage syphilis, since phthisis
was commonly identified as a symptom—often the final symptom—of venereal
disease.127 While not all of Sterne’s readers would have identified the unspoken
links between Tristram’s deformed nose and his consumptive symptoms, the
flight from death serves as another of the novel’s memento mori: if nothing else,
it signals that Tristram, like many real-life sufferers of hereditary venereal infec-
tions, “must be cut short in the midst of [his] days.”128
F R O M F A T H E R T O S O N : WA LT E R A N D
T H E S H A N DY PAT R I A R C H S
While all of Tristram’s implied venereal disease symptoms—his flattened

nose, his sexual impotence and physical weakness, his “phthisical” tendencies—
can be traced back to a paternal origin, Tristram Shandy is neither unsympa-
thetic nor uncomplicated in its treatment of the other Shandy men. Quite the
contrary: both Toby and Walter are presented as similar to Tristram in their
physical sufferings, and Walter in particular seems to share his son’s concerns
about the degeneration of the Shandy family line.
As the narrative proceeds, we are increasingly invited to see not just
Tristram, but also Walter, as the “sport of small accidents”—a figure obliged
to suffer for the misbehavior of prior generations of Shandys. Indeed, in the
aftermath of the traumatic forceps accident, Tristram describes the crushing
of his nose as a tragedy of which his father, and not he himself, must be seen
as the doomed hero: “From the first moment I sat down to write my life for
the amusement of the world, and my opinions for its instruction, has a cloud
insensibly been gathering over my father.—A tide of little evils and distresses
has been setting in against him.—Not one thing, as he observed himself, has
gone right: and now is the storm thicken’d, and going to break, and pour
down full upon his head.”129 Tristram’s account here—written “in the most
pensive and melancholy frame of mind, that ever sympathetic breast was
touched with”—identifies Walter as another helpless plaything of fortune, a
victim of the inevitable “evils and distresses” that have been “setting in against
him” from the start.
Walter’s misfortunes, like his son’s, have both their source and their effects
in masculine agency: they damage his status as patriarch, and they have been
at least in part inherited from his own paternal relations. We discover, for
example, that Walter has been obliged to pay out, for many years, a jointure
given in compensation for his grandfather’s physical inadequacies. Walter’s
grandmother—a widow who has outlived both her husband and her son—
originally demanded the jointure on the grounds that her husband had “little
or no nose.”130 Tristram dramatizes his great-grandparents’ negotiations over

this unusual article in their marriage contract:
S’death! cried my great grandfather, clapping his hand upon his
nose,—’tis not so small as that comes to;—’tis a full inch longer than
my father’s.—Now, my great grandfather’s nose was for all the world
like unto the noses of all the men, women, and children, whom
Pantagruel found dwelling upon the island of Ennasin.—By the way,
if you would know the strange way of getting a-kin amongst so flat-
nosed a people;—you must read the book;—find it out yourself, you
never can.—
—’Twas shaped, Sir, like an ace of clubs.
—’Tis a full inch, continued my great grandfather, pressing up the
ridge of his nose with his finger and thumb; and repeating his asser-
tion—’tis a full inch longer, madam, than my father’s—. You must
mean your uncle’s, replied my great grandmother.
—My great grandfather was convinced.—He untwisted the paper,
and signed the article.131
This comic exchange, much like Tristram’s earlier insistence on the literal
meaning of the word “nose,” relies in part on the association between the nose
and the penis, playing off the corollary joke that women prefer men with long
noses. At the same time, however, it establishes the foreshortened nose as a
family feature—an indicator not only of Shandy lineage but also of Shandy
impotence and debility. In this context, the late Mr. Shandy’s stubby, upturned
nose—a nose shaped “like an ace of clubs”—implicitly invites comparison
with the saddlenose characteristic of hereditary venereal infection. Mrs.
Shandy’s assessment of her husband confirms the feature’s paternal origins:
while Tristram’s great-grandfather’s nose may be longer than his uncle’s, it is
the same size, if not smaller, than his father’s. The Shandys, in other words,
are a degenerating breed, getting smaller, weaker, and sicklier with each pass-
ing generation.
The reference to Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel further supports this
suggestion of increasing Shandy family debility. In Rabelais’s novels, the
inhabitants of Ennasin are an object of curiosity both because they all have
“noses shap’d like an ace of clubs” and because they are all intimately related
to one another.132 Indeed, as Pantagruel and his men tour the island, they
discover that the residents are so intimately connected—by blood or marriage
or both—that they have developed their own kinship terms to denote the
complicated multiple relationships between inhabitants. The obvious sugges-

tion of incest is strengthened by the use of kinship terms that seem implicitly
sexual: “peg” and “hole,” “pipe” and “bag,” “tap” and “spigot,” “slipper” and
“foot,” “old greasy boot” and “young pliable buskin.”133
The island of the noseless, in other words, is a kind of nightmare of inbreed-
ing, in which the biological stock, apparently already tainted, is only ever get-
ting weaker. Even the name “Ennasin” seems to hint at inherited degeneracy:
as John Ozell explained in the notes to his 1750 translation, the term refers to
“one whose nose is stopt with a rheum”—a recognizable symptom of heredi-
tary venereal infection.134 Much like the diseased members of Ned Ward’s No-
Nose Club, the Ennasins “speak through the nose, or rather snuffle as if they
had no nose”—and their island locale, like Ward’s tavern, works to reinforce
their isolation from the rest of society.135
As this allusion suggests, then, Tristram’s great-grandfather comes from
a potentially long line of snub-nosed ancestors—and certainly both he and
his son seem to have suffered from a weak constitution, having died young.
Although Walter has been spared the dreaded Shandy ace-of-clubs nose, he
has still been left with the expensive jointure, and its burdensome payment,
just as much as Tristram’s nose and penis injuries, provides an unpleasant
reminder of the ways in which the sins of the fathers can be visited upon the
sons, even—as a number of biblical verses remind him—to the “third and
fourth generation.”136
Indeed, as if to worsen his own afflictions, Walter seems to be acutely
aware of the broader popular associations surrounding flat and foreshortened
noses. Both his melodramatic response to the forceps accident and his dis-
satisfaction with the jointure payments are indicative of his long-standing
conviction that noses matter—that they have a range of cultural meanings as
well as a range of physiological functions. Walter articulates this awareness via
his “theory of noses”—but even this theory is, of course, something that he
has inherited from the Shandys before him:
For three generations at least, this tenet in favour of long noses had
gradually been taking root in our family . . . . so that the whimsicality
of my father’s brain was far from having the whole honour of this, as
it had of almost all his other strange notions.—For in a great measure
he might be said to have suck’d this in, with his mothers’ milk. He did
his part however.—If education planted the mistake, (in case it was
one) my father watered it, and ripened it to perfection.137
Here, in a flourish of black humor, Walter’s “tenet in favour of long noses”

is presented as an inherited affliction in its own right, either transmitted in
utero or “sucked in”—as some medical writers explained that venereal infec-
tions could be—via his mother’s breast milk. Like the tales in Rinology or the
arguments in Dodd’s Critical Dissertation on Noses, Walter’s preference for
long noses plays on the alleged correlation between class status and nose
shape—but in this instance, the prejudice is informed not just by scholarly
inquiry but also by Walter’s own biology.
Unsurprisingly, Walter’s study of noses also foregrounds the significance
of nasal deformity for both the diagnosis and the treatment of venereal infec-
tion. Surgical attempts to repair collapsed noses—either through a developing
process of reconstructive surgery or through the use of prostheses—are of
particular interest. Walter’s reading includes works by Ambrose Paré, playfully
described as “chief surgeon and nose-mender to Francis the ninth of France,”
and Gaspare Tagliacozzi, the Italian surgeon (also mentioned by Dodd) who
was wrongly credited by Paré with inventing a primitive skin graft procedure
used to reconstruct the noses of venereal disease sufferers.138
Walter’s interest in Paré, a military surgeon under Francis I, explicitly high-
lights the relationship between disfigured noses and venereal disease: as James
Aiken Work explains, Francis I “had a very long and large nose” and “was said
to have died of syphilis” as a result of “his shamelessly licentious life.”139 In
Tristram’s account, however, the eccentric misidentification of the king as
“Francis the ninth” brings inherited disease to the fore, shifting the emphasis
away from the “licentious” progenitor and onto his imagined descendents. If
the sins of Francis I were visited upon his sons, Tristram’s commentary implies,
then perhaps Francis IX (a fictitious monarch) might have stood in even greater
need of a “nose-mender” than his distant paternal ancestor.
Walter’s studies also lead him to connect the flat Shandy nose with
impaired cognitive abilities and marginal social status. Among the various
“nose experts” he consults is Prignitz, a pseudo-naturalist whose examination
of 4,000 skulls allegedly leads him to identify a relationship between “the size
and jollity of every individual nose” and the “excellency of the wearer’s fancy.”
Like Lavater, Buffon, and other eighteenth-century naturalists, the hokey
Prignitz not only associates particular facial features with particular personal-
ity characteristics, but also generates a hierarchy “by which one nose ranks
above another”—and thus, presumably, one person or group ranks above
another.140 While Prignitz’s contention “that the fancy begat the nose” is chal-
lenged by an opposing scholar’s insistence that “the nose begat the fancy,”
both texts encourage Walter to conclude that the flat Shandy nose signifies a
defect in character or intelligence, and not just in physical appearance.141
Perhaps the most fantastical figure in Walter’s pantheon of nose experts is
Slawkenbergius—the mysterious writer whose “tale,” translated from the
original Latin and transcribed by Tristram at the outset of volume 4, recounts
the exploits of a nasally well-endowed foreigner. When this stranger—
subsequently identified as “Seignor Diego”—enters Strasbourg, his enormous
nose becomes an object of admiration among the townswomen (all of whom
seem to believe the rumors about men with long noses). The same feature gets
a far more skeptical treatment from the men, many of whom insist that the
stranger wears a false nose akin to the prosthetics worn by venereal disease
sufferers.
In his translation of Slawkenbergius, as in his accounts of Tagliacozzi and
Paré, Tristram implicitly identifies the central issue in his father’s research as
the cultural significance—and, at the same time, the essential unreliability—
of the nose as a signifier of identity. Initially, Diego’s enormous nose is pre-
sented as the source of his physical prowess, and we are told that he carries an
unsheathed scimitar—itself a symbol of the erect penis—in order to defend
it.142 Just as the surgical arts of the “nose-mender” aim to disguise a diseased
nose as a healthy one, so Diego’s ability to defend his nose makes it impossible
for the Strasbourgers to position him as either a powerful, virile young man or
an outcast victim of venereal infection. The consideration that he is a for-
eigner further complicates matters: perhaps Diego owes his large nose not to
virility or to a prosthesis, but rather, to racial inheritance?
In any case, because Diego’s nose is not just a nose, the question of its reality
or unreality takes on an increasing importance, eventually evolving into a pseu-
doreligious controversy in which the whole city becomes involved, with
Strasbourgers dividing into Swiftian camps of “Nosarians” and “Anti-Nosarians”
and debating the issue in the scholiastic tradition.143 When the townspeople are
unable to settle the controversy by arranging a second encounter with Diego,
they fall prey to their own unquenchable curiosity, and the whole unhappy
episode culminates in the downfall of Strasbourg as an independent city.
Ultimately, the comic genius of the tale lies not only in its depiction of Diego’s
long nose as an undecipherable symbol, but also in its absurd imaginings of the
evils that might result from an inability to interpret such facial features reliably.
Like Bridgeabout’s Rinology, Slawkenbergius’s Tale ridicules the idea of “read-
ing” the nose as a symbol of anything—except, perhaps, our own need to make
and interpret symbols.
Despite his study of Slawkenbergius—and in contrast with his son’s insis-

tence on the literal meaning of the word “nose”—Walter remains convinced
of both the nose’s symbolic value and its essential legibility. As a result, he is
left viewing Shandy family history as a narrative of hereditary decline—a nar-
rative strikingly similar to those that appear in eighteenth-century medical
writings on venereal disease.144 While Walter never explicitly attributes the
ace-of-clubs nose to infection, his account of the shift from an aquiline to a
flattened facial profile quietly parodies sober-minded warnings about the
dangers of hereditary infection for a family’s health, wealth, and social status:
He would often declare, in speaking his thoughts upon the subject,
that he did not conceive how the greatest family in England could
stand it out against an uninterrupted succession of six or seven short
noses,—And for the contrary reason, he would generally add, That it
must be one of the greatest problems in civil life, where the same num-
ber of long and jolly noses following one another in a direct line, did
not raise and hoist it up into the best vacancies in the kingdom.—He
would often boast that the Shandy family rank’d very high in king
Harry the VIIIth’s time, but owed its rise to no state engine,—he
would say,—but to that only;—but that, like other families, he would
add,—it had felt the turn of the wheel, and had never recovered the
blow of my great grandfather’s nose.—It was an ace of clubs indeed, he
would cry, shaking his head,—and as vile a one for an unfortunate
family, as ever turn’d up trumps.145
Here once again Walter’s language is reminiscent of Rinology, with its
mock-serious dedication to a “Family of Great Noses,” its description of long
noses followed by short noses “with a great Variety of Noseal-Pomp,” and its
insistence on the power of “a good Nose” to raise its wearer’s fortunes.146 Like
Timothy Bridgeabout, Walter presents his theory apparently in earnest, and
like Bridgeabout, he generates a sequence of seemingly unintended puns, cir-
cling around the issue of venereal disease by referring, for example, to the
“blow”—both the catastrophe and the emptying—of his grandfather’s nose.147
For Walter, then, the forceps accident serves not only as an ironic confirma-
tion of his own fears about the Shandy family fortunes, but also as a reminder
of his own inherited afflictions. When the attempt to provide Tristram with
an auspicious name—Walter’s final hope for his son’s happiness—ends in
disaster, Walter believes that his own, as well as his son’s, fate has been sealed.
His “lamentation,” as Tristram terms it, provides the novel’s clearest articula-
tion of Walter’s belief that the sins of the Shandy patriarchs have been visited
on subsequent generations:
I see it plainly, that either for my own sins, brother Toby, or the sins
and follies of the Shandy-family, heaven has thought fit to draw forth
the heaviest of its artillery against me; and that the prosperity of my
child is the point upon which the whole force of it is directed to play.
. . . Unhappy Tristram! child of wrath! child of decrepitude! interrup-
tion! mistake! and discontent! What one misfortune or disaster in the
book of embryotic evils, that could unmechanize thy frame, or en-
tangle thy filaments! which has not fallen upon thy head, or ever thou
camest into the world—what evils in thy passage into it!—What evils
since!—produced into being, in the decline of thy father’s days—when
the powers of his imagination and of his body were waxing feeble—
when radical heat and radical moisture, the elements which should
have temper’d thine, were drying up; and nothing left to found thy
stamina in, but negations—’tis pitiful—brother Toby, at the best, and
called out for all the little helps that care and attention on both sides
could give it. But how were we defeated!148
Reflecting on Tristram’s conception, on the hidden damage that preceded
both the crushed nose and the crushed penis, Walter admits his own, and his
family’s, defeat: as heir to “the sins and follies of the Shandy-family,” Tristram
will suffer deformity, ill health, and an early death—and Walter, shamed and
punished in his turn, will have to look on helplessly at his son’s sufferings.
U N C L E T O B Y, M A N O F M O D E S T Y
Like his brother, Toby seems to have escaped the ace-of-clubs nose, but he
too shows signs of Shandy male debility, most notably in his mysterious groin
wound and ambiguously described “modesty.” Like Tristram with his crushed
nose, Toby is defined by an injury to a crucial part of his anatomy—and like
Tristram in recording his Life and Opinions, Toby uses reminiscence and reen-
actment to replay and reinterpret that injury ad infinitum. Toby’s war
wound—and it is worth keeping in mind here the commonplace literary
comparisons between love and war, venereal disease symptoms and battle
scars—becomes yet another illustration of a damaged Shandy manhood. Like
the forceps accident, it both determines its bearer’s fate and condemns him to
a life of celibacy.149
As with Tristram’s “circumcised” penis, the specific nature of Toby’s groin

injury is never made clear, but Sterne gives us just enough detail about its
contexts (military service in France) and its symptoms (bone pain, ulcers, pos-
sible sexual dysfunction) to pique our curiosity. Leaving aside the long-
standing associations of venereal disease with military officers and with
Frenchness, Sterne’s medical description is deliberately suggestive of what we
would now identify as secondary syphilis. Toby experiences severe bone pain
“owing to a succession of exfoliations from the oss pubis . . . and the oss illeum”;
he also seems to have developed some sort of ulcer or sore on or near his
genitals.150 Fred Pinnegar has suggested that these injuries are consistent with
shot wounds to the pelvis, in which fragments of dead bone “work their way
out of the body” through wounds that subsequently discharge “vile-smelling
pus.”151 But Toby’s pain and open sores would also have been identified by
some of Sterne’s readers as potential signs of venereal infection.
Whatever their cause, Toby’s injuries have both physiological and psycho-
logical consequences—and just as Tristram consoles himself by writing, so
Toby soothes his anguish by studying the “science of fortification.” Toby’s
attempt to reenact his fateful accident with the aid of his servant, Trim, by
building a model fortification—a kind of prophylaxis writ large—initiates
further Shandy catastrophes, which in turn invite further double entendres.
The construction of the fortifications not only precipitates Tristram’s acciden-
tal circumcision, by requiring that the sash window in the Shandy nursery be
left, like its principal occupant, “not well hung”; it also requires the sacrifice
of a ludicrous family heirloom: a pair of jackboots that Walter claims “have
been in the family, ever since the civil wars.”152 As noted in the previous chap-
ter, jackboots were often used in midcentury caricatures to symbolize John
Bute, the Scottish prime minister who, to some of his opponents, threatened
to import the “Scotch itch” and “Scotch pox” of Caledonian ambition and
influence into England—but here, like the sash-less windows, they serve as a
comic symbol for inherited degeneracy, drawing on the same financial lan-
guage often used to describe children whose “entail” of health had been
“docked” by congenital infection: “They were our great-grandfather’s, brother
Toby,—they were hereditary. Then I fear, quoth my uncle Toby, Trim has cut
off the entail.—I have only cut off the tops, an’ please your honour, cried
Trim.”153 Walter’s and Toby’s remarks here directly echo—or rather, parody—
those of commentators warning of the dangers of hereditary venereal disease:
just as physician John Floyer cautioned that the infected father “docks the
Intail of his own Blood,” or John Hill explained that venereal disease “is
entailed on the Heirs of great Families” to create “a puny, ill-compounded,

unmanly Race,” so the Shandy family’s “hereditary” jackboots have been “cut
off,” like an entail, and its patriarchs left ill equipped as a result.154
Toby’s injuries also seem to affect his sexual prowess—and in this, too, his
experiences anticipate (or echo, depending on whether we use narrative or
chronological order) those of his nephew. Even if we define the word “mod-
esty” as innocently as Tristram defines the word “nose,” Toby’s awkward con-
versations with an amorous local widow, Mrs. Wadman, seem self-consciously
to invoke Tristram’s bumbling apologies to Jenny. Similarly, Toby’s mortifica-
tion, when he finally realizes that the widow’s inquiries into the nature of his
groin injury are attempts to determine his sexual health, suggests that he too
is reflecting on what “had not pass’d”—and, perhaps, ultimately can not
pass—between himself and a would-be sexual partner.155
TRIM, TOM, AND TRISTRAM’S LEGACY
I would like to conclude this chapter by looking at one last episode from
Tristram Shandy, not least because it brings together the same features of
Jewishness, blackness, and nasal disfiguration frequently connected in other
eighteenth-century representations of venereal disease. This is the story of
Trim’s brother Tom, a figure who otherwise has little importance in Sterne’s
novel, but whose misfortunes evocatively parallel those of the Shandy men,
particularly Uncle Toby. Like Toby, Tom has decided to court a local widow,
and his story is recounted to Toby by Trim as the two of them are walking
over to visit Widow Wadman. Whereas Toby’s vague romantic overtures
toward Widow Wadman come to naught, however, Tom’s successful marriage
negotiations with a Jewish widow ultimately result in his arrest and persecu-
tion by the Spanish Inquisition.
As Trim explains, Tom, having decided to settle in Lisbon, approaches the
widow of “a Jew who kept a sausage shop” and who “had the ill luck to die of
a strangury.” Both the deceased Jew’s occupation as a sausage maker and the
cause of his death (“strangury” refers to a blockage of the urinary canal, a
condition sometimes identified in eighteenth-century medical texts as a com-
plication of venereal disease) invoke the idea of the injured penis, and Tom’s
negotiations with the widow in the back room of the sausage shop, much like
Tristram’s great-grandparents’ negotiations over the ace-of-clubs Shandy nose,
refer to the associative connections between noses, penises, outsider status,
and venereal infection. In both scenes, a canny would-be bride attempts to
secure a financial settlement from a suitor, and in both cases the implied con-
text of the premarital bargaining is sexual function.
While Tristram’s great-grandfather was ultimately punished for his fore-
shortened nose, Tom wins the approval of the Jewish widow when, after help-
ing her make a sausage by tying it while she holds “the snout,” they both
reach for another sausage, and his turns out to have “more gristle in it” (with
“gristle” taking on an additional meaning here as a slang term for the nose
and also, occasionally, the penis).156 Although sausages replace noses as the
dominant phallic symbol in this episode, the widow’s sausages, no less than
her nose and her deceased husband’s circumcised penis, signify her outsider
status: as Trim explains, it is because the sausages contain no pork, and are
therefore easily identifiable as the product of a Jewish household, that Tom is
hauled before the Inquisition, and his solitary confinement in prison repli-
cates the ostracism faced by nasally disfigured venereal disease sufferers. Here,
as in works like A Harlot’s Progress, the stigma of Jewishness appears to be
contagious.
In another similarity with Hogarth’s series, the Jewish widow keeps a black
servant: when Tom walks through the shop “to talk to the Jew’s widow about
love,” he passes “a poor negro girl, with a bunch of white feathers slightly tied
to the end of a long cane, flapping away flies—not killing them.”157 The girl’s
situation recalls that of the turbaned black boy who appears in the Jewish
merchant’s household in plate 2 of A Harlot’s Progress: like him, she is an out-
sider working for an outsider—but in “flapping away” the insects rather than
“killing them,” she is also connected with Uncle Toby, since he too is charac-
terized as literally unable to hurt a fly.158 Indeed, Toby responds to Trim’s
account of the girl with his characteristic sympathy, observing, “ ’Tis a pretty
picture! . . . —she had suffered persecution, Trim, and had learnt mercy.”159
On the whole, the episode encourages some degree of compassion for both
the Jewish widow and the “poor negro,” as Toby and Trim go on to discuss
why “a black wench [is] to be used worse than a white one” and conclude that
it is only because the former “has no one to stand up for her.”160 Yet Sterne’s
treatment of the episode also works to align the story of the widow and her
servant with the adventures of the Shandy family: just as Tom is tainted by his
marriage to a Jew and his assistance in the production of her kosher sausages,
so Tristram is rendered Jewish by the accidental circumcision of his penis.
Similarly, just as Toby and the “poor negro girl” are connected by virtue of
their shared gentleness in response to “persecution,” so Tom’s contest with the
widow over whose sausage contains more gristle harks back not only to Walter’s
4.5. Henry Bunbury, The Battle of the Cataplasm, 1773, Bretherton edition of Tristram
Shandy (Reproduced courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University)
grandfather’s dispute with his bride-to-be over whether his own ace-of-clubs
nose is longer than his father’s, but also to the fateful antenatal negotiations
between Walter and Elizabeth Shandy that eventually lead to Tristram’s nasal
disfigurement.
Admittedly, these strange mirrorings are, like much else in Sterne’s work,
suggestive rather than definitive—but their appearance in an otherwise
meticulously planned and extraordinarily complex work seems to undermine
the possibility of complete coincidence. Tristram’s nose remains a central ele-
ment in the novel because the plotline consistently reinforces existing associa-
tions between nasal deformity and outcast status. And with the addition of
Tom’s story, Tristram Shandy also registers the vague but unsettling connec-
tions between deformity, Jewishness, and blackness—between noses disfig-
ured by infection and noses “disfigured” by racial or pathological inheritance.
While it remains unclear whether Sterne intended for these associations to
reflect on contemporary racial or religious prejudices, it seems clear that he
recognized how easily the symbolism of disease might be used to isolate and
condemn others.
4.6. Tristram Shandy’s Father Crossing the Street with his Ace-of-Clubs Nose, 1804
Further, at least some of Tristram Shandy’s contemporary and subsequent

readers recognized the obsession with noses as a reference to venereal disease,
and identified the ace-of-clubs Shandy nose as a byproduct of paternally
inherited infection. In addition to works such as Dodd’s Critical Dissertation,
which clearly sought to exploit Tristram Shandy’s wide-ranging nose innu-
endo, several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century illustrations of Sterne’s novel
linked the Shandy family fortunes with venereal disease. On the simplest level,
we might consider Henry Bunbury’s illustrations for the 1773 Bretherton edi-
tion of Tristram Shandy: in a depiction of the scene in which Susannah and
Slop attempt to treat Tristram’s injured penis, Bunbury shows Tristram not as
a child of five (the age he claims to have been when he was accidentally cir-
cumcised)—but rather, as an infant in a cot, with a bandage still fixed across
his flattened nose (fig. 4.5). Bunbury’s conflation of the two accidents neatly
demonstrates the analogical relationship between the deformed nose and the
deformed penis in the eighteenth-century imagination.
More pointedly, a later illustration—published by Laurie and Whittle in
1804 as part of their comic series Drolls—tellingly misrepresents the plot of
Sterne’s text by depicting Walter, rather than his grandfather and son, as suf-
fering from a nasal deformity. In Tristram Shandy’s Father Crossing the Street
with his Ace-of-Clubs Nose, Walter and Elizabeth are pictured with a pug dog
whose flattened face mimics that of the disfigured Mr. Shandy (fig. 4.6). As
they cross the street, they are approached by two beggars, one of whom is a
sweeper. The caption beneath reads:
“Bless your Eye-sight; remember the sweeper, pray do__ Bless your
honor’s Eye-sight”___
“Why do you bless my sight? My eyes are very good”___
“Yes sir, your Eyes are good, but if they should fail, you have no
Nose to hang your Spectacles on.”
And so here once again is the old joke about Sir William Davenant and
the beggar woman—the same joke that runs through a long comic tradition,
and that links Sterne’s text with works like A Harlot’s Progress, Rinology, and
the Critical Dissertation on Noses. While Walter is never explicitly described in
the novel as suffering from either venereal disease or nasal deformity, Laurie
and Whittle’s illustration takes us right back to where this chapter began:
with the premise that a nose is never just a nose.
Conclusion
Tristram Shandy famously concludes with the story of the family bull, a
miserable creature who, like all the other males at Shandy Hall, appears to be
suffering from some form of sexual dysfunction, and whose fruitless efforts
with a neighboring cow are summarized by Parson Yorick as the story of “a
cock and bull”; the question remains whether Laurence Sterne identified the
broader associations around his hero’s disfigured nose—associations that were
later used to implicate Jews, blacks, and other minority groups in the spread
of venereal disease—as equally unreliable. Certainly, the narrative that devel-
oped in response to the increasing incidence of saddlenose and other deformi-
ties associated with hereditary syphilis, a narrative of a once superior but
increasingly degenerating white race, proved to be a cock and bull story with
profound and far-reaching consequences, leading in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries to programs of eugenics and to pseudoscientific justifica-
tions of racism and anti-Semitism.
While the future of this set of associations proved to be particularly bleak,
it is worth noting that all the major associative relationships highlighted in
this book were to cast a long shadow. For eighteenth-century writers and art-
ists, venereal disease offered a means of exploring different social and cultural
boundaries: between black and white, simian and human, Jew and Gentile;
between the powerful and the disempowered, the socially aspiring and the
elite; between women and whores; between natives and foreigners. These
213
214 conclusion
sorts of boundaries were continually shifting, difficult to pinpoint, challeng-

ing to police, sometimes impossible even to perceive—but they were bound-
aries that persisted for centuries, in part because the prejudices on which they
were built, and to which they contributed, were prejudices of very long stand-
ing. While the specific targets of racism, elitism, sexism, and xenophobia
might change, the general practice of these biases remains disappointingly
consistent within human civilization. Accordingly, it has been part of the
work of this book to consider how representations of venereal disease in the
eighteenth century were not just “acute,” in their sensitivity to context and
moment, but also “chronic,” in their representation of long-term anxieties or
fears.
Traditionally, histories of disease have tended to tell one of two stories:
either they present a narrative of advancing medical knowledge or they offer
an account of changing public attitudes. While there are clear advantages to
this kind of chronological approach, one of the limits of using narrative to
historicize disease is that it can be easy to lose sight of the persistent, long-
term prejudices that underlie so much of disease discourse. In this book, I
have tried to take a different approach, not only by focusing on how venereal
disease was represented imaginatively rather than on how it was experienced
and treated in “real life,” but also by foregrounding how representations
of venereal infection did not change over the course of the long eighteenth
century—by focusing on the often-unsettling points of continuity between
texts, media, contexts, decades. Eighteenth-century satirists may have tar-
geted the “French pox” in some works and the “Scotch pox” in others, but
that underlying association between disease and foreignness—an association
with profound implications for racial politics, international trade, and the
treatment of immigrants, among other things—remained the same.
To conclude, in this book I have surveyed some of the many references to
venereal disease in works of imaginative literature and visual art produced
between 1660 and 1800 in Britain. I have argued that the infection was associ-
ated in the eighteenth-century imagination with elite masculinity; with pros-
titution (and often, though not exclusively, with female prostitutes); with
foreigners and foreign imports; and with inherited “deformities”—most
notably, the disfigured nose. I have also suggested that because venereal dis-
ease was regarded as ambiguous and changeable—it entered the body covertly,
could lie dormant for decades at a time, and seemed capable of mimicking
many other medical conditions—it offered a powerful metaphor for examin-
conclusion 215
ing racial, social, and sexual differences that seemed equally vague and change-
able in the eighteenth-century world.
Ultimately, venereal disease was used to explore many of the fundamental
institutions on which eighteenth-century British society was based: patriar-
chy, consumer capitalism, nationalism, white supremacy. While it was only
one of many metaphors that could be used to address these concerns, its
potency and flexibility meant that it remained prominent not just in the lit-
erature and art of the Restoration and the 1700s, but also well beyond. Its
persistence as a topic of literary and artistic representation likely speaks not
only to the longevity of systems like patriarchy and consumerism, but also to
our ongoing fascination with the human body and its complexities.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Monsieur Belloste’s Hospital Surgeon (London, 1737), 28.

2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 29.
5. On the confusions around venereal disease in the early modern period (particularly
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), see Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson,
and Roger French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 1–19; Agnieszka Steczowicz, “Paradoxical Diseases
in the Late Renaissance: The Cases of Syphilis and Plague,” in Framing and Imagining
Disease in Cultural History, ed. George Sebastian Rousseau with Miranda Gill, David
Haycock, and Malte Herwig (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 269–84;
Jon Arrizabalaga, “Medical Responses to the ‘French Disease’ in Europe at the Turn
of the Sixteenth Century,” in Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early
Modern Europe, ed. Kevin Siena (Toronto: Victoria University of Toronto, Centre for
Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 33–56; Jonathan Gil Harris, “(Po)X
Marks the Spot: How to ‘Read’ ‘Early Modern Syphilis’ ” in The Three Ladies of
London,” in Siena, ed., Sins of the Flesh, 109–32.
6. These do not correlate precisely with modern symptoms of the same sexually trans-
mitted infections, because the bacteria responsible for syphilis and gonorrhea
(Treponema pallidum and Neisseria gonorrhoeae) are likely to have mutated over time.
See Claude Quétel, The History of Syphilis, trans. Judith Braddock and Brian Pike
(London: Polity, 1990), 10–11, 26–28, 50–51, 80.
217
218 notes to pages 3–4
7. Charles Peter’s New Observations on the Venereal Disease (London, 1695), for example,
notes that you can contract the disease from someone with no visible symptoms
(2–4).
8. It is worth emphasizing that a wide range of medical practitioners treated and wrote
about venereal disease during this period, and that the distinction between those who
were “quacks” and those who were reputable physicians was by no means clear-cut, as
Roy Porter’s work has demonstrated. While the confusion around symptoms and
prevalence created a ready market for charlatans, even the more well established prac-
titioners who focused on venereal disease—like the French physician Jean Misaubin
or the surgeon to the king’s troop of guards, Thomas Hobbs—could be regarded with
disdain by virtue of their chosen area of expertise. See Roy Porter, Health for Sale:
Quackery in England, 1660–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989),
151–55. See also Kevin Siena, “The ‘Foul’ Disease and Privacy: The Effects of Venereal
Disease and Patient Demand on the Medical Marketplace in Early Modern London,”
Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75 (2001): 199–224.
9. Gideon Harvey, Little Venus Unmask’d (London, 1670), 15–16; Nicholas Robinson, A
New Treatise of the Venereal Disease (London, 1736), 219.
10. On the links between venereal disease and consumption, see Clark Lawlor, “ ‘Halfe
Dead: and rotten at the Coare, my Lord!’: Fashionable and Unfashionable
Consumption, from Early Modern to Enlightenment,” in Disease and Death in
Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture, ed. Allan Ingram and Leigh Wetherall
Dickson (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 165–86, esp. 170–72. For contem-
porary sources, see Joseph Cam, A Practical Treatise: Or, Second Thoughts on the
Consequences of Venereal Disease, 3rd ed. (London, 1729), 150; see also, for example,
Joseph Cam, A Short Account of the Venereal Disease, 3rd ed. (London: 1719), 10;
Nicholas Robinson, A New Method of Treating Consumptions (London, 1727), 96–100;
Peter, New Observations, 21.
11. Jean Astruc, A Treatise of the Venereal Disease, 2 vols., trans. William Barrowby
(London, 1737), 1:138 and see also 2:56; Nicholas Rosen von Rosenstein [Nils Rosén
von Rosenstein], The Diseases of Children, and Their Remedies, trans. Andrew
Sparrman (London, 1776).
12. Peter, New Observations, 25.
13. While many medical writers believed the disease was treatable in adults, particularly
if detected in the early stages, the prognosis seemed less certain for infections of long
standing or in children—and decades-long (in some cases, centuries-long) controver-
sies raged over the best means and methods of treatment. See, for example, Cam,
Short Account, 10; Daniel Turner, Syphilis: A Practical Dissertation on the Venereal
Disease (London, 1717), 85; Robert Johnson, Enchiridion Medicum; Or, a New Manual
of Physick, 3rd ed. (London, 1710), 282; Rosenstein, Diseases of Children, 324–25;
Astruc, Treatise, 2:53. Interestingly, there was also some residual confusion surround-
ing transmission. While it was clear that venereal disease could be inherited or passed
on through sexual contact, other aspects of transmission—whether hereditary infec-
tions could skip a generation, for example, or whether suckling babies could contract
an infection from a wet nurse—remained obscure. See Barbara J. Dunlap, “The
notes to pages 4–7 219
Problem of Syphilitic Children in Eighteenth-Century France and England,” in The

Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, ed. Linda
Merians (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 114–27, esp. 115.
14. Robinson, New Treatise, 219.
15. J. Becket, A New Essay on the Venereal Disease (London, 1765), 71–72; see also, for
example, Harvey, Little Venus Unmask’d, 25; Astruc, Treatise, 2:1–2; Rosenstein,
Diseases of Children, 328; John Hunter, A Treatise on the Venereal Disease (London,
1786), 24. Medical historians have also commented on this understanding of the
disease: see, for example, Quétel, History of Syphilis, 30–31, 56–57, 80–81; Roy Porter,
“ ‘Laying Aside any Private Advantage’: John Marten and Venereal Disease,” in
Merians, ed., The Secret Malady, 51–67, esp. 55; Susan P. Conner, “The Pox in
Eighteenth-Century France,” in Merians, ed., The Secret Malady, 15–33, esp. 18; Ray
Anselment, “Seventeenth-Century Pox: The Medical and Literary Realities of
Venereal Disease,” Seventeenth Century 4 (1989): 192.
16. Medical historians are working to fill this gap. Simon Szreter attempts to estimate
infection rates for one area in this period in “Treatment Rates for the Pox in Early
Modern England: A Comparative Estimate of the Prevalence of Syphilis in the City
of Chester and Its Rural Vicinity in the 1770s,” Continuity and Change 32 (2017):
183–223.
17. On venereal infection as a cultural symbol, see, for example, Kevin Siena, “Pollution,
Promiscuity, and the Pox: English Venereology and the Early Modern Discourse on
Social and Sexual Danger,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 8 (1998): 553–74;
Margaret Healy, Fictions of Disease in Early Modern England: Bodies, Plagues, Politics
(New York: Palgrave, 2001), 123–24.
18. On the secrecy surrounding the disease, see Siena, “The ‘Foul’ Disease,” 199–224.
19. On the metaphoric or symbolic representation of illness, see Susan Sontag, Illness as
Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978); Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors
(London: Allen Lane, 1989); Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images of
Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988). Examples
of this approach applied to venereal disease include Jonathan Gil Harris, Foreign
Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Pathology in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. 64–73; Healy, Fictions of Disease, 123–87;
Andrew Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the Fin-de-
Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 95–117.
20. There are many excellent accounts of the history of venereal infection, with syphilis in
particular proving very popular among early medical historians. See, for example, J.
Johnston Abraham, “The Early History of Syphilis,” British Journal of Surgery 32
(October 1944): 225–37; H. Sheridan Baketel, “The History of Syphilis,” Medical Life
30, no. 12 (December 1923): 623–31; Joseph L. Miller, “The History of Syphilis,” Annals
of Medical History, n.s., 2 (1930): 394–405; Charles Clayton Dennie, A History of
Syphilis (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1962); W. Allen Pusey, The History and
Epidemiology of Syphilis (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1933). More recent histo-
ries include Quétel, History of Syphilis; Philip K. Wilson, Surgery, Skin, and Syphilis:
Daniel Turner’s London, 1667–1741 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 149–89; Kevin
Brown, The Pox: The Life and Near Death of a Very Social Disease (Phoenix Mill:
Strutton, 2006); Kevin P. Siena, Venereal Disease, Hospitals, and the Urban Poor:
London’s “Foul Wards,” 1600–1800 (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press,
2004). Several studies attempt to isolate venereal disease as a factor in historical change.
See Stanislav Andreski, Syphilis, Puritanism, and Witch Hunts: Historical Explanations
in the Light of Medicine and Psychoanalysis with a Forecast about Aids (Houndmills:
Macmillan, 1989); Deborah Hayden, Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis
(New York: Basic Books, 2003).
21. Siena, “Pollution, Promiscuity, and the Pox,” 572.
22. Marie McAllister, “Stories of the Origin of Syphilis in Eighteenth-Century England:
Science, Myth, and Prejudice,” Eighteenth-Century Life 24 (2000): 22–44, esp. 23.
23. Today’s distinction between “fiction” and “nonfiction” does not hold for this pe-
riod—and, as work by Siena and McAllister admirably demonstrates, “nonfiction”
texts like medical treatises were just as capable of employing figurative language as
novels, poems, or plays. I am using the term rather loosely here, to distinguish be-
tween texts seeking accurately to document historical experience and those attempt-
ing to create characters, plots, and settings without a real-world corollary.
24. Owsei Temkin, “On the History and Morality of Syphilis,” in The Double Face of
Janus, and Other Essays in the History of Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1977),
472–84, esp. 476–77. Claude Quétel, by contrast, argues that the moralizing
approach to syphilis in the seventeenth century gave way to a less severe attitude in
the eighteenth; see Quétel, History of Syphilis, 5, 73–75. Medical professionals such as
Theodor Rosebury, J. D. Rolleston, and Sir D’Arcy Power have also mined literature
and art for information about the social, cultural, and epidemiological aspects of
syphilis. See J. D. Rolleston, “Venereal Disease in Literature,” British Journal of
Venereal Diseases 10 (1934): 147–74; D’Arcy Power, “Clap and the Pox in English
Literature,” British Journal of Venereal Diseases 14 (1938): 105–13; Theodor Rosebury,
Microbes and Morals: The Strange Story of Venereal Disease (London: Secker and
Warburg, 1972).
25. Raymond Anselment, The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-
Century England (Newark: Delaware University Press, 1995), 131–71.
26. Rose Zimbardo, “Satiric Representation of Venereal Disease: The Restoration Versus
the Eighteenth-Century Model,” in Merians, ed., The Secret Malady, 183–95; Leon
Guilhamet, “Pox and Malice: Some Representations of Venereal Disease in Restoration
and Eighteenth-Century Satire,” in ibid., 196–212, esp. 209.
27. Guilhamet, “Pox and Malice,” 198; Betty Rizzo, “Decorums,” in Merians, ed., The
Secret Malady, 149–67; N. H. Lowe, “The Meaning of Venereal Disease in Hogarth’s
Graphic Art,” in ibid., 168–82; April London, “Avoiding the Subject: The Presence
and Absence of Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel,” in ibid.,
213–27; Hermann J. Real, “Dean Swift on the Great Pox: Or, The Satirist as
Physician,” in Ingram and Dickson, eds., Disease and Death, 77–99; Emily Cock,
“The à la Mode Disease: Syphilis and Temporality,” in ibid., 57–75.
28. I should emphasize here that while this book’s scope includes the latter half of the
seventeenth century, I often refer to the “eighteenth century” or the “long eighteenth
century” with the full 140-year period in mind. On the (problematic) notion of early
modern “popular culture,” see Tim Harris’s essay “Problematising Popular Culture,”
in Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (London: Macmillan),
1–27.
29. On the limited audience for Restoration satires, see Harold Love, English Clandestine
Satire, 1660–1702 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Works such as Gillray’s
Very Slippy-Weather (1808) give us some indication of how prints were displayed in
shop windows. See Frederic George Stephens and M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of
Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 11 vols. (London: Printed by Order of the
Trustees, 1870–1954), 8:711.
30. Healy, Fictions of Disease, 124.
31. Ibid, 133. Other discussions of venereal disease in early modern English literature
and culture include Greg W. Bentley, Shakespeare and the New Disease: The Dramatic
Function of Syphilis in “Troilus and Cressida,” “Measure for Measure,” and “Timon of
Athens” (New York: Peter Lang, 1989); Johannes Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s
England (London: Jessica Kingsley, 1994); Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic,
20–30, 64–75; Winfried Schleiner, “Moral Attitudes Towards Syphilis and Its
Prevention in the Renaissance,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 68 (1994): 389–410;
Louis F. Qualtiere and William W. E. Slights, “Contagion and Blame in Early
Modern England: The Case of the French Pox,” Literature and Medicine 22, no. 1
(2003): 1–24.
32. Mary Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-
Century Medical Discourse (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); Judith Walkowitz,
Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980). For an alternative view, see Smith, Victorian Demons,
95–117.
33. For discussions of venereal disease discourse in early modern Italy, Germany, and
Spain, see, for example, Laura McGough, Gender, Sexuality, and Syphilis in Early
Modern Venice: The Disease that Came to Stay (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave, 2011);
Claudia Stein, Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Germany (Farnham, U.K.:
Ashgate, 2009); Cristian Berco, “The Great Pox, Symptoms, and Social Bodies in
Early Modern Spain,” Social History of Medicine 28, no. 2 (2015): 225–44; Berco,
“Textiles as Social Texts: Syphilis, Material Culture, and Gender in Golden Age
Spain,” Journal of Social History 44 (2011): 785–810.
34. These and similar terms are used in many eighteenth-century works, but references
here are to James II’s “hot” penis in “Historical Poem” (1680), in Poems on Affairs of
State, ed. George deF. Lord, 7 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963–75),
2:154–63, esp. 157; George IV’s burning “royal spit” in He Stoops to Conquer, or Royal
George Sunk!!! (1819; see Stephens and George, Catalogue, 9:887–88); the penis-shaped
logs in Maria Fitzherbert’s funeral pyre in Dido Forsaken (1787; see Stephens and
George, Catalogue, 6:416); Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg’s “curry’d and spiced”
German “sausage” in A German Present, or, the Lover’s Token (1816; see Stephens and
George, Catalogue, 9:665); and the “pepper’d” aldermen in Upright Billy alias Orator
Humbug (1788; see Stephens and George, Catalogue, 6:537–38).
35. In cultural and literary studies of venereal disease, this connection is often made by
connecting the premodern discourse around what we now identify as syphilis with
the late-twentieth-century discourse around AIDS.
36. On the inscrutability of early modern sexual wordplay, see Valerie Traub, Thinking
Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015),
202–5.
37. Curious aspects of venereal disease discourse include the widely held belief that the
disease was spread sexually but caused impotence. See John Marten, A True and
Succinct Account of the Venereal Disease 4th ed. (London, 1706), 241; Charles Peter,
Observations on the Venereal Disease, with the New Way of Curing the Same (London,
1686), 65–66; Astruc, Treatise (London, 1737), 2:52–53; Sir John Floyer, The Ancient
ΨΥΧΡΟΛΟΥΣΙΑ Revived: Or, An Essay to Prove Cold Bathing Both Safe and Useful
(London, 1702), 277–78 (the untransliterated Greek word is “psychrolousia,” from
the words for “cold” and “to bathe”); literary texts expressing this view include
William Wycherley’s The Country Wife and the Earl of Rochester’s “The Disabled
Debauchee,” both discussed in chapter 1. Other oddities include narratives, both
fictional and (allegedly) factual, of people deliberately contracting infections for what
seem today like relatively trivial reasons: to exact revenge on an unfaithful partner, to
provide proof of sexual maturity, to imitate the elite. April London, for example,
notes that the cuckolded husband in Mary Davys’s 1727 novel The Accomplished Rake
contracts the disease on purpose, “somewhat illogically given the consequences to his
own person” (“Avoiding the Subject,” 217). Several of the period’s public figures—
most notably Robert Carnegie, the Earl of Southesk, whose wife was the Duke of
York’s lover—were also rumored to have deliberately contracted infections in order to
punish philandering spouses. I discuss the positive associations of venereal disease
with virility, sexual maturity, and elite status in chapter 1.
38. See Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 16–19. I have, however, oc-
casionally used the term “syphilitic” to refer to symptoms—such as the destruction of
nasal cartilage—that can only occur with syphilitic infections.
39. Michael Worboys, “Contagion,” in The Routledge History of Disease, ed. Mark Jackson
(London: Routledge, 2017), 71–88. My thanks to Professor Worboys for showing me
this material in draft.
40. See Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Mark Hallett, Spectacle of Difference:
Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
CHAPTER 1. OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN
1. Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random, ed. O. M. Brack Jr. (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2012), 107.
2. Edward Kimber, The Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson, 2 vols. (London, 1783), 1:41. It
is worth noting, with reference to this example, that syphilis appears to have been con-
sidered even funnier than gonorrhea: in the original, 1750 edition of Kimber’s novel, the
prostitute is said to have “tipped him the Favour of a Clap” rather than the full-blown
“French Disease”; see The Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson (London, 1750), 1:102.
3. Gilbert Langley, The Life and Adventures of Gilbert Langley . . . Written by Himself, in
Maidstone-Goal, when under Condemnation, for a Robbery committed on the Highway
(London, 1740), 28, 75.
4. “Against Marriage,” in The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed.
David Vieth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 159.
5. On the ostensibly more relaxed attitude to sexuality in the eighteenth century, see, for
example, Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin,
1982), 259–65; Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800,
abr. ed. (London: Penguin, 1977), 326–38; Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern
Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975). For a useful critique of this view, see Tim
Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997), esp. 2–7.
On the “light-hearted” attitude to venereal disease in the Restoration and the eigh-
teenth century, see Power, “Clap and the Pox in English Literature,” 105–13; Temkin,
The Double Face of Janus, 477–80.
6. Betty Rizzo, “Decorums,” in Merians, ed., The Secret Malady, 149–67. On the sexual
double standard, see Keith Thomas, “The Double Standard,” Journal of the History of
Ideas 20 (1959): 195–216. Much subsequent work has expanded and qualified Thomas’s
claims: see, for example, Bernard Capp, “The Double Standard Revisited: Plebeian
Women and Male Sexual Reputation in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 162
(1999): 70–100; Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early
Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 3–4, 62–67; Elizabeth A. Foyster,
Manhood in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1999), 77–87.
7. See, for example, Siena, “Pollution, Promiscuity, and the Pox,” 553–74; McAllister,
“Stories of the Origin of Syphilis,” 33–40, esp. 33–39; Stephanie Koscak, “Morbid
Fantasies of the Sexual Marketplace: ‘Lascivious Appetites,’ Luxury, and Lues Venerea
in England, 1750–1800,” Michigan Feminist Studies 21, no. 1 (2007): 85–129. I offer a
more detailed discussion of this scholarship in chapter 2. It is worth noting here that
while eighteenth-century writers and artists may have imagined the disease as affecting
men rather than women, there is no evidence that this was actually the case. See Kevin
Siena, “ ‘The Venereal Disease,’ 1500–1800,” in The Routledge History of Sex and the
Body, ed. Sarah Toulalan and Kate Fisher (London: Routledge, 2013), 463–78, esp. 473.
8. Reliable data on infection rates do not exist for this period. Tim Hitchcock and
Randolph Trumbach have argued that the eighteenth century witnessed the develop-
ment of a sexual culture increasingly focused on heterosexual penetrative intercourse,
and Trumbach links this shift with rising venereal disease rates, speculating that “it
was likely that in most countries the majority of men who lived in cities would at
some point contract at least gonorrhea”; that soldiers and sailors were “among the
men most likely to go to whores”; and that these whores “would all have been in-
fected.” See Hitchcock, English Sexualities; Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender
Revolution, vol. 1, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 198.
9. See Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 79–80; Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of
Polite Society: Britain, 1660–1800 (London: Longman, 2000), esp. 70–76, 100–111.
Carter’s work charts how emerging models of male politeness and sensibility had to
be reconciled with traditionally “manly” qualities such as physical and mental
strength.
10. On the link between political and familial authority, see Susan Staves, Players’ Scepters:
Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979),
111–89; David Turner, Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex, and Civility in England,
1660–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6–8; Donna T. Andrew,
Aristocratic Vice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 127–73. Turner’s and
Andrew’s books focus on the similar anxieties surrounding adultery.
11. For example, see The Adventures of an Actor (London, 1770), 67; Hell-Gates Open to
all Men (London, 1753), 25; Jeremiah Whitaker Newman, The Lounger’s Common-
Place Book, or, Alphabetical Arrangement of Miscellaneous Anecdotes, 2 vols. (London,
1792–93), 1:75; J. B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners (London, 1793), 120;
Denis Diderot, James the Fatalist and His Master, translator unknown, 3 vols. (London,
1797), 1:146; The Trial; Or, the History of Charles Horton, Esq. 3 vols. (London, 1772),
1:19; William Wycherley, Love in a Wood, Or, St. James’s Park (London, 1672), 63;
Genuine and Authentick Memoirs of the Stated Speakers of the Robin Hood Society
(London, 1751). Where women were concerned, references to a “fashionable disease”
were almost always specified as referring to nonvenereal complaints such as the va-
pors. On the temporal dimensions of syphilis as a fashionable disease, see Cock, “The
a la Mode Disease: Syphilis and Temporality,” 57–75.
12. On the incidence of venereal disease among poor men, see Trumbach, Sex and the
Gender Revolution, 198–99.
13. Bickerstaff ’s Unburied Dead (London, 1743), 4.
14. Samuel Butler, “Satyr,” in The Genuine Remains in Verse and Prose of Mr. Samuel
Butler, 2 vols. (London, 1759), 1:98–103, ll. 43–50. Bone pain, genital discharge (“run-
ning of the reins”), deformities of the prepuce (“crystallines”), and hard sores (“nodes”)
were all recognized as symptoms of venereal infection.
15. See, for example, Serious and Comical Essays (London, 1710), 110–11; Ben Jonson, “On
English Monsieur,” discussed further in chapter 3.
16. The Devil Upon Crutches in England . . . Written upon the Plan of the Celebrated Diable
Boiteux of Monsieur Le Sage (London, 1756), 104.
17. Kevin Brown describes the disease as part of the “rite of passage by which a well-
connected young man came of age” (Pox, 46–47); see also Quétel, History of Syphilis,
96; Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century
(Stroud, U.K.: Sutton, 1992), 190–93.
18. Genuine and Authentick Memoirs, 8.
19. Aphra Behn, The City-heiress, or, Sir Timothy Treat-all (London, 1682), B1r, D1r. On
the comparatively “light-hearted” treatment of venereal disease in Restoration com-
edy, see Herbert Silvette, “The Doctor on the Stage,” Annals of Medical History 9
(1937), 392–93; Zimbardo, “Satiric Representation,” in Merians, ed., The Secret
Malady, 183–95.
20. There is long-standing critical debate over whether plays like Wycherley’s ultimately
seek to support or undermine a libertine code of conduct. For arguments in support,
see, for example, John Traugott, “The Rake’s Progress from Court to Comedy: A Study
in Comic Form,” SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 6 (1966): 381–407;
Maximilian Novak, “Margery Pinchwife’s ‘London Disease’: Restoration Comedy and
the Libertine Offensive of the 1670s,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 10 (1977): 1–23;
Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660–1760 (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1981): 49–53. For arguments against, see, for example, Robert Hume, “The Myth of the
Rake in Restoration Comedy,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 10 (1977): 25–55;
Richard Braverman, “Libertines and Parasites,” Restoration (1987): 73–86; Braverman,
Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in British Literature, 1660–1730
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 219–20.
21. On Horner’s name, see Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance
in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 49–50.
22. For a thorough account of Whig satirists’ use of venereal disease rhetoric to attack
Tory privilege, see Guilhamet, “Pox and Malice,” in Merians, ed., The Secret Malady,
196–212. For a political reading of venereal disease in City Politiques, see Zimbardo,
“Satiric Representation,” in ibid., 185–86.
23. For uses of “pox” as a curse by Horner, see William Wycherley, The Country-Wife
(London, 1675), 3, 7, 8, 35, 66, 83, 84, 85, 89. Other male characters also invoke the
pox, including Dorilant (9), Harcourt (37), Sparkish (38, 39), and Pinchwife (11, 13,
24, 50, 59).
24. Ibid., 5, 13, 29–30 (gambling), 5–6 (hunting).
25. On the play’s alignment of libertinism and gambling, see James E. Evans, “Libertine
Gamblers in Late Stuart Comedy,” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research
18 (2003): 17–30.
26. Wycherley, Country-Wife, 15.
27. Ibid., 13, 11.
28. Ibid., 11–12.
29. Ibid., 17.
30. Ibid., 16.
31. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 49–66. On the aristocratic poli-
tics of Wycherley’s play, see Jeremy Webster, Performing Libertinism in Charles II’s
Court: Politics, Drama, Sexuality (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 90–100;
James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality,
Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), esp. 210–18.
32. Edward Ward, The Wooden World Dissected (London, 1707), 62.
33. Donald Monro, An Account of the Diseases which were Most Frequent in the British
Military Hospitals in Germany, from January 1761 to the Return of the Troops (London
1764), 43. For case studies of military or naval men, see, among the many examples,
John Sintelaer, The Scourge of Venus and Mercury (London, 1709), 285–87; Lorenz
Heister, Medical, Chirurgical, and Anatomical Cases and Observations, trans. George
Wirgman (London, 1755), 101–2, 401–2; Charles Hales, Salivation Not Necessary for
the Cure of the Venereal Disease (London, 1764), 51–52; Thomas Denman, A Letter to
Dr. Richard Huck, on the Construction and Method of Using Vapor Baths (London,
1768?), 12; Samuel Foart Simmons, Observations on the Cure of the Gonorrhoea (London,
1780), 2; Jesse Foot [surgeon], A Critical Enquiry into the Ancient and Modern Manner
of Treating the Diseases of the Urethra (London, 1786), 70; Jacques Daran, A Complete
Treatise on the Virulent Gonorrhoea, trans. unknown (London, 1767), 126; Henry
St. John Neale, Practical Observations, on Venereal Complaints (London, 1786), 66.
34. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown, Conn.:
Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 86.
35. Smollett, Roderick Random, 124.
36. Samuel Garth, The Dispensary, in Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs of State, 1:58–128, canto
6, ll. 166–167.
37. Rochester, “To The Postboy,” in Complete Poems, 130–31, ll. 7–8.
38. This poem is widely attributed to Rochester, but there is some uncertainty over its
authorship. See “The Disabled Debauchee,” in Complete Poems, 116–17, ll. 13–14, 16.
39. Ibid., ll. 21–24.
40. Horner is also identified as an “old maim’d General” in act 3, scene 1 of The Country
Wife; see Wycherley, The Country-Wife, 36.
41. Rochester, “Disabled Debauchee,” l. 45.
42. Samuel Butler, Dildoides (London, 1706), 7.
43. Sintelaer, The Scourge of Venus and Mercury, 285; Turner, Syphilis, 74. On condoms in
the eighteenth century, see Ronald O. Valdiserri, “Cum Hastis Sic Clypeatis: The
Turbulent History of the Condom,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 64,
no. 3 (1988): 237–45, esp. 237–39.
44. The Machine, or Love’s Preservative (London, 1744). This text is sometimes amusingly
misattributed to the historian and bishop of Peterborough, White Kennett, who died
in 1728.
45. Ibid., 7. The Machine’s author attributes this etymology to “the Author of the Tatler,”
who, he claims, notes that Colonel Cundum “by his Ingenuity had made it indecent
to mention his Name”; see 7n*.
46. Ibid., 3–4. A “cordee” (“chordee”) is an inflammation of the penis; a “shanker” is
another term for a chancre; a “bolus” is a large rounded lump of medication to be
swallowed whole.
47. Ibid., 4.
48. Ibid., 4–5.
49. Ibid., 9, 10.
50. Ibid., 2.
51. Ibid., 11.
52. Ibid. On the alternative sexual practices mentioned here, see Gordon Williams, A
Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature
(London: Athlone, 1994), 350. Williams speculates that the practices mentioned allow for
“avoidance of genital contact,” though this isn’t clear from the context in The Machine.
53. Sodomy is notably absent from this list; see Kevin Siena, “The Strange Medical
Silence on Same-Sex Transmission of the Pox, c. 1660–1760,” in The Sciences of
Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kennis Borris and George Rousseau
(London: Routledge, 2008), 114–33. On the broader eighteenth-century shift toward

a model of masculinity that favored heterosexual penetrative sex, see Trumbach, Sex
and the Gender Revolution; Hitchcock, English Sexualities.
54. Rochester, “Disabled Debauchee,” ll. 47, 48.
55. Critics have long contested the issue of whether Rochester’s poem is intended as a cel-
ebration of libertinism (for example, Ian Donaldson, “The Argument of ‘The Disabled
Debauchee,’ ” in Modern Language Review 82 [1987], 30–34) or as a satire on it (for ex-
ample, Dustin H. Griffin, Satires Against Man: The Poems of Rochester [Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1973], 47–54; Marianne Thormählen, Rochester: The
Poems in Context [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 13–16, 21–23).
56. Like most of Hogarth’s works, The March to Finchley was originally produced as an
oil-on-canvas painting. Here, as elsewhere in the book, I refer to the print versions,
since these would have been more widely disseminated than the paintings.
57. Stephens and George, Catalogue, 3:517.
58. Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s Graphic Works, 3rd ed. (London: Print Room, 1989), 144.
See also Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, vol. 2: High Art and Low (Cambridge: Lutterworth,
1991), 357–81; Donald, Age of Caricature, 111.
59. On the anti-Stuart rhetoric of Hogarth’s print, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the
Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Vintage, 1996), 47–48.
60. William Blair, The Soldier’s Friend (London, 1798), 147–48; Robert Hamilton, The
Duties of a Regimental Surgeon Considered, 2 vols. (London, 1787), 1:83–84.
61. Robert Somerville, Memoir on the Medical Arrangements Necessary to be Observed in
Camps (London, 1796), 71.
62. Blair, Soldier’s Friend, 147–48.
63. Ibid., 149.
64. See Elliot Arthy, The Seaman’s Medical Advocate (London, 1798), 98–100, 119–20.
65. Ibid, i.
66. [Bernard Mandeville], A Modest Defence of Publick Stews (London, 1724), 2–3. See
also, for example, Robert Gould’s “A Satyr Upon Man,” in which he claims that
“none can be / Admitted Gentleman oth’ first degree, / Till he has thrice been clap’d,”
in Poems, Chiefly Consisting of Satyrs and Satyrical Epistles (London, 1689), 195–223,
quotation on 201.
67. [Mandeville], A Modest Defence, 3.
68. Hamilton, Duties of a Regimental Surgeon, 1:81–82.
69. For historical case studies of infected wives, see Mary Margaret Stewart, “ ‘And blights
with plagues the marriage hearse’: Syphilis and Wives,” in Merians, ed., The Secret
Malady, 103–13. Stewart quotes some of the same medical and literary works discussed
in this chapter, including those by Profily and Granville. On the husband-to-wife
transmission of gonorrhea, see Lisa Smith, “The Relative Duties of a Man: Domestic
Medicine in England and France, ca. 1685–1740,” Journal of Family History 31 (2006):
248–49.
70. Rosenstein, Diseases of Children, 327–28.
71. Ibid., 329. In a study of the work of the surgeon John Marten, Roy Porter attributes
to chivalry both Marten’s emphasis on male case studies and the categorization of his
few female patients as married women “infected by their husbands.” See Porter,
“ ‘Laying Aside Any Private Advantage,’ ” in Merians, ed., The Secret Malady, 51–67,
esp. 57; see also Marie McAllister’s discussion of Dr. John Burrows’s case studies in
“John Burrows and the Vegetable Wars,” in ibid., 85–102, esp. 98.
72. Rosenstein, Diseases of Children, 337.
73. John Profily, An Easy and Exact Method of Curing the Venereal Disease (1748), A6r.
74. Ibid. See also Floyer, The Ancient ΨΥΧΡΟΛΟΥΣΙΑ Revived, 282.
75. Profily, An Easy and Exact Method, A6r.
76. George Granville, Baron Lansdowne, Poems Upon Several Occasions (London, 1712),
114–15.
77. Henry Fielding, Amelia, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan
University Press, 1983), 299.
78. Andrew Smith notes a similar trend in some late-nineteenth-century medical and
literary discourse; see Smith, Victorian Demons, 95–117.
79. Rosenstein, Diseases of Children, 336; see also, for example, Monsieur Belloste’s Hospital
Surgeon, 29. For biblical uses of this phrase, see, for example, Exodus 20:5, 34:7;
Numbers 14:18; Deuteronomy 5:9.
80. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: The Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
81. Peter, New Observations, 25.
82. John Marten cites a fellow author’s concern over “the stupendious Growth and
Spreading of two depopulating Diseases, the Venereal and the Scorbutick,” and laments
“the Mortality and Pining of great, noble, and generous Families, their Generations
gasping and soon run out, one treading upon the Heels of another”; see Marten, A
Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, in Both Sexes. The Sixth
Edition, Corrected and Enlarg’d (London, 1708), 90.
83. Astruc, A Treatise of the Venereal Disease, 1:138.
84. Floyer, The Ancient ΨΥΧΡΟΛΟΥΣΙΑ Revived, 280–81.
85. Ibid., 282.
86. Charles Peter, New Observations on the Venereal Disease, 3rd ed. (London, 1709), 20;
see also Rosenstein, Diseases of Children, 324. Daniel Defoe adopted the still more
extreme view that a man’s infection of his wife ought to be considered “Matrimonial
Murther” and punished with death. See Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness; Or, Matrimonial
Whoredom (London, 1727), 376–78.
87. Rosenstein, Diseases of Children, 323.
88. John Hill, Lucina sine Concubitu. A Letter Humbly Address’d to the Royal Society; In
which Is proved by most Incontestible Evidence, drawn from Reason and Practice, that a
Woman may conceive and be brought to Bed without any Commerce with Man (Dublin,
1750).
89. Ibid., 28, emphasis added.
90. Ibid., 28–29.
91. Ibid., 30.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid., 30–31.
94. See, for example, Paulson, Hogarth: High Art and Low, 217–18; Robert L. S. Cowley,
Marriage a la Mode: A Re-view of Hogarth’s Narrative Art (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1983), 27–28, 39–40, 150; Lowe, “Meaning of Venereal Disease,” 172–
77; Fiona Haslam, From Hogarth to Rowlandson: Medicine in Art in Eighteenth-Century
Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), 103–17.
95. Scrofula is a bacterial infection of the lymph nodes in the neck. It is airborne rather
than sexually or congenitally transmitted. On the wide range of suspected symptoms
of hereditary venereal disease, see the introduction.
96. The older woman is sometimes identified as the apothecary’s assistant or a madam,
but there is some suggestion of a familial relationship between her and the girl, since
both appear in the original painting to be wearing the same yellow-and-pink-spotted
fabric. A mother-daughter (or madam-prostitute) relationship would also explain the
look of rage on the woman’s face. On gonorrhea as “gentlemen’s sniffles,” see Brown,
Pox, 29.
97. See Cowley, Marriage a la Mode, 150; Lowe, “Meaning of Venereal Disease,” 174–75.
98. Daniel Defoe, Reformation of Manners, A Satyr (London, 1702), 24. Spiro Peterson
identifies Casco and his sons as “one of the first families of Hertfordshire” (22); see
Spiro Peterson, “Daniel Defoe,” in The Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 95:
Eighteenth-Century British Poets, First Series, ed. John Sitter (Detroit: Gale Research,
1990), 7–35.
99. Ibid., 26, 27.
100. Ibid., 26.
101. Ibid., 27.
102. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1965), 198.
103. Ibid. See also Swift’s poem on the disease, “Pethox the Great,” in Swift, Poetical
Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 252–54, ll.
69–80.
104. Guilhamet, “Pox and Malice,” 206.
105. On satires about Charles II and James II, see Guilhamet, “Pox and Malice,” 202–6;
I discuss satires on George IV in further detail in chapter 2.
106. “Advice to a Painter to Draw the Duke By,” in Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs of State,
1:213–19, quoted lines on 216.
107. A Catholic Hymn on the Birth of the Prince of Wales (London, 1688), leaf 1. On the
rumor, see Galbraith M. Crump, “The Birth of James Frances Edward, Prince of
Wales,” in Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs of State, 4:236–37.
108. A Catholic Hymn, leaf 1.
109. John Dryden, The Medal, in The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols., ed. Edward Niles
Hooker, H. T. Swedenberg, Alan Roper, and Vinton A. Dearing (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1956–2000), 2:37–52, ll. 256–66.
110. For biblical uses of this phrase, see, for example, Exodus 20:5, 34:7; Numbers 14:18;
Deuteronomy 5:9.
111. “The Men of Honor Made Men Worthy,” in Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs of State,
4:163–68, ll. 113–15.
112. See Stephens and George, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings, 7:28.
113. On the fop’s relation to notions of masculinity, see Philip Carter, “Men About
Town: Representations of Foppery and Masculinity in Early Eighteenth-Century
Urban Society,” in Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and
Responsibilities, ed. Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (London: Longman, 1997),
31–57; Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, 137–44.
114. M. D. George identifies some of the figures in the group, naming John Penn, Lumley
St George Skeffington, and Sholto Henry Maclellan (later Baron Kirkcudbright); see
Stephens and George, Catalogue, 7:585.
115. The Bond Street Battalion—or the Hospital Staff from Holland!!! (1799). Diana
Donald’s discussion of caricatures featuring men and women of fashion provides a
useful (non-disease-focused) comparative; see Donald, The Age of Caricature,
75–108.
116. Rochester, “My Lord All-Pride,” in Complete Poems, 142–43, ll. 1–2, 13–22, 30. The
allusion to Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle in the final line per-
haps recalls the diseased Sir Pocke-hole of act 3, scene 4, as well as suggesting a
comparison between Sheffield and the play’s hero, the “Grocer-errant” Rafe; see
Beaumont, Knight of the Burning Pestle (London, 1613), G2r.
117. See Stephens and George, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings, 7:290.
118. See “muff, n. 1,” sense 2a, in the Oxford English Dictionary.
119. For a similar example in satiric verse, see the attack on Henry Mordaunt, 2nd Earl of
Peterborough, in “The Converts,” in Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs of State, 4:153–58, ll.
11–20.
120. See Stephens and George, Catalogue, 8:103.
121. See William Shakespeare, Richard III, in The Complete Works (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1988), 183–222, I.ii.241–244. In Shakespeare’s play, Richard is not extolling his
own attractiveness, but rather, marveling at Anne’s seeming admiration of him.
122. See Stephens and George, Catalogue, 2:770–71. Stephens speculates that Breval’s
work was written when he had heard about, but not seen, Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress.
123. My pun here is probably ahistorical: Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and
Unconventional English (London: Routledge, 2006) lists the use of “dick” as slang for
“penis” as developing from military usage c. 1880 (304); the OED dates usage from 1891.
124. Consistent with the unicist theory (i.e., the theory that the clap and the pox were
different phases of the same infection), the rake suffers from both the “green and
yellow” penile discharge associated with gonorrheal infection and the shinbone ex-
foliation associated with syphilitic infection.
125. John Durant Breval, The Progress of a Rake: Or, The Templar’s Exit (London, 1732), 4.
126. Breval, Progress of a Rake, 13.
127. The play on “Brasenose” not only foreshadows Dick’s brazen conduct at university,
but also perhaps suggests the false metal noses worn by disfigured syphilitics.
128. Breval, Progress of a Rake, 16, 17.
129. On Rochester’s period as Alexander Bendo, see, for example, Cephas Goldsworthy,
The Satyr: An Account of the Life and Work, Death and Salvation of John Wilmot,
Second Earl of Rochester (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2001), 200–203;
Graham Greene, Lord Rochester’s Monkey: Being the Life of John Wilmot, Second Earl
of Rochester (London: Bodley Head, 1974), 108–13; Jeremy Lamb, So Idle a Rogue: The
Life and Death of Lord Rochester (London: Allison and Busby, 1993), 178–82; Vivian
de Sola Pinto, An Enthusiast in Wit: A Portrait of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,
1647–1680 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 81–90.
130. Breval, Progress of a Rake, 39–40.
131. Ibid., 16, 41–42.
132. Ibid., 41–42.
133. Ibid., 43.
134. Ibid., 45.
135. Biblical verses referring to weeping and the gnashing of teeth include Luke 13:28 and
Matthew 8:12, 13:42, 13:50, 22:13, 24:51, 25:30.
137. Ibid., 47.
138. Ibid., 50.
139. Ibid., 52.
140. Ibid., 41, 52.
141. Ibid., 52–53.
142. See Ronald Paulson, Hogarth’s Harlot: Sacred Parody in Enlightenment England
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 149–50.
144. Ibid., 55–61.
145. Ibid., 55.
146. Ibid., 56. “Shankers” and “cordee” are also mentioned in The Machine; see note 46
to this chapter.
147. The classic account of libertinism as a philosophy is Virginia Ogden Birdsall, Wild
Civility: The English Comic Spirit on the Restoration Stage (Bloomington: University
of Indiana Press, 1970). For a counterargument, see, for example, Turner, Libertines
and Radicals in Early Modern London.
149. Ibid.
150. Ibid.
151. See Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society; Tim Hitchcock and Michèle
Cohen, eds., English Masculinities, 1600–1800 (London: Routledge, 1999); Foyster,
Manhood in Early Modern England; Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination
in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
CHAPTER 2. THE POX AND PROSTITUTION
1. Jonathan Swift, “A Beautiful Nymph Going to bed,” in Jonathan Swift, Poetical

Works, ed. Herbert Davis (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 517–19, l. 30. On
Corinna’s diagnosis and treatment, see Hermann J. Real and Heinz J. Vienken,
“ ‘Those Odious Common Whores of Which this Town is Full’: Swift’s ‘A Beautiful
Young Nymph Going to Bed,’ ” Arbeiten aus Anglistik and Amerikanistik 6 (1981):
241–59; MaryBeth Gugler, “Mercury and the ‘Pains of Love’ in Jonathan Swift’s ‘A
Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed,’ ” English Language Notes 29, no. 2 (1991):
31–36; Real, “Dean Swift on the Great Pox,” 79–80.
2. Swift, “A Beautiful Nymph,” ll. 34, 37, 69, 68.
3. Ibid., l. 74.
4. See Fielding, Amelia, 27–28.
5. Breval, Progress of a Rake, 41–42.
6. This claim has been made by many social and cultural historians, historians of medi-
cine, and literary critics. See, for example, Gilman, Disease and Representation, 254;
Brown, The Pox, 13; Anselment, The Realms of Apollo, 160; Qualtiere and Slights,
“Contagion and Blame in Early Modern England,” 1–24; Siena, “Pollution,
Promiscuity, and the Pox,” 553–74; McAllister, “Stories of the Origin of Syphilis,” esp.
33–39; Koscak, “Morbid Fantasies of the Sexual Marketplace”; Conner, “The Pox in
Eighteenth-Century France,” in Merians, ed., The Secret Malady, 19–20; Linda
Merians, “The London Lock Hospital and the Lock Asylum for Women,” in ibid.,
128–45, esp. 130; Rizzo, “Decorums,” in ibid., 149; London, “Avoiding the Subject,” in
ibid., 218. For the same argument made of prior and subsequent periods, see, for ex-
ample, Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England, esp. chaps. 5 and 6; Winfried
Schleiner, “Infection and Cure Through Women: Renaissance Constructions of
Syphilis,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 24 (1994): 499–517; Spongberg,
Feminizing Venereal Disease. Many of these studies initially acknowledge a split be-
tween “chaste” and “unchaste” women, but then go on to read attacks on prostitutes as
attacks on all women.
7. See Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution
and Control in the Metropolis, 1730–1830 (London: Longman, 1999), 13–51, 174–75,
180–82; Kathryn Norberg, “The Body of the Prostitute: Medieval to Modern,” in
Toulalan and Fisher, eds., Routledge History of Sex, 393–408, esp. 402–3; Carter,
Purchasing Power, 18–19; Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, 119.
8. Koscak, “Morbid Fantasies of the Sexual Marketplace,” 85; Siena, “Pollution,
Promiscuity, and the Pox,” 553–74. In a more recent article, Siena identifies a split
between medical and moral discourse, arguing that “while medical theories about
mixing seed suggested any woman could generate the pox, in practice discussions
usually centred on women who sold sex”; Siena, “ ‘The Venereal Disease,’ 1500–1800,”
in Toulalan and Fisher, eds., Routledge History of Sex, 463–78, quotation on 469.
9. While many scholars of early modern sexuality have assumed that all representations
of infected prostitutes are negative, recent work by Laura Rosenthal and Sophie
Carter has identified a wide range of prostitute “types”—some positive and some
negative—in eighteenth-century literature and art; see Laura J. Rosenthal, Infamous
Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 2006); Rosenthal, introduction to Nightwalkers: Prostitute
Narratives from the Eighteenth Century (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2008),
ix–xxix; Carter, Purchasing Power, esp. 51–154.
10. Once again, it is important to note the distinction between representation and
reality here, since, as Vivien Jones notes, celebratory accounts are not likely to have
reflected the experiences of most working prostitutes; see Jones, “Eighteenth-Century
Prostitution: Feminist Debates and the Writing of Histories,” in Body Matters:

Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality, ed. Avril Horner and Angela Keane (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2000), 127–42.
11. Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce. On the prostitute as a figure for commerce, see also
Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society; Carter, Purchasing Power, 51–71; Koscak,
“Morbid Fantasies of the Sexual Marketplace,” esp. 89–103.
12. London, “Avoiding the Subject,” in Merians, ed., The Secret Malady, 222–23.
13. On the correlation between the likelihood of infection and the number of partners,
see, for example, G. P. Joffe et al., “Multiple Partners and Partner Choice as Risk
Factors for Sexually Transmitted Disease Among Female College Students,” Sexually
Transmitted Diseases 19 (1992): 272–78; Lawrence Finer et al., “Sexual Partnership
Patterns as a Behavioural Risk Factor for Sexually Transmitted Diseases,” Family
Planning Perspectives 31 (1999): 228–36. Reliable data on infection rates among
eighteenth-century prostitutes do not exist, but for speculation on this, see Trumbach,
Sex and the Gender Revolution, 196–206.
14. Robert Gould, Love Given O’re: Or, a Satyr against the Pride, Lust, and Inconstancy,
&c. of Woman (London, 1682), 4.
15. See Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660–
1750 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 20 and see also 28–29.
Nussbaum’s claim about the “satiric myth” leads her to read a number of the satires
on prostitutes discussed in this chapter (including Swift’s “Beautiful Nymph” and
“Progress of Beauty”) as satires on women.
16. On prostitute-borne venereal disease as a threat to men, see Karen Harvey, Reading
Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 109; Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England,
80–82.
17. Robert Gould, “To the Much honoured and my Dear Friend, D. D. Esquire. Sent
him with my Satyr Against Woman,” in Gould, Poems, 282–86.
18. Louis Philippe Boitard, The Sailor’s Revenge or the Strand in an Uproar (1749).
19. Jonathan Swift, “The Progress of Beauty,” in Poetical Works, 172–75, l. 100.
20. Ibid., l. 84.
21. Ibid., ll. 89–96.
22. On the theme of women’s deceptive use of cosmetics, see Peter J. Schakel, “Swift’s
Remedy for Love: The Scatological Poems,” in Contemporary Studies of Swift’s Poetry,
ed. John Irwin Fischer and Donald C. Mell, Jr. (Newark: University of Delaware
Press, 1981), 136–48; Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate, 106–7; Carter, Purchasing
Power, 142–54; Katherine Aske, “ ‘Such gaudy tulips raised from dung’: Morality in
Jonathan Swift’s Dressing-Room Poetry,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 40
(2017): 503–17.
23. Swift, “The Progress of Beauty,” in Poetical Works, 172–75, ll. 97–100.
24. Richard Ames, The Female Fire-Ships a Satyr against Whoring (London, 1691), leaf 1v.
25. Ames, Female Fire-Ships, 5, 10.
26. Ibid., 11.
27. Ibid., 8.
28. Ibid., 10.

29. Ibid., 11, 14.
30. Ibid., 14.
31. Ibid., 18.
32. Ibid., 3.
33. Ibid.
34. My analysis here contrasts with that of Nussbaum and Anselment, both of whom
read The Female Fire-Ships as implicating all women, and not just prostitutes, as car-
riers of venereal disease. While Anselment equates The Female Fire-Ships with Ames’s
contemporaneous satire on women, The Folly of Love, I argue that in the latter poem
(as in Gould’s satires on women), venereal disease is largely absent from the terms of
insult: in the attack on prostitutes, by contrast, infection holds pride of place. See
Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate, 39–40; Anselment, The Realms of Apollo, 160.
35. Ames, Female Fire-Ships, 19.
36. Ibid., 11.
37. Thomas Gordon, “Of Anger,” in The Humourist: Being Essays Upon Several Subjects
(London, 1720), 132–37, 133.
38. Defoe, Conjugal Lewdness, 33. Defoe subsequently argues that an infected man who
knowingly contracts a marriage and infects his wife should be punished with death;
see pages 376–78.
39. Jonathan Swift, “Phillis, or, the Progress of Love,” in Poetical Works, 169–72; see also,
for example, “The Progress of Marriage,” 223–27. On Swift’s treatment of venereal
disease, see Real, “Dean Swift on the Great Pox,” 77–99.
40. See, for example, Bernard Mandeville’s Defense of Public Stews (1724), in which
he contends that publicly regulated brothels would provide an outlet for male
sexuality that might otherwise threaten the health and “virtue of our Wives and
Daughters” (ii).
41. A Conference About Whoring (London, 1725), 4.
42. Ibid., 4.
43. Ibid., 4–5.
44. Ibid., 5–6.
45. Robert Gould, The Play-House, A Satyr, in Gould, Poems, 161–85, 165.
46. Ibid., 165.
47. Ibid., 163.
48. Ibid., 165–66.
49. “A Satire,” in Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs of State, 2:290–91, 291.
50. “The Downfal of the French Bitch,” in Poems on Affairs of State, 4 vols. (London,
1703–7), 3:211–12.
51. Ibid., 3:211.
52. Ibid., 3:211–12.
53. Ibid., 3:212.
54. Historians continue to speculate about whether Georgiana and Fox were lovers; see, for
example, Amanda Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (London: HarperCollins,
1999), 130.
55. See Stephens and George, Catalogue, 6:112. For a similar example, see A Meeting of the
Female Canvassers in Covent Garden (1784); details in Stephens and George, Catalogue,
6:114–15.
56. The women’s profession is indicated by their uncovered breasts as well as by their
location.
57. Other satires on the kisses-for-votes claim include Female Influence; or the Devons——e
Canvas; The Two Patriotic Duchess’s on Their Canvass; Nil Desperandum, or The Hands
of Comfort; The Dutchess Canvassing for her Favourite Member; Fox’s Cotillon in
St. James’s Market; A Certain Dutchess Kissing Old Swelter-in-Grease the Butcher for his
Vote, all 1784, all in the British Museum.
58. On the use of spots as potential markers of venereal disease, see Gilman, Disease and
Representation, 245–55.
59. See Stephens and George, Catalogue, 6:81–82.
60. Ibid., 6:98.
61. See, for example, Thomas Rowlandson, Kings Place, or A view of M [Fox] Best Friends
(Stephens and George, Catalogue, 6:107); James Gillray, Blood & Co. Setting Fire to the
Tower, & Stealing the Crown (6:513). The latter caricature was produced in 1788; ac-
cusations of sexual misconduct (and sexual disease) continued to dog Fox throughout
his political career.
63. For other caricatures of Fox as a beggar or debtor, see, for example, Thomas
Rowlandson, In Office, Out of Office and The Westminster Mendicant; The Political
Beggar; Carlo-Khan in Limbo, all 1784 and in the British Museum.
65. See ibid., 6:920–21; see also, for example, The Kings Evil (1786); Gillray, The Lover’s
Dream (1795); A New Bravura with a Duett Affettuoso (1802), all in the British
Museum.
66. See, for purposes of comparison, the caricatures of George with Mary Robinson,
Dorothy Jordan, Eliza Chester, the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Hertford, Lady
Melbourne, Lady Jersey, or Lady Conyngham. For a sample of these, see Kenneth
Baker, George IV: A Life in Caricature (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005),
42–55.
67. See Martin J. Levy, “Maria Fitzherbert,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
online.
68. The caricatures surrounding the Duke of York and his prostitute-turned-mistress
Mary Anne Clark offer a similar example from the early nineteenth century: while
Clark was maligned as a former prostitute, both figures were ridiculed when she testi-
fied against her former lover during a select committee inquiry into his conduct as
military commander in chief. See, for example, Thomas Rowlandson’s A Pilgrimage
from Surry to Gloucester Place, and The Burning Shame, both from 1809 and in the
British Museum.
70. The bacterial infection scrofula was commonly known as the “king’s evil.”
71. Stephens and George, Catalogue, 6:416.
72. See, for example, plate 3 of Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress, discussed below; The Tar’s
Triumph, Or Bawdy House Battery (1749); He Would if He Could! (1795), all in the
British Museum.
73. I discuss this trope briefly in the introduction.
75. See John Milton, Comus, in Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y.
Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 86–114, 100 (ll. 455–56).
76. See Dunlap, “The Problem of Syphilitic Children,” in Merians, ed., The Secret
Malady, 114–27, 116.
77. Rosenthal, introduction to Nightwalkers, xiv, xvi. Like Rosenthal, I draw no distinc-
tion here between prostitutes’ and bawds’ narratives.
78. Genuine Memoirs of the Late Celebrated Jane D****s (London, 1761), 113–14.
79. Ibid., 114.
80. The Life and Memoirs of the Late Miss Ann Catley, the Celebrated Actress (London,
1789), 39–40.
81. The only overt reference to venereal disease is when Fanny is warned against “being
so open-legg’d” after a chance encounter with a sailor; see Cleland, Memoirs of a
Woman of Pleasure, 2 vols. (London, 1749), 2:135.
82. See Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce, 17–41; Sharon Smith, “Defoe’s The Complete
English Tradesman and the Prostitute Narrative: Minding the Shop in Mrs. Elizabeth
Wisebourn, Sally Salisbury, and Roxana,” in Journal For Early Modern Cultural Studies
15, no. 2 (2015): 27–57.
83. Memoirs such as Walker’s bear an obvious similarity to the period’s popular criminal
biographies; see Lincoln Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of
Criminal Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 117–24; Hal
Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 58–71.
84. Charles Walker, Authentic Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues and Adventures of the Celebrated
Sally Salisbury (London, 1723), 33.
85. Ibid., 33, 35, 37–38.
86. Critics are divided over whether Walker’s account is intended as a critique or a celebra-
tion of its heroine; see London, “Avoiding the Subject,” 222; Rosenthal, Nightwalkers,
xxiii; Lena Olsson, ed., Eighteenth-Century British Erotica, Part II, vol. 4 (London:
Pickering and Chatto, 2004), xi–xii; T. G. A. Nelson, “Women of Pleasure,” Eighteenth-
Century Life 11 (1987): 181–98, esp. 192–94. The immediate contexts of publication
suggest some degree of public support, since Authentic Memoirs would have appeared
while Salisbury was imprisoned in Newgate and awaiting trial for the attempted mur-
der of her lover, the Honorable John Finch—even though Finch was involved in ef-
forts to have these charges dropped. According to Barbara White, “Sally’s was a
celebrated rags-to-riches story, as she rose from humble origins to become one of the
most famous courtesans of her day at a time when courtesans were drawn from genteel
stock. Her fame and beauty won her public affection and she was celebrated in popular
songs and two full-length contemporary biographies”; Barbara White, “Sarah [Sally]
Salisbury [née Pridden],” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online.
87. Walker, Authentic Memoirs, D1v, A4r.

88. Ibid., 17.
89. Anodyne Tanner, The Life of the late Celebrated Mrs. Elizabeth Wisebourn (1721), 7;
Walker, Authentic Memoirs, 17–18.
90. Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Maria Brown. Exhibiting the Life of a
Courtezan, in the Most Fashionable Scenes of Dissipation, 2 vols. (London, 1766), 2:123.
91. Ibid., 2:125, 127, 128.
92. Ibid., 2:128–29.
93. Ibid., 2:130.
94. Ibid., 2:134–35.
95. Ibid., 2:135, 136–37.
96. Ibid., 2:137–38.
97. A View of the Beau Monde: or, Memoirs of the Celebrated Coquetilla. A Real History
(London, 1731), 9. The excised names presumably refer to the well-known London
brothel keepers Mother Howell and Mother Needham.
98. Love a la mode: or, the Amours of Florella and Phillis. Being the Memoirs of Two
Celebrated Ladies Under those Names (London, 1732), 32.
99. Ibid., 33.
100. Ibid., 51.
101. Ibid.
102. Ibid., 53.
103. For discussions of the “prostitute as victim” narrative in the earlier eighteenth cen-
tury, see Vivien Jones, “Placing Jemima: Women Writers of the 1790s and the
Eighteenth-Century Prostitution Narrative,” Women’s Writing 4 (1997): 201–20, esp.
203–4; Henderson, Disorderly Women, 179–90.
105. Ibid., 109.
106. Ibid., 110. There are obvious similarities here with Henry Mackenzie’s sentimental
novel The Man of Feeling, with the hero rushing to the aid of a fainting prostitute
whose weakness turns out to derive from hunger rather than infection.
107. Ibid., 109–10.
108. Ibid., 110.
109. Ibid.
110. Ibid.
111. On the unchaste, or “fallen,” woman in later literature, see, for example, George
Watt, The Fallen Woman in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel (London: Croon
Helm, 1984); Tom Winnifrith, Fallen Women in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
(Houndmills: Macmillan, 1994); Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces:
The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1993).
112. Carter, Purchasing Power, 27–50; see also Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference, 92–129;
Nelson, “Women of Pleasure,” 191–92. On Eliza Brandon as a victim of venereal
disease, see Marie E. McAllister, “ ‘Only to Sink Deeper’: Venereal Disease in Sense
and Sensibility,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17 (2004): 87–110.
113. Spectator (Friday, 4 January 1712), 356–57, quoted in Carter, Purchasing Power, 32.
Carter’s account focuses particularly on the condemnatory accounts of prostitution
presented in two 1733 poetic interpretations of Hogarth’s series, Joseph Gay’s The
Lure of Venus and the anonymous The Harlot’s Progress.
114. Critics remain divided on Moll’s culpability. For a reading of the series as condemna-
tory of Moll, see Carter, Purchasing Power, 38–50; for a reading that identifies Moll
as a victim, see Sean Shesgreen, “A Harlot’s Progress and the Question of Hogarth’s
Didacticisms,” Eighteenth-Century Life 2 (1975–76): 22–28. For a reading that stresses
the series’ ambiguity, see Ronald Paulson, Hogarth, vol. 1: The “Modern Moral
Subject” (Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1991), esp. 254–57.
115. See, for example, Thomas Rowlandson, A Cully Pillaged (1784?), A Fool and His
Money’s Soon Parted (1790), and Preparing for Action (1793); Men of Pleasure in their
Varieties (1794), all in the British Museum. For images of prostitutes stealing pocket
watches in particular, see, for example, Deceitful Kisses, or the Pretty Plunderers (1781);
A Rich Privateer Brought Safe into Port by Two First Rates (1782); Men of War, Bound
for the Port of Pleasure (1791), all in the British Museum. On prostitutes and theft, see
Carter, Purchasing Power, 58–59. On pocket watches and venereal disease in Hogarth,
see Cock, “The a la Mode Disease,” 69–72.
117. Ibid.
118. Ibid. Similar sentiments are expressed by John Cleland in The Unfortunate Boscavern
Penlez (1749); see Hal Gladfelder, Fanny Hill in Bombay: The Making and Unmaking
of John Cleland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 55.
119. Ibid., 122.
120. Ibid., 123.
121. Ibid.
122. Ibid. On the vilification of the madam in this period, see Carter, Purchasing Power,
105–28.
124. In addition to the biblical description of woman as “the weaker vessel” (1 Peter 3:7),
many eighteenth-century texts compare women with jars, bottles, or vases. See for
example, Pope’s comparisons of “maids” with “bottles” in The Rape of the Lock (canto
4, line 54)—or, indeed, Elizabeth Wisebourn’s comparison of prostitutes’ vaginas
with wine bottles in Walker’s Authentic Memoirs, as discussed above.
126. Ibid., 125.
127. Ibid., 125–26.
128. Ibid., 126.
129. Ibid.
130. See John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (London, 1728), 10.
131. See Henderson, Disorderly Women, 179–90; see also, for example, Somerville, Memoir
on the Medical Arrangements Necessary to Be Observed in Camps, 67–68.
132. Martin Madan, Thelyphthora, or a Treatise on Female Ruin, 2 vols. (1780), 2:73. On
the implications and reception of Madan’s treatise, see Rosenthal, Infamous
Commerce, 202–12.
133. Madan, Thelyphthora, 2:302, 1:307.

134. Ibid., 1:7.
135. Ibid., 2:335; see also, for example, 2:317, 338, 261–62.
136. David Innes Williams, The London Lock: A Charitable Hospital for Venereal Disease,
1746–1952 (London: Royal Society of Medicine Press, 1995), 25, 55; see also Siena,
Venereal Disease, 192; Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in
the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 69–71.
137. Siena, Venereal Disease, 192.
138. Ibid.
139. Henderson, Disorderly Women, 189. See also Norberg, “The Body of the Prostitute,”
404–5; Kathryn Norberg, “From Courtesan to Prostitute: Mercenary Sex and the
Venereal Disease, 1730–1832,” in Merians, ed., The Secret Malady, 34–50; Ruth Perry,
“Good Girls and Fallen Women: Representations of Prostitutes in Eighteenth-
Century English Fiction,” in Narrating Transgression: Representations of the Criminal
in Early Modern England, ed. Rosamaria Loretelli and Roberto De Romanis (Berlin:
Peter Lang, 1999), 91–101; Siena, Venereal Disease, 473.
140. As Henderson observes, “The idea of the prostitute as victim did not simply replace
the predatory image” (Disorderly Women, 190); see also Carter, Purchasing Power,
118–28.
141. See Walkowitz, Prostitution in Victorian Society. It is, however, worth noting that
Victorian attacks on male vice were orchestrated and articulated by women as well
as by men.
CHAPTER 3. FOREIGNERS
1. In 1725, the word “Frenchified” was defined as meaning “Clapt or Poxt”; “the French
Gout” was a synonym for “the pox”; and to have received a “Blow with a French
Faggot-Stick” or a “French cowlstaff ” was slang for having the pox, sometimes spe-
cifically used “when the Nose is fallen by the Pox.” See the entries for “French gout”
and “Frenchified” in A New Canting Dictionary: Comprehending All the terms, Antient
and Modern, Used in the Several tribes of Gypsies, Beggars, Shoplifters (London, 1725);
John Ray, A Compleat Collection of English Proverbs, 3rd ed. (London, 1737), 69. Ray’s
volume defines “He has got a blow over the nose with a French cowlstaff ” and “He is
Frenchified” as meaning he “hath the French Pox” (69).
2. The Act of Union in 1707 united Scotland with England, which by that time also in-
cluded Wales and parts of Ireland. Tensions remained, however, between the English
and the Scots, erupting into violence during the Jacobite uprisings of 1715 and 1745. On
British national identity in this period, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation,
1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Gerald Newman, The Rise of
English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1720–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997).
3. On the association of disease with foreignness or foreign enemies, see, for example, Susan
Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors, 48; Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images
of Illness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 21–25; on this
conception of venereal disease in the early modern period in particular, see, for example,
Anna Foa, “The New and the Old: The Spread of Syphilis (1494–1530),” in Sex and
Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, trans. Margaret
A. Gallucci with Mary M. Galluci and Carole C. Galluci (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1990), 26–45; Rose Hentschell, “Luxury and Lechery: Hunting the
French Pox in Early Modern England,” 133–57, in Siena, ed., Sins of the Flesh, esp. 134–38;
Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic, 1–16; Anselment, The Realms of Apollo, 156–57;
Healy, Fictions of Disease, 124, 132–34; Quétel, History of Syphilis, 10, 15–16.
4. See Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in
Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 1. Harris
discusses this use of syphilis in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors on 29–51.
5. Edward Dunn, A Short Discourse on the Venereal Disease in A Compendious and New
Method of Performing Chirurgical Operations (London, 1724), 166–67. Almost every
text treating the origins of the disease makes this observation, but for some specific
eighteenth-century examples, see M. Jourdan de Pellerin, A Treatise on Venereal
Maladies (trans. from French; London, 1750), 62; George Warren, A New Method of
Curing, without internal medicines, that degree of the venereal disease, call’d, a gonorrhoa
or clap (London, 1711), 2; William Turnbull, An Inquiry into the Origin and Antiquity
of the Lues Venerea (1786), 14; Pierre-Joseph Desault, A Treatise on the Venereal
Distemper (London, 1738), 30.
6. Quétel, History of Syphilis, 16.
7. Brown, Pox, 9–10.
8. On the competing theories of the disease’s origins, see Quétel, History of Syphilis,
33–49; Brown, Pox, 5–7; Siena, “ ‘The Venereal Disease,’ 1500–1800,” in Toulalan and
Fisher, eds., Routledge History of Sex and the Body, 463–67; McAllister, “Stories of the
Origin of Syphilis,” 22–44.
9. The sixteenth-century Italian physician Leonardo Fioraventi argued that venereal dis-
ease had resulted from cannibalism. For eighteenth-century discussions of Fioraventi’s
claim, see, for example, Astruc, A Treatise of the Venereal Disease, 1:99; J. H. [James
Hervey], M.D., Scelera acquarum: Or, a Supplement to Mr. Graunt on the Bills of
Mortality (London, 1701), A3v; Voltaire, The works of M. de Voltaire, trans. T. Smollett
et al., 25 vols. (London, 1761), 4:196. Dunn dismisses similarly outlandish claims that
the disease resulted from bestiality (Discourse on the Venereal Disease, 171).
10. See Astruc, A Treatise of the Venereal Disease, 1:77–83.
11. See Quétel, History of Syphilis, 40.
12. Ibid., 11.
13. See Siena, “Pollution, Promiscuity, and the Pox,” 553–74, esp. 569–74; see also
McAllister, “Stories of the Origin of Syphilis,” esp. 30–32. My argument departs from
both Siena’s and McAllister’s, however, in suggesting that native men as well as native
women were blamed for the disease.
14. Astruc, Treatise of the Venereal Disease, 1:92.
15. Ibid., 1:101.
16. Ibid., 1:102–3.
17. On sixteenth-century European versions of this “stereotype of the lascivious Indian,”
see Foa, “The New and the Old,” in Muir and Ruggiero, eds., Sex and Gender in
Historical Perspective, esp. 31–34.

19. On the Judeo-Christian view of menstruation as “polluted and polluting” and the
corresponding prohibitions against sex during menstruation, see Patricia Crawford,
“Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 91
(1981): 47–73; Ottavia Niccoli, “ ‘Menstruum Quasi Monstruum’: Monstrous Births
and Menstrual Taboo in the Sixteenth Century,” in Muir and Ruggiero, eds., Sex and
Gender in Historical Perspective, 1–25; Lesel Dawson, “Menstruation, Misogyny, and
the Cure for Love,” Women’s Studies 34 (2005): 461–84, esp. 471–72; James A.
Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), 53, 91–92.
21. Ibid., 1:90. Other writers on venereal disease also identify it as “bad merchandise”;
see, for example, Dunn, Discourse on the Venereal Disease, 171.
23. Ibid., 1:119.
24. Theodor Rosebury similarly speculates that Astruc’s view “was attractive to increas-
ingly predatory white Europeans who were in process of putting down the darker-
skinned peoples of the earth”; see Rosebury, Microbes and Morals: The Strange Story of
Venereal Disease (London: Secker and Warburg, 1972), 97.
25. While I focus on the British context here, the same pattern appears in many seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century French texts, and a number of these were translated
for an English-speaking audience. See, for example, Guillaume Thomas François
Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans
in the East and West Indies, trans. J. Justamond, 4 vols. (London, 1776), 2:149–50; Jean-
Bernard Bossu, Travels through that Part of North America formerly called Louisiana,
2 vols. (London, 1771), 1:7–9; Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit
of Laws, 3 vols. (London, 1770), 2:15–16; Voltaire, Young James, Or the Sage and the
Atheist, An English Story (London, 1776); Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre,
Studies of Nature, trans. Henry Hunter, 3 vols. (London, 1798), 1:83–84; Claude
Francois Xavier, Abbé Millot, Elements of General History, 3 vols. (London, 1779),
2:218–19.
26. John Hawkesworth, An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present
Majesty, 3 vols. (London, 1773), 2:232. Hawkesworth includes these remarks in his
account of Captain Cook’s voyage of 1768–71, but the description of venereal disease
is Hawkesworth’s own.
27. The Civil and Ecclesiastical Systems of England Defended and Fortified (London, 1791),
56–57.
28. Considerations addressed to the nobility and gentlemen of the landed interest, to engage
them to use their influence to have the prohibition of Malt Spirits taken off in Scotland
(London, 1760), 18.
29. Abraham Cowley, “To Dr. Scarborough,” in Poems Written by A. Cowley (London,
1656), 35–37, 36.
30. Nahum Tate, “The Translator to Mr. Hobbs,” preface to Girolamo Fracastoro,
Syphilis, or, a Poetical History of the French Disease, trans. Nahum Tate (London,
1686), A3v. Jonathan Gil Harris argues that Fracastoro’s text was the first to suggest an
“externalized” view of venereal disease as caused by “seeds” that entered the body
from outside; see Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic, 23–26. On Tate’s transla-
tion of the text, see Raymond A. Anselment, “Fracastoro’s Syphilis: Nahum Tate and
the Realms of Apollo,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 73 (1991): 105–18.
31. Francis Garden, Lord Gardenstone, “Horace, Lib I. Ode III. Imitated,” in Miscellanies
in Prose and Verse (Edinburgh, 1791), 70–74, ll. 51–52.
32. Ibid., ll. 83–96.
33. Ibid., ll. 102, 100.
35. On venereal disease in colonial India, see David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State
Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), 83–87; Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing
Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003).
36. On the love-hate relationship between Britain and France in the eighteenth century,
see, for example, Jeremy Black, Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-French Relations
in the Eighteenth Century (London: Duckworth, 1986); Siobhan Talbott, Conflict,
Commerce, and Franco-Scottish Relations, 1560–1713 (London: Pickering & Chatto,
2014); John Nye, War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade,
1689–1900 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007); Jean-Pierre Jessenne,
Renaud Morieux, and Pascal Dupuy, eds., Le négoce de la paix: Les nations et les traités
franco-britanniques, 1713–1802 (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 2008); Charles
Edouard Levillain, “Ruled Britannia? Le problème de l’influence française en Grande-
Bretagne dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle (1660–1700),” in France-Angleterre:
Un siècle d’Entente Cordiale, 1904–2004, ed. Laurent Bonnaud (Paris: L’Harmattan,
2004), 107–36.
37. Terminology offers a basic illustration of this trend: a cursory search of the Eighteenth-
Century Collections Online database suggests that references to the “French disease”
appear nearly seven times more often than references to the “Neapolitan disease,” for
example.
38. On the transmission of venereal disease from France to Britain, see, for example, John
Dunton, The Art of Living Incognito (London, 1700), 50; Nikolai Detlef Falck, A
Treatise on the Venereal Disease (London, 1772), 74; [Mandeville], A Modest Defence of
Publick Stews, 56. The first recorded mention of the disease in Britain—a 1497 royal
decree from Edinburgh—refers to it as “grandgor,” a term that suggests it may indeed
have come over from France; see Quétel, History of Syphilis, 15.
39. Hentschell, “Luxury and Lechery,” in Siena, ed., Sins of the Flesh, 133–57.
40. On the association of effeminacy with Frenchness, see Michèle Cohen, “Manliness,
Effeminacy, and the French: Gender and the Construction of National Character in
Eighteenth-Century England,” in Hitchcock and Cohen, eds., English Masculinities,
44–61; on the association of venereal disease with Catholicism, see Siena, “Pollution,
Promiscuity, and the Pox,” 553–74; Hentschell, “Luxury and Lechery,” in Siena, ed.,
Sins of the Flesh, 138.
41. A New General English Dictionary (London, 1768).
42. See Anselment, Realms of Apollo, 157. On the Jacobean and Elizabethan use of this
trope, see Frédérique Fouassier, “The ‘French Disease’ in Elizabethan and Jacobean
Drama,” in Representing France and the French in Early Modern English Drama, ed.
Jean-Christophe Mayer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 193–206;
Jonathan Gil Harris, “ ‘Some love that drew him ofte from home’: Syphilis and
International Commerce in The Comedy of Errors,” in Disease, Diagnoses, and Cure on
the Early Modern Stage, ed. Stephanie Moss and Kaara L. Peterson (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2004), 69–92; Harris, Sick Economies, 29–51.
43. Ben Jonson, “On English Monsieur,” in The Workes of Beniamin Ionson (London,
1616), 792–93, l. 10.
44. Ibid., ll. 7–8.
45. Samuel Butler, “Satyr,” in The Genuine Remains in Verse and Prose of Mr. Samuel
Butler, 2 vols., ed. Robert Thyer (London, 1759), 1:73–77, ll. 35, 40, 121–22. Butler’s
poem was sometimes explicitly titled “Satire upon our Ridiculous Imitation of the
French” in eighteenth-century editions.
46. William Winstanley, Poor Robin 1706. An Almanach of the Old and New Fashion
(1706), A4r.
47. Theophilus Lucas, Memoirs of the Lives, Intrigues, and Comical Adventures of the Most
Famous Gamesters (London, 1714), 134–35.
48. Samuel Butler, Hudibras, The Third and Last Part (London, 1678), 42 (part 3, canto 1,
line 716).
49. Gould, “To the Ingenious, and my Dear Friend, Mr. J. Knight,” in Poems, 291.
50. “Dialogue III. Between Tonsor a Barber, and Sartor a Taylor, with other Gentlemen
and Ladies at Tunbridge-Wells,” in The Town Spy, Part II (London, 1704), 52–87, 62.
51. George Colman, The Connoisseur, 2 vols. (London, 1755–56), 1:300.
52. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, “Nature’s Cook,” in Poems, and Fancies
(London, 1653), 127. Cavendish’s poem not only links the pox with French food and
French cooks, but also suggests that the disease makes a “French fricassee” of its
victims.
53. See Margaret Pelling, “Appearance and Reality: Barber-Surgeons, the Body, and
Disease” in London, 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis, ed. A. L. Beier and R.
Finlay (London: Longman, 1986), 82–112.
54. Christopher Smart, “The Bag-Wig and the Tobacco-Pipe,” in Poems on Several
Occasions: By Christopher Smart (London, 1752), 211–13.
55. Ibid., 211.
56. Ibid., 213.
57. Ibid., 212.
58. Ibid., 213.
59. Samuel Butler, Dildoides, 3.
60. See Viviane Barrie, “La Prohibition du Commerce avec la France dans la Politique
Anglaise à la Fin du XVIIème Siècle,” Revue Du Nord 59 (1977): 343–64.
61. Butler, Dildoides, 5, 4.
62. Ibid., 4.
63. Ibid., 7–8.
64. Ibid., 10.

65. Ibid.
66. Samuel Johnson, London: A Poem, in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal (London,
1738), 10, l. 114.
67. A Collection of Miscellany Letters, Selected Out of Mist’s Weekly Journal, 4 vols. (1722–
27), 1:3.
68. See fig. 2.14; Misaubin is the lean man pointing at his pill case. I discuss A Harlot’s
Progress in chapters 2 and 4. On Misaubin in graphic satire, see Haslam, From Hogarth
to Rowlandson, 94–96.
69. Four Satires (London, 1736), 27.
70. Johnson, London, 10, l. 115; for the stereotypical conception of the meager French diet,
see, for example, The Bacchanalian: or, Choice Spirits Feast (London, 1755), 52; Samuel
Bishop, “The Book,” in The Poetical Works of the Rev. Samuel Bishop, 2 vols. (London,
1796), 1:226–30, 228; Elizabeth Cobbold, The Mince Pye: An Heroic Epistle (London,
1800), 30; The Deviliad: An Heroic Poem (London, 1744), 18; Charles Molloy, The
Coquet: Or, The English Chevalier, A Comedy (London, 1718), 52; Tobias Smollett, The
Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, ed. O. M. Brack Jr. (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1988), 130.
72. Such was the staying power of Misaubin’s “antivenereal pills,” in fact, that they were
still sold under his name after his death. In Quackery Unmask’d, Or Empiricism Display’d
(1748), an elderly woman—probably Misaubin’s widow, Marthe—is depicted as com-
ing to join a group of London quacks, pointing to a pill in her outstretched hand; see
Stephens and George, Catalogue, 3:732–36.
73. Richard Perkin, “A Critical Edition of the Manuscript of Thomas Shadwell’s ‘The
Humorists,’ ” (Ph.D. diss., University of Leeds, School of English, 1980), “Commentary,”
437–38n41.
74. On venereal disease in Restoration comedy, Zimbardo, “Satiric Representation,” in
Merians, ed., The Secret Malady, 183–88.
75. See Perkin, “Introduction,” 96–104, for a discussion of the historical figures on whom
Oldpox might have been based. References to Shadwell’s play in the subsequent anal-
ysis are to Perkin’s manuscript edition and use his act and line numbers.
76. On the meaning of the term “Drybob” and on the possibility that Drybob is based
on Dryden, see Perkin’s note to 2:81 (Perkin, “Commentary,” 457–58n81.1).
77. Ibid., 1:33–37.
78. Ibid., 1:41–44.
79. Ibid., 1:209.
80. Ibid., 1:215–16.
81. Ibid., 1:217–23, 234–35.
82. Ibid., 1:239–46.
83. Ibid., 1:248–49.
84. Ibid., 1:261.
85. Ibid., 1:264–65. In the sanitized 1671 version of the play, “pox” is changed to “his
Enemy,” maintaining the battle metaphor; see Perkin, “Commentary,” 448n264.
86. Ibid., 1:278–79.

87. On French fashions as “Liveries,” see Samuel Butler, “Satyr,” in Genuine Remains, l.
14.
88. Serious and Comical Essays (London, 1710), 110–11.
89. Ibid.; see also Sir Thomas Overbury, “Forrein Newes of the yeere 1604: From France,”
in A Wife . . . Whereunto are Added Many Witty Characters, and Conceited Newes
(London, 1614), G4v.
90. William Scroggs, The Lord Chief Justice Scroggs his Speech in the Kings Bench The First
Day of this Present Michaelmas Term 1679 (London, 1679), 7.
91. Scroggs, The Lord Chief Justice Scroggs, 7.
92. The Monitor: Or, British Freeholder (London 1756), 231.
93. A Representation of the Present Affairs and Interests of the Most Considerable Parts of
Europe (London, 1677), 26.
94. For an overview of the response to the French Revolution in British art, see David
Bindman, The Shadow of the Guillotine: Britain and the French Revolution (London:
British Museum, 1989).
96. Isaac Cruikshank’s Preparing for Action; or an English Man of War Engaging Two Dutch
Doggers, discussed in greater detail in chapter 1, similarly symbolizes the French mili-
tary penetration of Flanders as two “Dutch Doggers” (prostitutes) infected with the
French disease.
97. See Stephens and George, Catalogue, 7:561–62. George points out the references to
Lake and to the blockade and uprisings in Naples.
98. See, for comparison purposes, the quack’s shop depicted in plate 3 of Hogarth’s
Marriage a-la-Mode (fig.1.3).
99. See Siobhan Talbott, “British Commercial Interests on the French Atlantic Coast, c.
1560–1713,” Historical Research 85 (2012): 394–409; Talbott, “ ‘Beyond the Antiseptic
Realm of Theoretical Economic Models’: New Perspectives on Franco-Scottish
Commerce and the Auld Alliance in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Journal of
Scottish Historical Studies 31, no. 2 (2011): 149–68.
100. Ferdinando Killigrew, The Universal Jester (1754), 54; see also, for example, The Merry
Andrew (1759), 68; The Merry Andrew (1760), 67; Killigrew’s Jests (1764), 54.
101. Robert Gould, “The Murmurers, &c. a Satyr,” in The Works of Mr. Robert Gould, 2
vols. (1709), 2:119–43, quotation on 136.
102. Although both Oliver R. Baker and Ashley Chantler have suggested that the term
“Scotch fiddle” refers to a specific sexual practice, many eighteenth-century diction-
aries define the term as meaning “the itch.” See, for example, Nathan Bailey, The
New Universal Etymological English Dictionary (London, 1776); Francis Grose, A
Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London, 1785); A New Canting Dictionary
(London, 1725); James Caulfield, Blackguardiana: Or a Dictionary of Rogues, Bawds,
Pimps, Whores, Pickpockets, Shoplifters (London, 1793). On the debate over the term’s
meaning, see Ashley Chantler, “The Meaning of ‘Scotch Fiddle’ in Rochester’s
Tunbridge Wells,” Restoration 26 (2002): 81–84; Oliver R. Baker, “Deep in Long
Plackets: Expounding the Riddle of Rochester’s ‘Scotch Fiddle,’ ” ANQ 25 (2012):
190–93; Oliver R. Baker, “Rochester’s ‘Scotch Fiddle’ or the Duke’s ‘Scotched

Fiddle’?,” Notes and Queries 61, no. 3 (September 2014): 394–95.
103. See, for example, Marten, Treatise of all the Degrees, 41, 258, 305, 318; Peter, Observations
(1686), 52; Astruc, Treatise of the Venereal Disease, 59, 145, 160, 194, 196; Profily, Easy
and Exact Method, 101; John Douglas, A Dissertation on the Venereal Disease (London,
1737), 37. It was not until the final decades of the eighteenth century that there was a
decided attempt to classify the itch as nonvenereal; see John Hunter, Treatise on the
Venereal Disease (London, 1786), 2. Interestingly, the pox was initially known in
Denmark as gallica scabies, or “French scabies” (Quétel, History of Syphilis, 15–16); in
France, it was allegedly at one point known as the “Neapolitan itch” (Astruc, Treatise
of the Venereal Disease, 134).
104. See the entry for “itch” in A New Canting Dictionary.
105. William Grimston, Lawyer’s Fortune: or, Love in a hollow tree. A comedy (Rotterdam
[London?], 1728), A2r; see also, for example, the engravings Jaco-Independo-Rebello-
Plaido (1747) and John Bull Bother’d;—Or—the Geese Alarming the Capitol (1792),
both in the British Museum.
106. The Scotch Portmanteau Opened at York (London, 1761), 145; see also, for example,
John Hall-Stevenson, “An Epistle from John Me, Esquire, to His Excellence My Lord
Self,” in The works of John Hall-Stevenson, Esq., 3 vols. (London, 1795), 224–32, 227.
107. A North Briton Extraordinary: Written by a Young Scotsman, Now a Volunteer in the
Corsican Service (Corte [London?], 1769), 15. See also, for example, John Shebbeare,
Lydia, or filial piety. A novel (London, 1755), 74; Lincolnshire: A poem (Bury St.
Edmunds, 1720), 6. It is perhaps worth noting that the first recorded outbreak of
syphilis in the British Isles was, indeed, in Scotland—Aberdeen, followed by
Edinburgh; see Pusey, History and Epidemiology of Syphilis, 6–7.
108. Edward Topham, Letters from Edinburgh, written in the years 1774 and 1775 (London,
1776), 271.
109. Ibid., 271–72; see also, for example, F. Swediaur, Practical Observations on Venereal
Complaints, 3rd ed. (Edinburgh, 1787), 12n*, 234.
110. Historians of medicine believe “sibbens” to have been a nonvenereal virus, like yaws,
caused by the treponema bacterium. On this now eradicated condition, see R. S.
Morton, “The Sibbens of Scotland,” Medical History 11, no. 4 (1967): 374–80.
111. Robert James, A Treatise on the Gout and Rheumatism (London, 1745), 88.
112. Ibid.
113. Many medical texts cited poor hygiene as a cause of disease among Scots; see, for
example, Robinson, New Treatise, 48–49; Swediaur, Practical Observations, 295;
William Buchan, Observations Concerning the Prevention and Cure of the Venereal
Disease (London, 1796), 172–73.
114. Causidicus, A Poetic Lash (London, 1779), 28.
115. Calidonia Rediviva: Or, the Scotch Riddle. Being [a] New Description of [a] Port in
North Britain (London, 1711), 13.
116. Colley Cibber, “A Character of Scotland, taken from a Pane of Glass in an Inn in the
Northern Road,” in Joe Miller’s jests: or, the Wits Vade-mecum, 9th ed. (London,
1747), 189. This edition is the earliest with this verse.
117. John Shebbeare, The occasional critic; or, the decrees of the Scotch tribunal in the
Critical Review rejudged (London, 1757), 136.
118. See also, for example, the satires on aspiring Scottish surgeons produced in the wake
of the 1767 dispute between the Fellows and the Licentiates of the Royal College of
Physicians: The March of the Medical Militants to the Siege of Warwick-Lane (Stephens
and George, Catalogue, 4:411–12) and The Siege of Warwick-Castle; or the Battle be-
tween the Fellows & Licentiates (Stephens and George, Catalogue, 4:410–11); Bonnell
Thornton, The Battle of the Wigs (London, 1768).
119. For a good overview of the satires on Bute, see Herbert Atherton, Political Prints in
the Age of Hogarth: A Study of the Representation of Politics (Oxford: Clarendon,
1974), 208–27.
121. On the use of the boot symbol in caricatures of Bute, see Donald, Age of Caricature,
50–60.
123. Ibid., 4:32.
124. A similar technique is used in a print attacking Bute’s negotiations for the Peace of
Paris, George Townshend’s The Scotch Tent, or True Contrast (1762). Here the “tent”
conceals Bute and the princess in alliance alongside a deluded George III, who
stands beneath a petticoat, indicative of his petticoat government; see Stephens and
George, Catalogue, 4:130–31.
125. See Stephen and George, Catalogue, 4:29–30.
126. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first known use of this phrase to 1704, s.v.
“scratch, v.” 2c.
127. A Chirurgical Address from Dr. R——d R——k, M. L. to L*** (Butt) or a New Lesson
upon the S——h Fiddle (London, 1761); see Stephens and George, Catalogue, 4:32.
On Rock, who remains a relatively obscure figure in medical history, see Finley
Foster, “William Hogarth and the Doctors,” Bulletin of the Medical Library
Association 32, no. 3 (1944), 356–68.
128. This comparison appears in a number of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-
century satires, including Rochester’s famed advertisement for his services as the
fictitious quack Alexander Bendo. Rochester argues that the politician, like the
mountebank, swindles his audience by promising things that “can ne’re be brought
about,” and concludes that “the Politician is, and must be a Mountebank in State
Affairs; and the Mountebank (no doubt if he thrives) is an errant Politician in
Physick”; see John Wilmot, “Alexander Bendo’s Brochure,” in The Works of John
Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
114–18, quotations on 114.
130. See ibid., 4:53–54.
131. See, for example, cartoons such as The St——te Quack (1762, 1763), The Lyon
Entranced (1762), and The Cramers, or, Political Quacks (1762), the last of which is
discussed in greater detail below.
133. See also The Cramers or Political Quacks (1762), in which the peace is similarly identi-
fied as a quack remedy “crammed” down the nation’s throat by a quackish Bute and
his allies. In one version of this popular print, Britannia is being dosed with Scottish
and French medicines, presumably to treat Scottish and French diseases; see Stephens
and George, Catalogue, 4:146–48.
134. See, for example, the following prints, all in the British Museum: A Poor Man Loaded
with Mischief, Or John Bull and his Sister Peg (1762); Paul Sandby, Satire on Lord Bute,
the Duke of Bedford, Earl Talbot, Lord Mansfield, Hogarth, Smollett, and others (1762);
It’s all of a Peace, or French Leuisdors for English Bricks (1762); The Evacuation (dis-
cussed in the text), and Townshend, The Scotch Tent, or True Contrast—though dif-
ferent versions of this last print identify him as “Never-Knows” or “Never a Nose.”
136. For prints connecting Thompson and Sinclair with the itch, see, for example, The
Cats Paw (1746); James Gillray, Meeting of the Monied Interest (1798). See Stephens
and George, Catalogue, 3:626, 7:499–500.
137. S. W. Fores, A German Present, or, the Lover’s Token; George Cruikshank, A Brighton
Hot Bath, or Preparations for the Wedding!!; George Cruickshank, Anticipation (all
1816); see Stephens and George, Catalogue, 9:665, 9:670, 9:672. The Dutch were
another group connected with infection in the 1790s; see, for example, Het Committè
De Santè (1796; discussed earlier in this chapter); The Bond Street Battalion—or the
Hospital Staff from Holland!!! (1799); Isaac Cruikshank, Preparing for Action or an
English Man of War Engaging Two Dutch Doggers (1793). The second and third works
are discussed in chapter 1.
CHAPTER 4. A CHAPTER OF NOSES
1. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, 3 vols., ed.
Melvyn New (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1978), 258. Subsequent references
in the text and the notes are to this edition; pagination is continuous across the three
volumes. John Kerrigan, remarking on this scene, quotes Wolfgang Iser’s claim that
volume 3 of Tristram Shandy was a favorite of Freud’s; see John Kerrigan, “A Complete
History of Comic Noses,” in English Comedy, ed. Michael Cordner, Peter Holland, and
John Kerrigan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 241–66, esp. 241.
2. On Sterne’s text as following the tradition of the nose as signifying wit, see Robert G.
Walker, “A Sign of the Satirist’s Wit: The Nose in Tristram Shandy,” Ball State
University Forum 19 (1978): 52–54. On the association of the nose with the penis, see
Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 154;
Alfred David, “An Iconography of Noses: Direction in the History of a Physical
Stereotype,” in Mapping the Cosmos, ed. Jane Chance and R. O. Wells Jr. (Houston:
Rice University Press, 1985), 76–97, esp. 82–83; Kerrigan, “Complete History of
Comic Noses,” 241–43, 255.
3. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 267.
4. Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English dates the catchphrase “a
long nose is a lady’s liking” from the nineteenth century, but jokes to the same effect
appear in many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works, including several of the

pamphlets discussed in this chapter. See, for example, Ned Ward’s Secret History of
Clubs (London, 1709): “for the Ladies know, That Flat Things always love long
Snouts” (44); Thomas Bridgeabout’s Rinology (Dublin, 1736): Ovid’s large nose “made
many Ladies be enamour’d with him” (5); or the ballad “A Ligg of Good Noses,” in
Wit and Mirth; Or, Pills to Purge Melancholy: Being a Choice Collection of the best
Merry Ballads, and above a Hundred of the best Songs, old and New, 5 vols. (London,
1714), 5:44–48: “The longest with Ladies are still in request” (5:45).
5. On the links between “being black, being Jewish, being diseased, and being ‘ugly’ ” in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century European culture, see Sander Gilman, The Jew’s
Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), esp. 96–102, 169–93; on the association of venereal
disease with Jews or Jewishness in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, see Foa, “The
New and the Old,” in Muir and Ruggiero, eds., Sex and Gender in Historical
Perspective, 35–40.
6. David, “Iconography of Noses,” 76–97. Stevick, by contrast, argues that the promi-
nent nose indicates a stronger focus on olfactory perception; Philip Stevick, “The
Augustan Nose,” University of Toronto Quarterly 34 (1965): 110–17.
7. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, in The Fair Jilt, and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (London:
Pickering and Chatto, 1995), 63.
8. See, for example, Joshua Reynolds’s portraits Augustus Keppel as Apollo Belvedere
(1725), Miss Elizabeth Ingram (1757), Aeneas Mackay (1760), Jane Countess of Harrington
(1778), Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse (1783), and Admiral Hood (1783). The Duchess
of Devonshire’s elegant neoclassical nose is a key feature in Reynolds’s 1775 and 1781
portraits, as well as in Gainsborough’s 1775 and 1787 portraits and Horace Hone’s 1812
portrait. It is worth noting that Reynolds’s portrait of Sterne also focuses on the au-
thor’s dramatically elongated nose, suggesting (in combination with the sitter’s sly
smile) that Sterne was particularly well equipped to enjoy innuendo about men with
long noses.
9. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub. Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind. To
which is added, an Account of a Battel Between the Antient and Modern Books (London,
1704), 203.
10. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “nose, v. 1” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Bridgeabout’s Rinology—a text discussed at greater length later in this chapter—simi-
larly jokes that “Presbyterian Parsons generally spoke thro’ their Noses” (10).
11. See Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 171–72. In the eighteenth century there was still a degree
of ambiguity about whether Jews were racially “nonwhite.”
12. See, for example, John Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 3 vols., trans. Henry
Hunter (London, 1789), 2:161–62, 3:365; Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon,
The Natural History of Animals, Vegetables, and Minerals; with The Theory of the Earth
in General, 6 vols., trans. W. Kendrick and J. Murdoch (London, 1775), 1:228–33;
Oliver Goldsmith, An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, 8 vols. (London,
1774), 2:226–28. While I have cited these works in later eighteenth-century English
translations, the first volume of Buffon’s natural history appeared in 1749, and
Goldsmith, publishing similar material in 1774, was familiar with its contents. For
subsequent reprintings or reworkings, see, for example, Lavater’s Looking-Glass

(London, 1800), 53; Ebenezer Sibly, Magazine of Natural History, 14 vols. (London,
1794–1808), esp. vols. 1–7.
13. Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 2:161–62.
14. Goldsmith similarly identifies the African’s flat nose and prominent lips as structural
“deformities” and characterizes the race as “stupid, indolent, and mischievous”
(History of the Earth, 2:227–28).
15. Although the generic name “monkey” was introduced in the sixteenth century, seven-
teenth- and eighteenth-century writers often used both “ape” and “monkey” to refer
to primates generally.
16. Monkeys are associated with Africa, and with blackness, in various eighteenth-
century literary and visual works. Well-known examples include Behn’s Oroonoko, in
which the black hero protests that he and other African slaves are “bought and sold
like apes or monkeys” (105), and plate 2 of Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress; see David
Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth-Century English Art
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 128–29. On the tradition of view-
ing primates as mimics of human behavior, see H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1976), 165–69.
17. Several popular eighteenth-century British prints, for example, characterized Jews as
apes. In A Harlot’s Progress, Hogarth identifies the Jewish merchant as a social climber
by means of a pet monkey. In The Jerusalem Infirmary (c. 1750), an anti-Semitic satire
depicting a meeting at the Jewish hospital for the sick poor, the institution’s “wisest
governor” is portrayed as an ape, and his associates are depicted as promoting, and
profiting from, the spread of venereal disease: a peddler equipped with “gloves against
mercurial pills” offers a condom to the hospital matron, and a “famous operator”
enthusiastically declares, in the ostensibly Sephardic language of Spanish, “Gonorrhea
and the French disease for all gentlemen.” For commentary on this print, see Stephens
and George, Catalogue, 3:791–93.
18. Astruc, A Treatise of the Venereal Disease, 2:24.
19. Polly Peachum’s Jests (London, 1728), 5–6; for other works that include this joke, see, for
example, Joe Miller’s Jests (London, 1739, 1740, 1742, 1743, 1755); The Merry Medley (1750);
The Nut Cracker (1751); A Collection of Jests, Epigrams, &c. (1753); The Universal Jester
(1754); Jack Smart’s Merry Jester (1755); Killigrew’s Jests (1759). On the political implications
of such lampoons, see Marcus Nevitt, “The Insults of Defeat: Royalist Responses to Sir
William Davenant’s Gondibert (1651),” Seventeenth Century 24, no. 2 (October 2009):
287–304. Nevitt argues that Davenant’s disfigured nose became an important symbol for
royalists trying to deal with the regicide and the Commonwealth settlement.
20. On Dr. L——n’s identity, see G. S. Rousseau, “Matt Bramble and the Sulphur
Controversy in the XVIIIth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967): 577–89
(the section on Linden is at 577–81). Readers may wish to compare the noseless
German doctor in Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Maria Brown, 2 vols.
(London, 1766), 2:134–35.
21. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1990), 20–21.
22. Ibid., 21.

23. Mary Latter, “To Capt. —— of Ld. A——’s Dragoons; On his falling from his
Horse, and breaking his Nose,” in Latter, The Miscellaneous Works, in Prose and Verse
(London, 1759), 110–11.
24. Latter, Miscellaneous Works, 111.
25. The critical reception of Amelia—and particularly, critics’ ridicule of the heroine’s
“noselessness”—is rehearsed in Peter Sabor, “Amelia,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Henry Fielding, ed. Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
94–108; Martin Battestin, general introduction to Henry Fielding, Amelia (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1983), xv–lxi, esp. li–liii; Frederick T. Blanchard, Fielding the Novelist: A
Study in Historical Criticism (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), 79–103. For a very
different reading of Amelia’s noselessness, see George E. Haggerty, “Amelia’s Nose; Or,
Sensibility and Its Symptoms,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 32 no. 2
(1995): 139–56, esp. 151–53.
26. Review of Amelia, London Magazine (1751), quoted in Sabor, “Amelia,” 96.
27. Fielding, Amelia, 27–28.
28. Sabor, “Amelia,” 96; see also Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The
Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen, 1986),
179.
29. Fielding, Amelia, 531–32.
30. Ibid., 299.
31. Ibid., 67.
32. Drawcansir Alexander [Tobias Smollett], A Faithful Narrative of the Base and Inhuman
Arts That were lately practised upon the Brain of Habbakkuk Hilding (London, 1752),
18.
33. Bonnell Thornton, Have At You All: or, the Drury-Lane Journal (London, 1752),
104–5.
34. Fielding, Amelia, 455. On Fielding’s own large nose, see Battestin, introduction to
Amelia, xxn5.
35. Thornton, Have At You All, 105.
36. The Latin references are to the Aeneid, bk. 3, ll. 678–80, and Ars Poetica, ll. 36–37. See
Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1935), 416–17; Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica,
trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929), 452–53.
37. Thornton, Have at You All, 105. “Naso” was also Ovid’s surname, hence the jokes
about Ovid’s nose in texts such as Alexander Pope’s “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”; see
Pope, “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,” Pope, Selected Poetry, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008), 93–105, esp. 96 (l. 118).
38. See Haslam, From Hogarth to Rowlandson, 117–18.
39. On the ambiguity of Hogarth’s depiction of the harlot, see Paulson, Hogarth: The
“Modern Moral Subject,” 256–60. On the ambiguity or complexity of Hogarth’s works
in comparison with neoclassical ideals, see Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art,
and Times, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 1:473–75; Sean Shesgreen,
Hogarth and the Times-of-the-Day Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,
1983), esp. 107–54; Norman Bryson, Word and Image, 147–50. On the ambiguity of
Hogarth’s depictions of venereal disease, see Lowe, “The Meaning of Venereal
Disease,” in Merians, ed., The Secret Malady, 168–82.
40. On Moll’s child as suffering from congenital syphilis, see Lowe, “The Meaning of
Venereal Disease,” 175; Sean Shesgreen, annotation to pl. 5 of A Harlot’s Progress, in
Engravings by Hogarth: 101 Prints, ed. Sean Shesgreen (New York: Dover, 1973),
pl. 22.
41. Rose A. Zimbardo similarly argues that plate 2 of Hogarth’s engraving shows Moll
becoming “a denizen of the marginal world of the ‘other’ ”: Zimbardo, “Satiric
Representation,” in Merians, ed., The Secret Malady, 191. For discussions connecting
Moll with the Jewish “Other,” see David Solkin, “The Excessive Jew in A Harlot’s
Progress,” in Hogarth: Representing Nature’s Machines, ed. David Bindman, Frédérique
Ogée, and Peter Wagner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 219–35;
Gilman, The Jew’s Body, 121–23.
42. On the fashion for black servants in eighteenth-century aristocratic households, see
Philip D. Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (London:
MacMillan, 1965), 35.
43. On beauty spots as signs of venereal disease in Hogarth, see N. F. Lowe, “Hogarth,
Beauty Spots, and Sexually Transmitted Diseases,” British Journal for Eighteenth-
Century Studies 15 (1992): 71–79.
44. See Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks, 106–8.
45. Zimbardo interprets the matzo as “a sign of Moll’s damnation, which is figured at the
beginning of her progress by her keeper’s Jewishness and now, at the end, stamps her
for eternity as the ‘alien other’ ” (“Satiric Representation,” in Merians, ed., The Secret
Malady, 193). On the use of matzos as flycatchers, see Shesgreen’s commentary on pl.
22 in Shesgreen, Engravings by Hogarth, n.p.
46. See, for example, Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks, 121; Lowe, “The Meaning of Venereal
Disease,” in Merians, ed., The Secret Malady, 179, 183.
47. Lowe, “Hogarth, Beauty Spots, and Sexually Transmitted Diseases,” 78. A black
woman and a noseless woman are also paired in Isaac Cruikshank’s A Meeting of
Creditors (fig. 2.5).
48. Lowe has suggested that the “weak little legs and domed head” of the young boy in
Evening are also indicative of congenital syphilis: Lowe, “The Meaning of Venereal
Disease,” in Merians, ed., The Secret Malady, 175.
49. For medical descriptions of congenital syphilis patients with disfigured or stuffed-up
noses, see, for example, Rosenstein, Diseases of Children, 326–27; Robinson, New
Treatise, 391; Marten, A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease,
5th ed. (London, 1707), 34. Barbara J. Dunlap notes, “Thomas Denman, a popular
physician and accoucheur, reported important observations about snuffles in young
infants to the London Medical Journal in 1790. Reporting on eight infants born to
‘people of rank and fortune’ between April and October, he noted a condition that
appeared after about two weeks which first seemed to be merely a cold but was char-
acterized by heavy discharges from the nose, often bloody. The infants had trouble
swallowing and suckling (as they had to breathe through their mouths) and could no
longer take the breasts of their wet nurses”: Dunlap, “The Problem of Syphilitic
Children in Eighteenth-Century France and England,” in Merians, ed., The Secret
Malady, 114–27, quoted material on 117–18.
50. John Spinke, London’s Medicinal-Informer (London, 1710), 66.
51. Spinke uses the joke in an attack on John Marten, a London surgeon and the author
of several semipornographic treatises on venereal disease; see Peter Wagner, “The
Discourse on Sex—or Sex as Discourse: Eighteenth-Century Medical and Paramedical
Erotica,” in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy
Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 46–68, esp. 47–48; Porter,
“ ‘Laying Aside Any Private Advantage,’ ” in Merians, ed., The Secret Malady, 51–67.
52. See, for example, the London Magazine 43 (1774), 29–30; “The Country Christening,”
in The Merry Medley for Gay Gallants and Good Companions (Dublin, 1748), 35; John
Gay, Fables (London, 1727), 10; Ned Ward, The Rambling Fuddle-Caps: Or, a Tavern
Struggle for a Kiss (London, 1706), 25; Mary Pix, The Different Widows: Or, Intrigue
All-A-Mode, A Comedy (London, 1703), 11.
53. I am quoting a popular eighteenth-century English translation. See Voltaire, Candide:
Or, All for the Best (London, 1759), 11, 13.
54. See Quétel, The History of Syphilis, 5.
55. See Dunlap, “The Problem of Syphilitic Children,” in Merians, ed., The Secret
Malady, 114–27.
56. Claude Quillet, Callipaedia; Or the Art of Getting Beautiful Children (London, 1733),
quoted in Dunlap, “The Problem of Syphilitic Children,” 116–17. Queen Charlotte is
pictured clutching a copy of this book in James Gillray’s popular caricature The
Lover’s Dream (1795).
57. References in this chapter are to the 1709 London edition of The Secret History of
Clubs.
58. Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, 156.
59. Ward, Secret History of Clubs, 37.
60. Ibid., 36.
61. Ibid., 36–37.
62. Ibid., 39.
63. Ibid., 38.
64. Ibid., 41.
65. Ibid.
66. Samuel Foote’s 1752 comedy Taste exploits this joke at great length, satirizing the
pretentious tastes of a would-be connoisseur of antiquities who is duped into buying
a “noseless” statue of Venus.
67. Ward, Secret History of Clubs, 42.
68. Ibid., 45.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid., 46.
71. The names of the duchess and actor are never specified. Possibilities include Barbara
Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, and either Charles Hart or Cardell Goodman.
72. Bridgeabout, Rinology, 3rd ed. (Dublin, 1736).
73. Ibid.,18.
74. Ibid., 19.
75. Ibid., 13.
76. Ibid., 14.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid., A2r.
79. Ibid., 4.
80. Ibid.
81. Ibid.
82. See Floyer, The Ancient ΨΥΧΡΟΛΟΥΣΙΑ Revived, 283:
One may look brisk, with Cherry-Cheek,
And yet below-Stairs very weak.
That Woman’s in a doubtful Case
That builds her hopes upon a Face;
As one was cheated, when she chose
A Husband by the length of ’s Nose.
83. Bridgeabout, Rinology, 11.
84. Ibid., 11–12.
85. Ibid., 13.
86. Ibid., 9.
87. Ibid., 14.
88. Ibid., 15.
89. Ibid., 24.
90. Ibid., 24–25.
91. James Sambrook, “George Alexander Stevens,” in The Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography Online.
92. James Solas Dodd, A Satyrical Lecture on Hearts: To which is added, a Critical
Dissertation on Noses. (London, 1767), 47.
93. Ibid.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid., 52, 49, 50.
96. Ibid., 48.
97. Ibid., 47.
98. Ibid., 52.
99. Ibid., 53.
100. See A Collection of English Ballads, from the Beginning of the Present Century (London,
1790), 91.
102. Peter Sabor notes that “Sterne’s endless play on noses and their sexual connotations
in Tristram Shandy surely looks back to a once celebrated debate” on Amelia (Sabor,
“Amelia,” 98).
103. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 46–47.
104. Ibid., 196; see also, for example, 272.
105. Clement Hawes discusses the relationship between nose size and ethnic origin in his
compelling account of the influence of Tristram Shandy on Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children: both novels, as Hawes points out, are stories of origin, and both
feature a large-nosed protagonist; see Hawes, The British Eighteenth Century and
Global Critique (London: Palgrave, 2005), 67–92.
106. On Sterne’s borrowings from medical texts, see Judith Hawley, “The Anatomy of
Tristram Shandy,” in Literature and Medicine during the Eighteenth Century, ed. Marie
Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 84–100.
107. See Louis A. Landa, “The Shandean Homunculus: The Background of Sterne’s
‘Little Gentleman,’ ” in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in
Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963),
49–68.
108. Tristram blames his father for his deficiencies, despite the novel’s periodic sugges-
tions that Walter may not be Tristram’s biological father (see 8, 372–73, 526 for hints
of Tristram’s potential illegitimacy). For further discussion of this issue, see John A.
Hay, “Rhetoric and Historiography: Tristram Shandy’s First Nine Kalendar Months,”
in Studies in the Eighteenth Century II, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1973), 73–91.
110. Rosenstein, Diseases of Children, 324; Peter, New Observations (1695), 25.
112. As Arthur H. Cash notes, the contract allows Elizabeth “the privilege of bearing her
children in London, where she sought the care of Dr. Richard Manningham, the
physician who founded the first lying-in ward in England.” Walter, by contrast,
voices the theories of the surgeon Dr. John Burton in arguing for some dangerous,
and unwarranted, birth methods for his son; see Arthur H. Cash, “The Birth of
Tristram Shandy: Sterne and Dr Burton,” in Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain,
ed. Paul-Gabriel Boucé (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 198–224,
quoted material on 202.
114. Ibid., 253.
115. Ibid., 449.
116. Ibid., 495–96.
117. Among the many eighteenth-century medical treatises linking phimosis with vene-
real disease, see, for example, John Armstrong, A Synopsis of the History and Cure of
Venereal Disease (London, 1737), 256, 395; Astruc, A Treatise of the Venereal Disease,
1:423–28; William Cockburn, The Symptoms, Nature, Cause and Cure of a Gonorrhoea
(London, 1713), 84–87; Pellerin, Treatise on Venereal Maladies, 248–56.
118. On the use of circumcision as a prophylactic measure, see Robert Darby, “ ‘An
Oblique and Slovenly Initiation’: The Circumcision Episode in Tristram Shandy,”
Eighteenth-Century Life 27 (2003): 72–84, esp. 79–81.
120. Ibid., 449–50.
121. Ibid., 459–60.
122. Darby, “ ‘An Oblique and Slovenly Initiation’ ”; see also Hawes, British Eighteenth
Century, 86–87. Darby’s article fascinatingly reinterprets Tristram’s accident in light
of popular fears about Jewish circumcision. I am emphasizing the “Jewish” aspect of
circumcision here because Walter’s scholarly investigations are directed towards
Jewish, and not Muslim, ritual.
123. On the range of symptoms and illnesses connected with venereal infections, see the
introduction.
124. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 624; see also New, notes to Tristram Shandy, 480–81.
125. Ibid., 249.
126. Rumors circulated that Sterne’s death from consumption was caused by a long-
standing venereal infection; see Kate Williams, “Reading Tristram Shandy in the
Brothel: The ‘Episodic Contagion’ and Nocturnal Revels,” Shandean 16 (2005): 114–
18. Although subsequent biographers have disputed this diagnosis, Sterne clearly
believed that he had been infected, confessing as much to his wife and receiving
mercury treatment in 1767. For a refutation of the claims that Sterne had venereal
disease, see Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (London: Methuen,
1986), 289–91. For the case in favor of infection, see, for example, Ian Campbell
Ross, Laurence Sterne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 118, 375–77.
127. See Lawlor, “ ‘Halfe Dead,’ ” 170–72; Cam, Short Account, 10; Cam, Practical Treatise,
150; Robinson, New Method of Treating Consumptions, 96–100. Since France was
sometimes recommended to sufferers of advanced venereal disease on the grounds of
its drier climate, Tristram’s place of refuge may also be somewhat suggestive; see
Brown, Pox, 42.
129. Ibid., 253–54.
130. Ibid., 259.
131. Ibid.
132. François Rabelais, The Works of Francis Rabelais, 5 vols., trans. Thomas Urquhart and
Peter Motteux, with notes by John Ozell (London, 1750), 4:118.
133. Ibid., 4:121, 119, 122.
134. Ibid., 4:118.
135. Ibid.
136. See, for example, Exodus 20:5 and 34:7, Numbers 14:18, and Deuteronomy 5:9.
138. Ibid., 276. As editors of the novel have observed, Tristram’s awareness of the misat-
tribution indicates that Sterne must have read Tagliacozzi; see New, notes 276.16–23,
in Tristram Shandy 3:274–75.
139. James Aiken Work, ed., The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (New York:
Odyssey, 1940), 301n1, quoted in New, notes to Tristram Shandy, 3:174.
141. Ibid., 276.
142. Ibid., 291.
143. Ibid., 314. The episode is reminiscent of the debate in Gulliver’s Travels between
Big-Endians and Little-Endians; see Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 68–69.
144. Curiously, and in spite of his interest in the nose as an inherited feature, Walter
claims to be persuaded by Paré’s theory that “the flatness and shortness of puisne
noses” was due to the “firmness and elastic repulsion” of the breast of the wet nurse
(277).
146. Bridgeabout, Rinology, A2r, 4.
147. There is also, of course, an echo of the episode in Gulliver’s Travels in which Swift’s hero
surveys multiple generations of “old illustrious families” and observes “whence one
family derives a long Chin,” as well as “who first brought the Pox into a noble House,
which hath lineally descended in scrophulous Tumours to their Posterity” (198).
148. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 353–54.
149. There is long-standing critical debate over whether Uncle Toby is impotent. For
examples on either side of the debate, see Fred Pinnegar, “The Groin Wounds of
Tristram and Uncle Toby,” Shandean 7 (1995): 87–100; R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in
Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London:
Macmillan, 1974), 211.
151. Pinnegar, “Groin Wounds,” 91.
153. Ibid., 241–42.
154. Floyer, The Ancient ΨΥΧΡΟΛΟΥΣΙΑ Revived, 280–81; Hill, Lucina sine Concubitu,
28–29.
156. Ibid., 752; see also, for example, Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 1:194. For
an example of “gristle” for “nose,” see, for example, Ward, Secret History of Clubs, 42.
157. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 750, 747.
158. Ibid., 130–31.
159. Ibid., 747.
160. Ibid., 748.
Index
Aeneid (Virgil), 88–89, 171, 251 Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, Princess of

“Against Marriage” (Rochester), 14–15, Wales, 146–49, 151
57, 223 Austen, Jane, Sense and Sensibility, 101,
Amelia (Fielding), 32–33, 62, 167–71, 194, 237
228, 232, 251, 254 Authentic Memoirs of the Life, Intrigues
America, as source of venereal disease, and Adventures of the Celebrated Sally
64, 115–22, 125, 163 Salisbury (Walker), 95–98, 101, 109,
Ames, Richard, The Female Fire-Ships, 236
68–72, 108, 233–34
Anne Hyde, Duchess of York, 43–44 “Bag-Wig and the Tobacco-Pipe”
Anselment, Raymond, 8, 219–20, 232, (Smart), 125–26, 243
234, 240, 242, 243 bathing, 158, 222, 226, 248
Antidote by Carr for C[a]l[e]d[onia]n Battle of the Cataplasm (Bunbury),
Impurities, 152–53 210–12
apes, venereal disease and, 156, 163–64, Bawd on her Last Legs (Rowlandson), 62
171, 174–75, 180, 184–85, 250 “Beautiful Nymph Going to Bed”
apothecaries, 34, 38–39, 78–80, 96, 229 (Swift), 5, 62, 65–67, 72, 92, 113, 231–33
Arrizabagala, Jon, 12, 217, 222 beauty spots, 77, 175–77, 235, 252
Arthy, Elliot, 29, 227 Becket, J., 4, 219
Arouet, François-Marie. See Voltaire Beggar’s Opera (Gay), 111, 238
Ashley Cooper, Anthony. See Behn, Aphra: The City Heiress, 18, 224;
Shaftesbury, seventh Earl of Oroonoko, 162, 249–50
Astruc, Jean, 3, 117–19, 142, 163–64, 218– Belloste, Augustin. See Monsieur Belloste’s
19, 222, 228, 240–41, 246, 250, 255 Hospital Surgeon
259
260 index
biblical allusion, 33, 44–45, 57, 65, 112, Carlo Kan (Cruikshank), 78–79
174–75, 202, 228–29, 231, 238 Carnegie, Robert. See Southesk, Earl of
Bickerstaff ’s Unburied Dead, 17, 224 Carter, Philip, 61, 223–24, 230–31
blackness, venereal disease and, 6, 160, Carter, Sophie, 101, 232–33, 237–39
162–63, 167, 171–72, 174–77, 180–81, Catley, Ann, Life and Memoirs of the Late
185, 192, 208–10, 213, 249–50, 252 Miss Ann Catley, 94, 236
Blair, William, 28–29, 227 Catholics, as associated with venereal
Blood & Co. Setting Fire to the Tower disease, 7, 42–43, 74–76, 81, 85–92,
(Gillray), 80, 235 136, 140–42, 229, 242
Boitard, Louis Philippe, The Sailor’s Cavendish, Georgiana Spencer. See
Revenge, 66, 233 Devonshire, Duchess of
Bond Street Battalion—or the Hospital “Character of Scotland, taken from a
Staff from Holland!!!, 47 Pane of Glass in an Inn in the
Boswell, James, 7 Northern Road” (Cibber), 18, 143–44,
breastfeeding, 203, 252–53, 257 246
Breval, John Durant, The Progress of a Charles II, 28, 42, 47–48, 74–76, 85, 126,
Rake: or, the Templar’s Exit, 51–61, 229
62–64, 66, 71, 73, 111, 230–32 Charteris, Francis, 102, 105
Bridgeabout, Timothy, Rinology, 161, Cibber, Colley, “A Character of
185–92, 194, 203–5, 212, 249, 253–54, Scotland, taken from a Pane of Glass
257 in an Inn in the Northern Road,” 18,
Brighton Hot Bath (Cruikshank), 158 143–44, 246
Briton (Smollett), 151–52 circumcision, 90, 197–99, 207, 209,
Brown, Kevin, 219–20, 224, 229, 232, 255–56
240, 256 City Heiress (Behn), 18, 224
Buckingham and Normanby, Duke of, City Politiques (Crowne), 18–19, 54, 60,
47–48, 230 225
Buffon, Comte de, 162–63, 180, 203, clap. See gonorrhea
249–50 Clarissa (Richardson), 162
Bunbury, Henry, The Battle of the Cleland, John, 96; Fanny Hill, 94, 236,
Cataplasm, 210–12 238
Burke, Edmund, 81–82, 89–90 “Cleora” (Granville), 32–33, 227–28
Bute, third Earl of, 145–57, 207, 247–48 Cock, Emily, 9, 220, 224, 238
Butler, Samuel: “Dildoides,” 23, 126–28, Colman, George, The Connoisseur, 125,
224, 226, 243, 245; Hudibras, 81–82, 243
125; “Satyr,” 17, 124 colonialism, as cause of venereal disease,
115–16, 119–22, 126, 154, 242
Callipaedia, or the Art of Getting Pretty Columbus, Christopher, 117, 119–20, 180
Children (La Callipedie ou l’art d’avoir condoms, 23–25, 93, 121, 226, 250
de Beaux Enfans), 92, 180, 253 Conference About Whoring, 72–74, 106,
Cam, Joseph, 3, 218, 256 234
campaigning, as prostitution, 64–65, congenital syphilis. See venereal disease:
76–82, 85 hereditary
Candide (Voltaire), 180, 240–41, 253 Conjugal Lewdness (Defoe), 72, 228, 234
index 261
Connoisseur (Colman), 125, 243 Dodd, James Solas, A Critical

consumption (phthisis), 3, 133–34, Dissertation on Noses, 161, 190–93, 203,
199–200, 218, 256 211–12, 254
Cook, Captain James, 116, 241 Donald, Diana, 12, 26, 222, 227, 230,
cooks, 125, 128, 243 247
Country Wife (Wycherley), 18–21, 23, 54, Donne, John, “Satire I,” 124
56, 60, 94, 222, 224–26 Douglas, Jane (Mother Douglas), 93–94,
Cowley, Abraham, “To Dr. 236
Scarborough,” 120, 241 Douglas, William. See Queensberry,
Critical Dissertation on Noses (Dodd), fourth Duke of
161, 190–93, 203, 211–12, 254 Dryden, John, 132, 244; The Medal,
The Critical Review, 144–45 44–45, 229
Crowne, John, City Politiques, 18–19, 54, Dunn, Edward, 116, 240–41
60, 225
Cruikshank, George, A Brighton Hot Election (Hogarth), 172–73
Bath, 158 eugenics, 76, 160, 180, 213
Cruikshank, Isaac: Carlo Kan, 78–79; A The Evacuations, or an Emetic for Old
Meeting of Creditors, 83; Preparing for England, by a Scot, 154–55
Action; or an English Man of War
Engaging Two Dutch Doggers, 45–46 Faithful Narrative of the Base and
Inhuman Arts that were Lately practised
Darby, Robert, 199, 255–56 upon the Brain of Habbakkuk Hilding
Dark Lanthern Business, Or Mrs Hob and (Smollett), 167, 169–70, 251
Mrs Nob on a Night Canvass with a Fanny Hill (Cleland), 94, 236, 238
Bosom Friend (Rowlandson), 77–78 fashion, 16–21, 47–51, 53, 71, 115, 123–26,
Davenant, William, 164–66, 192, 212, 136, 141, 177, 218, 245
250 Female Fire-Ships (Ames), 68–72, 108,
Defoe, Daniel: Conjugal Lewdness, 72, 233–34
228, 234; The Reformation of Manners, Fielding, Henry: Amelia, 32–33, 62,
40, 42, 229 167–71, 194, 228, 232, 251, 254; Joseph
Devonshire, Duchess of, 76–82, 85–86, Andrews, 22, 170, 226
234–35 Filmer, Robert, Patriarcha, 16
Devonshire Method to Restore a Lost financial metaphors for venereal
Member, 78–80 disease, 33–36, 69–74, 80–81, 88, 95,
Dido Forsaken (Gillray), 88–90, 92, 221 151, 179–80, 187–88, 191–92, 197,
Dighton, Robert, Old Q-uiz, the Old 207–8
Goat of Piccadilly, 48–49 fire metaphors, 11, 68–69, 89–90, 221
“Dildoides” (Butler), 23, 126–28, 224, fire-ships, prostitutes as, 68–72, 109
226, 243, 245 Fitzherbert, Maria, 47, 81, 85–92, 221
dildos, 23, 126–28, 226, 243 Floyer, John, 34, 187, 207, 222, 228, 254,
“Disabled Debauchee” (Rochester), 22, 257
24–26, 28, 53, 59–60, 183, 222, Fores, S. W., A German Present, 157–58,
226–27 248
Dispensary (Garth), 22, 226 Four Times of Day (Hogarth), 175–78
262 index
Fox, Charles James, 76–82, 85–86, gonorrhea, 2, 5, 9, 20, 23, 34, 43, 57, 59,
88–92, 154–55, 234–35 68–69, 71–72, 75, 90–91, 123–24, 127–
Fox and Burke as Hudibras and Ralpho, 29, 134, 141, 217, 222–23, 226–27, 229–
81–82 30, 239–40. See also venereal disease
Fracastoro, Girolamo, Syphilis, 120, Gonson, John, 104
241–42 Gordon, Thomas, 72, 234
French, Roger, 12, 217, 222 Gould, Robert, 66, 125, 141, 227, 234,
French Generals Retiring on Account of 243, 245; Love Given O’re, 66, 233; The
their Health (Gillray), 137–39, 157 Play-House, 73–74, 113, 234
Frenchness, associated with venereal gout, 3, 19–20, 36, 40, 114, 143, 239
disease, 9, 17, 74–76, 85, 114–16, grand tour, 17, 224
122–42, 144, 146, 150, 154–57, 188–89 Granville, George, “Cleora,” 32–33,
French Revolution, 9, 29, 45–46, 50, 227–28
137–40, 157, 245 Guilhamet, Leon, 9, 42, 220, 225, 229
Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 42, 189, 204,
Gardenstone, Francis Garden, Lord, 229, 256–57
120–21, 242 Gwynn, Nell, 75–76
Garth, Samuel, The Dispensary, 22, 226
Gay, John, The Beggar’s Opera, 111, 238 Haiti. See Hispaniola
Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Hallett, Mark, 12, 222, 237
Maria Brown, 96–97, 237, 250 Hamilton, Robert, 28, 30–31, 227
Genuine Memoirs of the Late Celebrated Harlot’s Progress (Hogarth), 3, 5, 53, 58,
Jane D****s, 93–94, 236 101–8, 110, 129, 150, 173–75, 177, 184,
George II, 26 197, 209, 212, 236, 238, 244, 250–52
George III, 90–91, 146–47, 151, 247 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 115, 217, 219, 221,
George IV, 42, 47, 81, 83–92 240, 242–43
German Present (Fores), 157–58, 248 Harvey, Gideon, 3, 218–19
Germans, associated with venereal Have At You All: or, the Drury-Lane
disease, 96–97, 157–58, 164–65, 221, Journal (Thornton), 170–71, 251
248 Hawkesworth, John, 119–20, 241
Gillray, James, 9; Blood & Co. Setting Haynes, Joe, 124–25, 243
Fire to the Tower, 80, 235; Dido Healy, Margaret, 5, 10, 219, 221, 240
Forsaken, 88–90, 92, 221; French Henderson, John, 12, 217, 222
Generals Retiring on Account of their Henderson, Tony, 64, 113, 232, 237–39
Health, 137–39, 157; Het Committè de Hentschell, Rose, 123, 240, 242
Santè, 137–38; Lordly Elevation, 49–51; Het Committè de Santè (Gillray), 137–38
The Lover’s Dream, 90–92; Sale of Hill, John, 167; Lucina sine Concubitu,
English-Beauties, in the East-Indies, 34–36, 228, 257
121–22; A Voluptuary Under the Hispaniola, as origin of venereal disease,
Horrors of Digestion, 83–84; other 117–19
works, 221, 248 Hitchcock, Tim, 61, 223, 227, 231
Gilman, Sander, 160, 219, 232, 235, 239, Hogarth, William: An Election, 172–73;
249, 252 Four Times of Day, 175–78; A Harlot’s
Goldsmith, Oliver, 162, 249–50 Progress, 3, 5, 53, 58, 101–8, 110, 129,
index 263
150, 173–75, 177, 184, 197, 209, 212, Laqueur, Thomas, 33, 228
236, 238, 244, 250–52; Industry and La Revellière-Lépeaux, Louis-Marie de,
Idleness, 172; Morning, 175–76; The 137–40, 157
March to Finchley, 25–28, 227; Latter, Mary, “To Capt. —— of Ld.
Marriage A-la-Mode, 36–41, 80; Noon, A——’s Dragoons,” 166–67, 172, 251
177–78; A Rake’s Progress, 51, 230 Laurie, Robert, and James Whittle
Horace, 120, 171, 242, 251 (Laurie and Whittle), Tristram
Hudibras (Butler), 81–82, 125 Shandy’s Father Crossing the Street with
Humorists (Shadwell), 130–35 his Ace-of-Clubs Nose, 211–12
Humphry Clinker (Smollett), 96, 164–65, Lavater, Johann, 162–63, 180, 192, 203,
172, 250 249–50
Leake’s pills, 47, 79–84, 121–22, 139–40
immigrants, as source of venereal Leclerc, Georges-Louis. See Buffon,
disease, 6, 9, 12, 114–15, 128–36, 141, Comte de
144–45, 147–53, 158, 214 Lecture on Heads (Stevens), 191, 254
impotence, 18, 19, 22–28, 86–88, 186, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, Prince, 157–58,
196, 198–201, 222, 257 221
Industry and Idleness (Hogarth), 172 Life and Adventures of Joe Thompson
itch, as venereal disease, 3, 9, 128, 133–34, (Kimber), 14, 222
140–53, 156–57, 207, 245–46, 248 Life and Memoirs of the Late Miss Ann
Catley, 94, 236
jackboots, 146–47, 152, 207 Linden, Diederich Wessel, 96–97, 164–
Jack-Pudden, 137, 151–52 65, 250
James, Robert, 143, 246 Lock Hospital, 71, 78, 112, 232, 239
James II, 42–44, 74, 140, 221, 229 London, April, 9, 65, 220, 222, 232–33, 236
Jews, associated with venereal disease, London (Johnson), 128, 130, 134, 244
92, 160, 162–63, 167, 173–75, 180, 197– The London Prodigal, 114
99, 208–10, 213, 249–50, 252, 256 London’s Medicinal-Informer, 179, 253
Johnson, Samuel, London, 128, 130, 134, Lordly Elevation (Gillray), 49–51
244 Love Given O’re (Gould), 66, 233
Jonson, Ben, “On English Monsieur,” Love a la Mode: or, the Amours of Florella
124, 137, 224, 243 and Phillis, 98–99, 108–9, 237
Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 22, 170, 226 Lover’s Dream (Gillray), 90–92
love-as-war metaphor, 22–28, 37–38, 45–
Kéroualle, Louise de. See Portsmouth, 47, 55, 68, 127, 135, 183, 193–94, 206–8,
Duchess of 238, 244–45
King’s Evil, 86–88 Lowe, N. H., 9, 173, 220, 229, 252
Kings Place (Rowlandson), 80 Lucina sine Concubitu (Hill), 34–36, 228,
Kirkcudbright, Baron, 49–51 257
Kimber, Edward, The Life and
Adventures of Joe Thompson, 14, 222 The Machine, or Love’s Preservative, 23–25,
226, 231
Landa, Louis, 196, 255 Madan, Martin, Thelyphthora, or a
Langley, Gilbert, 14, 223 Treatise on Female Ruin, 112–13, 238–39
264 index
Mandeville, Bernard, A Modest Defence “No-Nose Club” (The Secret History of

of Publick Stews, 30–31, 227, 234, 242 Clubs, Ward), 180–85, 191, 193, 202,
March to Finchley (Hogarth), 25–28, 227 249, 257
Marriage A-la-Mode (Hogarth), 36–41, 80 Noon (Hogarth), 177–78
Mary of Modena, 43–44 North, Frederick, Lord North, 89–90
Mazarin, Louis-Jules Barbon Mancini. nose, associated with venereal disease,
See Nivernais, Duc de 159–212
masculinity, venereal disease and, 14–61 Nussbaum, Felicity, 66, 233–34
masturbation, 25, 175
McAllister, Marie, 7, 220, 223, 228, 232, officers, military or naval, 15–16, 21–31,
237, 240 45–47, 124–25, 166–67, 193, 206–7
McLellan, Sholto Henry. See Old Q-uiz, the Old Goat of Piccadilly
Kirkcudbright, Baron (Dighton), 48–49
Medal (Dryden), 44–45, 229 “On English Monsieur” (Jonson), 124,
Meeting of Creditors (Cruikshank), 83 137, 224, 243
“Men of Honor Made Worthy,” 45, 229 “On Quacks,” 129, 244
menstruation, 117–19, 241 Oroonoko (Behn), 162, 249–50
mercury, 38–39, 44–45, 65, 67, 129, 137,
141, 157, 174, 184, 230–31, 256 Paré, Ambrose, 203, 257
Merians, Linda, The Secret Malady, 11, Patriarcha (Filmer), 16
218–20, 223–25, 227–28, 232–33, 236, Paulson, Ronald, 26, 28, 59, 227, 229,
239, 244, 252–53 231, 238, 251
military. See officers penis, 2, 11, 56–58, 88–90, 93, 126, 159,
Misaubin, Jean, 106, 129–31, 133, 150, 166, 170, 186, 188, 191, 194–95, 197–99,
174, 218, 244 201–2, 204, 206–9, 211–12, 221, 230,
The Modern Paradise or Adam and Eve 248
Regenerated, 47 Perkin, Richard, 130, 244
Modest Defence of Publick Stews Peter, Charles, 4, 34, 36, 196, 218, 222,
(Mandeville), 30–31, 227, 234, 242 228, 246, 255
Modest Proposal (Swift), 35 Phillips, Mrs. (condom retailer), 121–22
The Monitor: Or, British Freeholder, 136, phimosis, 90, 198, 255
245 phthisis. See consumption
monkeys. See apes pickpockets, prostitutes as, 104, 111, 238
Monro, Donald, 21, 225 Play-House (Gould), 73–74, 113, 234
Monsieur Belloste’s Hospital Surgeon, 1–3, 5 Polly Peachum’s Jests, 164–66, 192, 212,
Morning (Hogarth), 175–76 250
The Mountebank, 150–52 Poor Robin (Winstanley), 124, 243
“My Lord Al-Pride” (Rochester), 47–48, Porter, Roy, 181, 218–19, 223, 227–28, 253
230 Portsmouth, Duchess of, 74–76, 85–86
pox. See syphilis
navy. See officers Prenez des Pilules (Watteau), 129–31
Needham, Elizabeth (Mother Preparing for Action; or an English Man
Needham), 98, 102–3, 105, 237 of War Engaging Two Dutch Doggers
Nivernais, Duc de, 154–57 (Cruikshank), 45–46
index 265
“Progress of Beauty” (Swift), 66–67, 72, Rosenstein, Nils Rosén von, 4, 31, 34, 36,
233 196, 218–19, 227–28, 252, 255
Progress of a Rake: or, the Templar’s Exit Rosenthal, Laura, 65, 93, 232–33, 236,
(Breval), 51–61, 62–64, 66, 71, 73, 111, 238
230–32 Rowlandson, Thomas, 9; A Bawd on her
prostitution, 6–7, 10–11, 15–16, 22, 24– Last Legs, 62; Dark Lanthern Business,
27, 44–46, 55, 60, 62–113, 121–22, 137– Or Mrs Hob and Mrs Nob on a Night
38, 148, 151, 167–70, 173–76, 183, 214, Canvass with a Bosom Friend, 77–78;
229, 245 Kings Place, 80, 235; other works, 235,
238
quacks, 3, 18, 23, 34, 38–39, 54–55, 57, 73,
96, 128–35, 137–40, 150–55, 164–65, saddlenose, 50–51, 177–80, 192, 195, 198–
181, 218, 244–45, 247–48 99, 201–2, 213, 257
Queensberry, fourth Duke of, The Sailor’s Revenge (Boitard), 66, 233
48–50 Sale of English-Beauties, in the East-Indies
Quétel, Claude, 217, 219–20, 224, 240, (Gillray), 121–22
242, 246, 253 Salisbury, Sally, 95–98, 101, 109, 236
Quillet, Claude, Callipaedia, or the Art of “Satyr” (Butler), 17, 124
Getting Pretty Children (La Callipedie Sawney Discover’d, or the Scotch Intruders
ou l’art d’avoir de Beaux Enfans), 92, (Townshend), 148–51
180, 253 scabies. See itch
Scotch Hurdy Gurdy or the Musical Boot,
Rabelais, François, Gargantua and 146–47
Pantagruel, 201–2, 256 The Scotch Mountebank. See Mountebank
Rake’s Progress (Hogarth), 51, 230 The Scotch Portmanteau Opened at York,
Real, Hermann, 9, 220, 231–32, 234 141–42, 246
Reformation of Manners (Defoe), 40, 42, Scroggs, William, 136, 245
229 scrofula, 36–38, 40, 42, 86–88, 229, 235
Richardson, Samuel, Clarissa, 162 scurvy, 3–4, 228
Rinology (Bridgeabout), 161, 185–92, 194, Secret History of Clubs (Ward), 180–85,
203–5, 212, 249, 253–54, 257 191, 193, 202, 249, 257
Rizzo, Betty, 9, 15, 220, 223, 232 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 21, 225
Robinson, Nicholas, 3, 218–19, 246, 252, Sense and Sensibility (Austen), 101, 237
256 servants, 17, 128, 135–36, 172–77, 207,
Rochester, second Earl of, 9, 14–15, 53; 209, 252
“Against Marriage,” 14–15, 57, 223; Seven Years’ War, 136–37, 146, 153–57
“Disabled Debauchee,” 22, 24–26, 28, Shadwell, Thomas, The Humorists,
53, 59–60, 183, 222, 226–27; “My Lord 130–35
Al-Pride,” 47–48, 230; “To the Shaftesbury, seventh Earl of, 44–45
Postboy,” 22, 226 Shebbeare, John, 144–45, 246–47
Rock, Richard, 26, 47, 106, 129, 150, 152, Sheffield, John. See Buckingham and
174, 177, 247 Normanby, Duke of
Roderick Random (Smollett), 5, 14, 22, Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 91–92
99–111, 222, 226, 237–38 Shore, Jane, 75–76
266 index
sibbens, 142–43, 246 Thelyphthora, or a Treatise on Female

Siena, Kevin, 5, 7, 112–13, 117, 217–20, Ruin (Madan), 112–13, 238–39
223, 226, 232, 239–40, 242 Thornton, Bonnell, 167, 247; Have At
Smart, Christopher, “The Bag-Wig and You All: or, the Drury-Lane Journal,
the Tobacco-Pipe,” 125–26, 243 170–71, 251
Smollett, Tobias, 151–52, 154–55, 240, “To Capt. —— of Ld. A——’s
244, 248; The Briton, 151–52; A Dragoons” (Latter), 166–67, 172, 251
Faithful Narrative of the Base and “To Dr. Scarborough” (Cowley), 120,
Inhuman Arts that were Lately practised 241
upon the Brain of Habbakkuk Hilding, Topham, Edward, 142, 246
167, 169–70, 251; Humphry Clinker, “To the Postboy” (Rochester), 22, 226
96, 164–65, 172, 250; Roderick Townshend, George: Sawney Discover’d,
Random, 5, 14, 22, 99–111, 222, 226, or the Scotch Intruders, 148–51; We are
237–38; other works, 240, 244 all a comeing or Scotch Coal for ever,
Sontag, Susan, 115, 219, 239 149–50, 152
Somerville, Robert, 29, 227, 238 Town Spy, 125, 243
soupe-maigre, 129, 154–55 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 5, 90, 159–61,
Southesk, Earl of, 43–44, 222 166, 169, 192–213, 248, 254–57
Spongberg, Mary, 10, 221, 232 Tristram Shandy’s Father Crossing the
Stephens, Frederic George, 13, 26, 28, Street with his Ace-of-Clubs Nose,
148, 221 211–12
Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy, 5, 90, Trophys Exchang’d, 156–57
159–61, 166, 169, 192–213, 248, 254–57 Turner, Daniel, 23, 218–19, 226
Stevens, George, A Lecture on Heads, 191,
254 vagina, 2, 70, 96, 238
Stuart, John. See Bute, third Earl of Velno’s vegetable syrup, 48–51, 83–84,
Swift, Jonathan: “A Beautiful Nymph 91–92
Going to Bed,” 5, 62, 65–67, 72, 92, venereal disease: hereditary, 3–4, 29–45,
113, 231–33; Gulliver’s Travels, 42, 189, 92, 177–80, 192, 194–208, 213, 218–19,
204, 229, 256–57; A Modest Proposal, 229, 252; as metaphor, 2, 5–6, 213–15,
35; “The Progress of Beauty,” 66–67, 219; prognosis, 3–4, 14–15, 96, 119, 218;
72, 233; A Tale of a Tub, 162, 249 recent scholarship on, 7–11;
syphilis, 2–3, 5, 12, 15, 33, 48, 66, 96–97, relationship to other diseases, 3–4, 218
125, 157, 161, 177–80, 199–200, 203, (see also consumption; gout; scrofula;
207, 213, 217–20, 221–24, 227, 232, scurvy); symptoms, 1–5, 23, 38, 134,
239–43, 246, 252–53. See also venereal 161, 177–78, 207; treatments for (see
disease Leake’s pills; mercury; Velno’s
Syphilis (Fracastoro), 120, 241–42 vegetable syrup); unicist theory of, 2,
230
Tagliacozzi, Gasparre (Tagliacotius), A View of the Beau Monde: or, Memoirs of
192–93, 203–4, 256 the Celebrated Coquetilla, 97–99, 109,
Tale of a Tub (Swift), 162, 249 237
Tate, Nahum, 120, 241–42 Virgil, The Aeneid, 88–89, 171, 251
Temkin, Oswei, 8, 220, 223 Voltaire, Candide, 180, 240–41, 253
index 267
Voluptuary Under the Horrors of Digestion Westminster elections, 76–82, 235

(Gillray), 83–84 wigs, 50, 97, 104, 115, 123, 125–26, 128,
141, 144, 191
Walker, Charles, Authentic Memoirs of Wilmot, John. See Rochester, second
the Life, Intrigues and Adventures of the Earl of
Celebrated Sally Salisbury, 95–98, 101, Winstanley, William, Poor Robin, 124,
109, 236 243
Walkowitz, Judith, 10, 113, 221, 233, 239 Wisebourn, Elizabeth (Mother
Ward, Ned, 21, 225, 253; The Secret Wisebourn), 95–96, 237–38
History of Clubs (“The No-Nose wives, as victims of venereal disease, 15,
Club”), 180–85, 191, 193, 202, 249, 257 30–45, 64, 113, 227–28
war wounds, 22–28, 45–47, 127, 135, 182– Work, James Aiken, 203, 256
83, 193–94, 206–8, 238, 244–45. See Wycherley, William, The Country
also love-as-war metaphor Wife, 18–21, 23, 54, 56, 60, 94, 222,
Watteau, Jean-Antoine, Prenez des 224–26
Pilules, 129–31
We are all a comeing or Scotch Coal for Zimbardo, Rose, 8, 175, 220, 224–25,
ever (Townshend), 149–50, 152 244, 252

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New Haven & London

Copyright © 2018 by Yale University.

Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational,

Set in Adobe Garamond type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India.

ISBN 978-0-300-21705-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the kindness of those friends who

Pain or stiffness in your joints? It might be venereal disease. Sore, swollen

The confusion around venereal disease in eighteenth-century Britain

uphold, but at other times to question or undermine—the distinctions between

HISTORIES OF VENEREAL DISEASE: NEW AND

I am not the first scholar to explore the broader cultural “meanings”

to suggest that the experience and understanding of venereal infection

kinds of prostitution, and they attribute some forms of pathogenic prostitu-

I have focused my analysis on four associations that appear with particular

“modernity.”35 Implicit in this book’s analysis is a reminder that there is much

bias.40 Like anyone interested in eighteenth-century graphic art, I owe an

fficers and Gentlemen

broadly here, to denote military or naval personnel of all ranks—and gentle-

VENEREAL DISEASE IN VOGUE

Horner’s witty observations here establish venereal disease as a common-

Just as plays like Wycherley’s worked to cement the association between

Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1740), for example, it is an “Ensign of Foot” who

Much like Wycherley’s Country Wife, Rochester’s poem identifies sexual

a whole classifies condoms as items primarily of service to men—and primar-

Several commentators were particularly exercised by the policy of charging

Over the course of the eighteenth century, writers reflecting on civilian

facilitated men’s profligate—and, ultimately, pathogenic—sexual behavior in

the Embraces of a careless vicious Husband.”74 While Profily’s text outlines

she subsequently transmits that infection to her husband.)77 While Granville’s

form of the disease, defining “adventitious” infections against “hereditary”

children without the danger of paternally transmitted disease.92 Asking “whether

connected with venereal disease by eighteenth-century medical writers, and

plate, she appears to be of healthier stock than her aristocratic husband—and

Contagious Vice infects the Judgment-Seats,

Although venereal disease is linked with prostitution here (the infection

poisoning along with the infection it was intended to treat. Shaftesbury’s

ADVENTITIOUS INFECTION AND PUBLIC LEADERSHIP

Just as the metaphor of hereditary venereal infection prompted eighteenth-

on either side by an ugly, corpulent prostitute (the two “Dutch Doggers” of

With stinking breath and every loathsome mark,

assessment here, Queensberry illustrates the contrast between the trappings

While many eighteenth-century imaginative works touched on the links

in its identification of venereal disease, rather than madness, as the obvious

1.8. Frontispiece to John Durant

Alexander Bendo—Dick at last succeeds to his father’s estate.129 Grieving for

Poor Dick, thy Parts were never great,

Hangs such a Load—such Bags of Sorrow,

Here, as in much libertine literature, libertinism is championed not just

he Pox and Prostitution

In a foul, rat-infested attic room, the prostitute-heroine of Jonathan Swift’s

Dick’s Preaching and his Praying now,

The same privileging of male perspective characterizes the opening pages

a series of naval metaphors that portray men as vulnerable sailors, goods-

If Strephon’s happy in a Charming Bride,

seduced by such, is like going gradually and deliberately into a Pest-house; or

fficers and Gentlemen

he Pox and Prostitution